This past week has been slow and rough. A lot of people got irritated with me for participating too much in RDAP, and it really made me think about the mindset of many people in here compared to my own.
When I first came into prison, I worried about fitting in—not because I wanted to be like the other inmates, but because I wanted my time to go smoothly. When you’re “green,” as they call it, everyone tries to teach you how to “move” in prison: how to talk, how to act, how to treat guards and staff. If you don’t “move right,” you make people angry, and that doesn’t end well. They also don’t like guys with short sentences like me (anything under five years). We don’t know the rules, and honestly, I think some of them are jealous, but instead of admitting that, they tear you down because you haven’t logged as much prison time as they have.
It’s completely backward. You’d think spending years in prison—or coming back multiple times—wouldn’t be the badge of honor they treat it as. But here, that’s status. So for a while, I played along. Even though I didn’t really agree, I adopted parts of that mindset because, well… when in Rome. But living in that mindset, even when you’re faking it, twists your sense of reality. I found myself resenting the guards and respecting inmates simply because they’d been locked up longer.
Around the one-month mark, something shifted. I started thinking about getting out and rebuilding my life. The old me came back. I began taking RDAP seriously and started noticing the thinking errors I used on the outside. I wanted to improve myself—and honestly, I hoped some of the guys around me would do the same. I became friendly with people who had done a lot of crime, and I wanted them to recognize their own patterns too.
I didn’t do anything dramatic. I just started participating more in class—owning my mistakes and pulling others up on theirs. And that’s when some people started getting mad. They said the program was fake, that nobody really does it, that “we just pretend until we go home.” They told me I was trying too hard and making them look bad.
At first, it confused me. Nobody wants to be disliked, and I wanted my time to stay peaceful. I actually started to take their advice seriously. But eventually it clicked: Why would I take advice from people who brag about spending most of their adult lives in prison? Why would the opinion of someone who has never done anything besides sell drugs matter to me?
I got even more discouraged when I watched some of these same guys use their contraband phones at night to line up new drug deals for when they get out. It hit me: the people telling me not to take RDAP seriously are the same people who’ll be right back here. I won’t. I need a completely different mindset.
It’s ironic—so many of the long-timers get furious when guys with short sentences get into RDAP ahead of them because it comes with a year off. But once they get into the program, they refuse to participate, learn, or improve. They beg to get in, then treat it like it’s uncool to try. Why fight for something just to waste it?
Anyway, my mindset is corrected now. These are not the people to take advice from. I’m here to absorb everything RDAP can offer—how to avoid criminal thinking, how to build real morals, how to stay disciplined, and how to keep my mind and body healthy. I will not be coming back to prison.
The new version of me is just nine days away from the outside world.
Stay legal and safe out there,
Larry
0 Comments