Recidivism. The definition of the word means “the tendency of a convicted criminal to reoffend.” It’s a real threat to anyone – everyone – who has been in prison, and the statistics bear out that fact plainly.

In a study released in May of 2018 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, the numbers were alarming and yet, at the same time, expected. Unfortunately. The study looked at 401,288 state prisoners who were released in 2005 and followed them for nearly a decade. Together, they combined for an astounding 1,994,000 arrests during the 9-year period. That’s an average of about five arrests per prisoner, with 60 percent of the arrests coming in years 4 through 9. Breaking it down, about 68 percent of former prisoners were arrested within 3 years of release, 79 percent within 6 years, and 83 percent during the 9 years following release. Scarily, about half – 47 percent to be exact – did not have an arrest within the first 3 years, but were then subsequently arrested at some point between years 4 and 9.

What does this tell us? Pretty simple: putting your life back together after getting out of prison isn’t as fucking easy as some people make it out to be. And it doesn’t necessarily get better as time goes by.

The sheer number of prisoners in the system may have grown exponentially in the past three decades, but all along, the cards have been stacked against them. Think about it. A guy – or woman – makes their way through their sentence, gets allowed parole, and the day comes when they physically get out of the joint. What happens? Most of the time, it looks like this: get back your belongings that you came into prison with, collect 50 bucks from the state, then walk out the door. At that point, your former custodians don’t give a shit about what you do or how you leave. You better be ready, and if not, move along anyway.

So now, let’s say you’ve been in prison for 4 years after doing something stupid. Because, you know, you wouldn’t be there if you didn’t do something stupid, right? It’s been four years that you haven’t had a job, haven’t had an apartment, haven’t had an electric bill, haven’t made any money as far as the IRS is concerned, haven’t had insurance on a vehicle. Unless you were somehow independently wealthy or had an extremely supportive family and network when you went in that’s still willing to stand by your side, the likelihood is that all you own at that point is what you are carrying away from camp. And if you’ve been in more than 4 years? Like 8 or 10 or 15 or 18? Yeah, odds are high, really high that you’re completely on your own at this point.

How easy is it then to start over?

That fifty bucks the state gave you? Hell, let’s be generous and even say they gave you $100. How far is that going to last you? Sure, you could possibly buy a meal and get a decent hotel room for a night or two. But, that’s if you’re near a city already. Not sure if you’ve noticed, but most prisons, especially the ones with the worst criminals, aren’t built in huge population centers, so maybe you have to buy a bus ticket to get to a city. That could easily eat up half your hundred bucks and cut it down to one night in a dingy motel and a couple meals. And since you have 24 hours after release to check in in person with your parole officer, you can’t really skip out of that bus ticket. Let’s say you get there on time and check in, then what’s next? Without that support network – even one friend with a couch – you now better get crackin’ on finding a job so you can have a place to stay and food to eat this weekend. But how easy is that when you go to apply for a job – any fucking job, even flipping burgers – and you don’t have a permanent address to put down or a recent employment history? Not ideal, is it?

“Anyone who thinks that will work is a moron,” Craig said. “There are good people, great humans, who get out, but they are often not the most intelligent, not the most self-motivated, not the ones with the greatest work ethic. Not that they should be handheld by the system, but if you expect the system to correct the behaviors and prevent the individual from coming back to prison, it is failing miserably. Anyone who thinks the system intact right now is going to work, they’re tilting at windmills. There’s no way the system can produce positive results.”

No, not every prisoner is in this situation when they get out, just like not every prisoner in that study commits another crime. But without the support system in place to help them succeed – whether from their own personal network or even some better kind of help from the state – their likelihood of reoffending is outrageously high. That’s only the point being made here. Recidivism is real for a reason.

And that right there is why Craig has repeatedly said how important it was for him to have a plan from Day 1.

We talked about it in a couple of the earlier chapters. He said in Chapter 2 that he wanted to break it up into three, six-year stretches, making it more palatable as he was going through the stages and helping him focus on reaching goals sooner – ones that were obtainable – instead of having a big, long goal almost two decades away. It’d be 6 years of learning the system and working on getting his number as low as possible; 6 years of cruising along, biding his time best he could; and then 6 years devoted to paperwork and getting prepared to get out.

Let’s talk about that part for a bit, the ‘getting prepared’ part. He mentioned it in our conversations pretty early how he had to prepare himself for release, and I mostly dismissed it. I assumed he meant thinking about what he’d do when he first got out, who he’d see, what he’d eat now that he wasn’t stuck with prison food. Those kind of things. Man, was I wrong.

