22 Years to a Second Chance

Posted by D'Arcy Robb on 3/22/18 10:00 AM

Faith, Hope and Second Chances

Spring is when the sunshine returns, the season of renewed hope and second chances. This spring, we want to share with you the story of a man who found hope during the darkest days of his life. His story speaks to the incredible power of faith and love – and to the fact that even when the world seems darkest, there is a next chapter to come.

Mentor, father, veteran. Son of a strong loving mother, youth basketball star and Nebraska State High School Powerlifting Champion. Bobby Smith has embodied many roles in his life and now, as a Mentor Coordinator for Total Action for Progress (TAP) in Roanoke, VA, he says the one that most defines him is ‘encourager of others’. But it is only in the past few years that Bobby has been free to share his gift of encouragement with the world. That’s because for twenty-two years prior, Bobby wasn’t free – he was serving time as a Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate.

Taking the Wrong Path

Bobby and his siblings were raised in Omaha by a mother who he describes as the very essence of love. After becoming a father himself at a young age, Bobby married the mother of his three children and served three years in the military. But after his honorable discharge, Bobby struggled to transition from a world of structure to a world of uncertainty. He landed a series of jobs only to be repeatedly laid off.

Right about that time Bobby fell in with a new circle of friends. Some of the people in his new circle had plenty of money – money obtained by selling drugs. “I was used to working a 9 to 5. Then when I got in that circle, I started to see some things that I wasn’t used to seeing…. I made a request to try to get into what they were doing because I saw the money that was being made.” For the next six or seven years, while he never did drugs, selling them was a big part of his life. “Eventually my marriage ended and then I think once that ended, it was like I really didn’t have that stability to keep things together. So I went all in and just started selling with no real recourse.”

Bobby’s life had taken a sinister turn, and while he didn’t know how to get out, he knew it wasn’t what he wanted. “I was coming home one night from picking my kids up when some guys pulled up on me in a car and they pulled some guns out the window. And my young stepdaughter started to scream, Bobby, they’ve got a gun. When that happened, it started to weigh on me and I just really wanted out….So I was just kind of wrestling with how do you get out, how do you go back to being normal, what is the right time to get out. When the indictment came down, it was almost like an answered prayer.”

"Very Dangerous Men"

His new reality hit Bobby in the form of a 30-year federal BOP sentence. And while he was deeply relieved to be away from selling drugs, he couldn’t accept the consequences of his long sentence. “The first 4 years was extremely difficult. Because what happens is you realize that you lose your liberty, you lose your family, you lose your finances, you lose everything….I was just trying to hang on, like man I don’t want to lose my family, I don’t want to lose the things I have obtained. But once you start to realize that you can no longer hold onto it, a dose of reality set in.”

Bobby got into a fight in a medium-security prison and was sent to the maximum-security U.S. Penitentiary in Lompoc, California. It was there, surrounded by men serving life sentences, that he found hope. “Men who doesn’t have hope, you know they are very dangerous men. They don’t believe that the life sentence can be overturned. They don’t believe that something’s going to give for them.” In contrast to that hopelessness, Bobby began to feel a light within. “I said if I have to do every day of this 30-year sentence, I’m going to get another chance at life. And that’s when I realized I had to start doing some things differently, cause it was not over for me. And the peace came about when God spoke to my spirit. And he said you’re going to be all right. Quit trying to fix other people, and let me work on you.”

18 Years to Freedom

Bobby began writing letters to people he had wronged. Some of the people he thought would never forgive him became part of his support system. “Like my ex-mother-in-law, I wrote to apologize for not being the husband to her daughter that I promised to be. From the time I wrote that letter to the day I walked out those prison doors she never wavered, she never gave up, she treated me like I was her own son. She just believed in me. So that support system just began to surround me, with people who truly believed that the doors would open for me and life would take a different turn for me.” In addition to his former mother-in-law, Bobby is everlastingly grateful to his sister-in-law Caroline and her husband A.J. for their unwavering support. Of Caroline, Bobby says, “She wrote me every month for 18 years.”

That support network sustained Bobby through that 18 years as he progressed through maximum, medium, and low security prisons, and to minimum security ‘camp’ and finally work release. Bobby credits his support network - including his wife, children, siblings, friends, mentor and his employment specialist - as critical to his success once he became a free man. In his current role at TAP, he matches individuals in a community correction “halfway house” with community members who serve as their mentors. He also works with youth who are struggling to stay on a positive path.

Bobby explains that with the youth, he tries to “take a backseat role” by encouraging the young people to ask others about their experiences, and to take an honest look at their own behavior and think about where it may lead. He eagerly embraces this work as an opportunity to help others avoid the kind of costly mistakes that too many young people, himself included, have made. “When you in prison like twice a month a new bus will come in, and when you see how young men are, it begins to grieve you. It begins to grieve and weigh on your spirit that so many young men are just forfeiting their lives over things that in the big scheme of things are really nothing. I gave the majority of my youth away sitting behind a fence somewhere.”

In keeping with his personal philosophy, Bobby believes that the key to community corrections is for staff to do a good assessment and constantly encourage men and women to take an honest look at their needs and address their issues, especially around addiction. He says, “I do believe in order to solve some of the problems that are plaguing our communities, the community has to learn how to embrace changed men and women that are coming back to the community after being incarcerated. Let us be part of the solution to problems. Instead of ostracizing us and talking about our past and not willing to bring us onboard, we should be embraced.”

The Next Chapter

Regarding his own role as a former dealer, Bobby expresses sorrow and regret that he was part of a terrible problem, and says he is grateful that his mother did not live to see his incarceration. But he knows better than most people that beauty can grow out of the darkest places. Friends he made while in prison are now pursuing dreams ranging from starting an investment company to engaging in youth ministry, and Bobby nurtures his own dream of starting a business where he can use his gift of encouraging others. “We experience things in life so that we can write the next chapter. Incarceration was one chapter. How do I write the next chapter?”

Here’s to everyone working hard to write their own next chapter – and to the community corrections professionals working hard, supporting men and women to write a brighter chapter to come.

To request more information or schedule an online demonstration of our community corrections software, click here. We offer integrated corrections software and support services for probation/parole, residential and reentry programs. Our Program Foundation Platform and twenty robust modules were designed by community corrections practitioners to guide organizations toward a powerful EBP implementation, relieve them of strenuous paperwork and manual processes, and enable them to focus on what matters - people!      

Topics: Community Corrections, Community Corrections Professional, Second Chances

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