One of the first things he did when this last phase of his sentence began was to take a correspondence course. The benefit was multifold: by taking the classes, he could utilize his mind in ways nothing else in prison would allow, and at the same time, he’d be giving himself something recent he could show employers regarding what he’s been up to during a period of years he couldn’t fully account for easily on an application. It was smart. Getting an early start on it was crucial though, but not because of how you’re probably thinking. Yes, correspondence courses are time consuming, not just with the taking of the classes, but mailing all the information back and forth to the “school”. The bigger issue with the timing was a previously unidentified obstacle: the administration.

“It was interesting how the administration really was against it. Not the top brass, but the people who actually were doing the work in the prison, because in Arizona where I was, there is an agreement with a local college to do the correspondence courses and any other legit education going on. The interesting thing is that if you try to do something that isn’t through that college, they’re completely against it. It’s almost like, I don’t have proof of it, but almost like there are kickbacks, so as long as a student goes through their school, there’s profitable money in it. But there’s no kickback from the other schools, so they do not allow it.”

He didn’t see it early when he first started getting the correspondence course mailings, which did not come from the prison’s accredited school. At the beginning, it was simple: receive a mailing, do the homework, mail it back. Once he got to the final, it had to be proctored and in the prison, there is an education department with someone who could proctor it. The school would mail it, the education department would let the prisoner know when it’s there, and then he could set a time to go in and take the test. Once he finished his last classwork, he sent it off and began waiting for the final to come in the mail. And then kept on waiting. And waiting. And waiting. It should take a couple weeks with the way the prison mail worked, but nothing came. So his mother reached out on his behalf after a few weeks and asked the school if it could send it again. Then he waited again. This had to happen two more times – mom calling, Craig waiting – and still nothing. It was like it disappeared, vanished into thin air after being resent.

Now, at this point, you may laugh a little – I know I sure did – because of the optics in this situation. Full grown man, been in prison more than a decade, sometimes at the highest security levels they have, and yet it takes his mommy coming to the rescue here, and did she ever. She called up the warden for the entire complex, informed him of the situation of the mysteriously missing paperwork with details, dates, and all the proper questions including, “So, where’d it go?” The warden didn’t want to hear of it, saying that his people all do their jobs accordingly. Well, mom sure didn’t want to hear that and scolded him with, “Really? Then why am I talking to you right now about this?”

Want to guess how this turned out? Yeah, mom called the school a fifth time after getting off the phone with the warden, and amazingly, three days later the final exam showed up at the prison’s education department for Craig to come in and test.

This whole episode of waiting, re-sending paperwork, and more waiting took almost nine months.

“The concept of the Department of Corrections is that it’s supposed to be there to change you into a decent human being, with the idea of sending you out the gate on the right foot. Really though, you’re just fighting bureaucracy. I’m trying to better myself, so why do you not support that? I’m here doing on my own what, by the title of where I’m at, you’re supposed to be doing for or to me, but yet I have to fight you to get this done.

“Now, you look at that from the perspective of someone who is not self-motivated and of course they are going to go back to their criminal ways when they get out. Why would they fight so hard against a system that’s supposed to be rehabilitating them? This is just a microcosm of what we dealt with almost every day. We had to fight for everything. It’s like, ‘How am I supposed to get rehabilitated when I’m getting institutionalized and callous from having to deal with the system?’”

There’s that institutionalization again popping up as Craig has pointed out time over time. The individuals’ experience builds on itself and produces a prisoner that when he goes back into the world, he too often has no way of adapting, adjusting or conforming to the norms that are set outside of the razor-wired stone walls. And it goes way farther down into everyday basics, things not even associated with education. Little stuff, even like opening doors.

When Craig went from a 5 to a 4 yard, the change was significant. He had to take a urine analysis and went to the area where he was supposed to and waited by the door. It was closed. The officer, looking through the window from the other side, gave him a quizzical glance, like “What the hell are you doing, idiot?” Where he came from, the highest security yard in the Arizona state system, they didn’t allow inmates to open doors on their own. Here, on a 4 yard, the door was unlocked and he was expected to open it and go through on his own. In his mind, however, he had been programmed for the past couple  years to just ‘know’ that it’s locked, even if he hadn’t tried it. Getting over that hump, realizing that he had to relearn how to utilize what little freedoms he had, struck him hard.

Fast forward to 12 years later and he had to start doing what he had been preaching all along in learning how to act, how to live all over again. They had an incredible amount of free time, so he should not go through the day mindlessly, and instead, use it to his benefit.

Craig looked at it as a “What if?” game. What would it be like if he did this? What if he acted like that? What if he did all these things that came to mind? In his head, he would try to live out a full day to the best that he could as if he were out of prison and living in the real world. Some of it was physical, making himself get up at a certain time, push himself to clean his house, get ready for work, maybe even pack a lunch. He’d pretend to live a normal life as much as he could and see what works and what doesn’t. It started with a small section of the day and expanded from there, all the way to a series of days. Sometimes it wasn’t physical and instead mental exercises, thinking about his schedule, how he’d get up and go to work so he could pay bills, and think about what kind of bills he’d have, what he’d spend money on and how much he’d save or give to charity.

He’d find that some things would work well and some wouldn’t, so then he’d adjust. If nothing else, practicing the mindset of not absently doing everything the guards told him to do, and running a set schedule that would help him command his own life after prison would pay dividends. He spent years doing this, deciding on, once he got out of prison, what he’d eat, how much he’d spend on things, the route he’d take to work, everything you and I do in the real world every day. He was preparing for whatever life threw at him and planning to have a couple different ways to work with if things don’t go the way he wanted. His preparation may have been pretend but it was a baseline he needed, more than he even realized once the administration pulled another 360 on him.

All along from that first meeting with the prison official when he initially got sent to Central Unit in Florence, Ariz., he was under the impression the best he could ever hope for was getting sent to a 3 yard. His classification would never get better than that because of the crime he committed. Well, that was the plan until they changed the classification system on him. Now, low and behold, he could get to a Level 2, which would be incredible. Prior to learning the system conversion, he was prepared to go back into the world after release directly from a 3 yard.

The problem? “I was absolutely flabbergasted at how institutionalized I was.”

His new home had 10-man tents out on the 2 yard because they didn’t have enough room in the buildings for the bed spaces. There wasn’t any plumbing, little electric, only enough for a light by each bunk and the TV hook ups. Of course, the fucking TV hook ups. They can’t live without them, which I’m still as incredulous about now as the first time we talked about it. These were regular 10-man Army-type tents, set up next to a shower building where they could go to the bathroom, clean up, brush their teeth. They couldn’t go anywhere other than their tent and the shower building when the yard was closed, but once it sunk in that they had the freedom to push a screen door open and be right on the rec yard, only steps away from virtual freedom if not real freedom, it was intoxicating. And scary as shit.

On this yard, Craig started working in the horse stables outside of the fence that enclosed the yard and it took him a solid six months before he was comfortable being out there. He found it unsettling because he didn’t know the boundaries. For so many years, more than a decade, he’d been told exactly where he could walk, how much he could push a boundary, how much rope he had to hang himself with, if you will. Now, he had no idea how far he could go before getting into trouble. It boiled down to, as he said, he had too much freedom all of sudden. Even with the practice exercises he’d been doing and making the decision to live his life as closely as he could to being on the outside, this new space he found himself in was completely foreign. He found it actually comforting to go back on the yard because of the restrictions he knew were in place when he was there.

“When I went back to the yard, it was defined. I knew exactly what the rules were. There was no ambiguity at all. Along with my conduct and reputation, I was given a lot of leeway at the stables. Once I started getting comfortable, I started stretching boundaries a little bit, not enough to get in trouble. But the experience of going from a place where I think I’m prepared to reenter the real world from a Level 3 and then getting to go to a Level 2, I could see the contrast to how institutionalized I was in my thinking. It was eye-opening to think about going from Level 3 straight out onto the streets.”

And this was after he had previously thought he was already street-ready.

With that knowledge in hand, Craig was one of the few who actually worked and put depth of thought into how his first day out of prison would look. Over the final years and months of his sentence, he started contacting places to find somewhere to live when he got out. Remember, his parole would include three years mandatory residence in the state of Arizona, where he still had no family. And he began looking for employment in addition to learning about other basic things he’d need to live life in a modern society. He’d find out about how to get a bank account. Learn what was needed to change his driver’s license (which amazingly was still active). And so many other things that anyone outside of prison walls may just take for granted on a daily basis.

Spoiler alert: he made it work. Was it perfect? No, he had bumps along the way and has had bumps since he got out, but he followed the plan, made it conform to his benefit. If more people who do commit crimes were to follow this path, those recidivism numbers in the study would be lower. Make no mistake though, Craig is still not out of the clear. Never will be. Like many of you, I hope he doesn’t become just another statistic because I’ve seen how far he’s made it to date, and believe in how far he can go. And I’m proud of him for it.

Now, don’t fuck it up.