Note: While the people in this blog are fictitious, the struggles they have represent real feelings that many ex-convicts have battled with.
Barry had been out of prison for two months. He had managed to get a job at a pastry factory working twelve hours a day, six days a week. The work was grueling. In prison he had gotten his GED, which helped him find employment. However, he had very little family support. In prison he had to be content with the chow hall meals, often “hustling” by such things as cutting hair or shining boots to earn a soup or a couple of stamps every now and then. Most of his family had disowned Barry when he went away for ten years on a robbery charge. Those who stood by him were poor and could not help him much.
As a consequence of the family’s financial straits, Barry paid rent while living with his mother and was going to have to get a place of his own. Often he wondered how he could have been foolish enough to fall in with a street gang when he was a teenager. True, his father went to prison when Barry was 12 years old and had died in there. His mother worked three jobs to provide for and raise him and his younger brother and he had thanked her by getting into gang activity and crime. Now he was 30 years old and starting over in life when most folks were raising families and advancing in their careers and he was painfully conscious of all this.
Barry’s parole officer was a lesbian who hated men. She especially did not like Barry—for no discernible reason. Miss Freda, as she was called, was always calling him, questioning him, coming over to his house to look around, which only escalated the tensions between him and his mother. It seemed like no matter how hard he tried, Barry could not get a leg up on life.
Some of Barry’s coworkers were gossips. As he was fresh out of prison, he did not talk much. Barry wanted people to get to know him before divulging his status to anyone. Only his bosses knew. Thankfully they were good people. They did not spread his business—but one of his coworkers did. It just so happened that Tony, one of the guys who worked on Barry’s line at the factory, looked him up on the internet and found out about his felony conviction. Before Barry knew it, people were talking about him and giving him a hard time. The long hours, the stress of people ostracizing him and the tension it was creating in the workplace, his ever-hateful P. O. and his poor, nervous mother robbed him of his peace. Finally, something inside Barry snapped.
One day his mother was taken to lunch by a couple of friends of hers. It just so happened to be on his one day off during the week. Barry, who had never been much of a drinker, climbed into the old clunker of a car that he could barely afford buying and drove to a nearby liquor store. He purchased a fifth of vodka. Driving down to a park by the local river, making sure there was nobody around to interrupt him, he began to drink. At first the vodka was like lava. He almost vomited. But then he started to force it down. Rapidly the intoxication took over. Barry thought of his ragged, rough life, his thirty years on this earth during which he had contributed nothing but heartache and pain. Now he wanted to make a new start but the deck was stacked against him no matter which way he turned. What was the point of being here any longer? Barry was about to take a torch to his life. He was going to light it on fire, to end it all. Now sufficiently drunk to be emboldened yet still having an awareness of his surroundings, Barry found a long stretch leading to a bridge. He put the pedal to the floor of the car and took off like a rocket, slamming head-on into one of the bridge supports at over 100 miles per hour. The car simultaneously exploded and flew all to pieces, and so did Barry. His life was over.
Tom was a former Navy seal who had gotten into drugs and porn, ultimately seducing a sixteen-year-old girl. He spent a decade in prison, coming out of there at the age of 36 and finding himself on the sex offender registry. While still incarcerated, Tom had an emotional and spiritual crisis that brought him to the end of himself: A dishonorable discharge from the military, a divorce and the resulting loss of custody of his two sons, and the alienation of many of his family and friends. In anguish of soul he cried out to Jesus Christ to save him, and he became a Christian. Tom struggled with doubt, however. His father, who had also been a military man, was angry and perfectionistic, sometimes downright abusive. Because of this, Tom thought God—his heavenly Father—was the same way, and he often felt like he had to work to please God and keep his salvation. Reassurances from fellow believers were not always enough to assuage the doubts that Tom had. Nevertheless, he endeavored to become a better and better Christian. Never a drinker or a drug user, Tom maintained a rigorous exercise regimen while in prison. He also practiced as best he could the fighting moves he had learned as a Navy seal. Not that Tom had wanted to hurt anybody—becoming a Christian had made him into a gentler man—but he knew that at any time he might need his self-defense skills. Even being housed in prisons where the majority of the inmates were sex offenders, Tom had been attacked several times because of his charges. He never lost a fight.
The church on the inside had given him hope. When he got out, Tom had a place to stay. Not all of his family had abandoned him. His parents took him in. Unfortunately, Tom’s father Roger was still the angry, perfectionistic jerk that he had always been, and tensions between father and son ran high. Tom was determined to get a job and get out of the house as soon as possible. Because even at 36 years of age he was in excellent physical condition and because he was a good handyman, Tom soon found employment as a construction worker. He loved the hard work, and he enjoyed building things.
Tom had maxxed out his prison sentence, so when he got out he was not on probation, an unusual development for someone convicted of a sex crime. However, he heard the horror stories of sex offenders on probation: the exorbitant counseling fees, the counselors being more interested in discovering new crimes than in helping their clients, the mandatory and expensive polygraph tests, many SOs having to wear ankle monitors, vindictive probation officers looking for any excuse to send a sex offender back to prison because they hated SOs, and so on. Tom was glad he was not in all that. He was also thankful that the sheriff’s department in his city was professional and not petty.
Even so, things began to unravel for Tom. His coworkers got curious about him and did their digging online. Once they found out he was a registered sex offender they began to talk about him behind his back. Twice he almost lost his job because someone tried to set him up, making it look like he was stealing. Twice also he got ready to go home for the day, only to find his tires slashed. His father hated the visitations by the sheriff’s deputy to verify Tom’s residence, saying it shamed him to have a son who was a convicted sex offender. Tom began to hate the registry requirements, including the proximity laws and the constant need to update information. But the unraveling accelerated when he tried to find a church.
Three churches rejected Tom outright in rapid succession because of his status on the registry, and two others only wanted him as a member if he signed complicated agreements and consented to armed escorts everywhere on church property. In a fit of depression Tom concluded that God had not really saved him, that He had never forgiven him for his crime, just as his earthly father had never forgiven him, either. It was an ordeal to try to work, now that the secret about him was out. Even his great physical prowess no longer gained him respect. Sorry as he was for his crime, nobody cared. To them he would always be a sex offender. God had sat back and let it happen. That talking head of a pastor who snickered at him when talking about signing a contract represented this angry, distant Almighty. One of the senators who had sponsored the latest sex offender restriction bill lived only a few blocks away from Tom—and he was on that church’s board of directors, as was one of the liability lawyers who advised against letting sex offenders join churches. The gentleness that had been built into Tom began to wear away. It came to a head when a woman whom he really loved shut him out completely when he told her about his past and the fact that he was on the sex offender registry. That was the last straw.
Barry had turned his anger on himself and committed suicide. Tom saw no reason to live any longer also, but he was going to leave the world in a far different way. As an ex-military man, Tom knew weapons. He also knew the black markets where convicted felons could get guns and other things. Convinced that God would never forgive him for his sex crime, believing that he only had misery and heartache to look forward to, this ex-Navy seal set his mind on one thing: Revenge. He was about to torch his life, to light it on fire—and the lives of many others as well. Tom’s epitaph would be written in blood.
In a few weeks, Tom had his arsenal ready—guns and explosives. Tom called out “sick” from his job. Little did his coworkers know that soon they would be suffering from a fatal dose of bullets. He left a manifesto on his laptop, knowing that his rampage of payback would end in his death. As he left the house his father came home from putting gas in his car. He smarted off to Tom, who promptly blew him away. Never again would his jerk of a dad talk down to him again. Tom got into his own car and drove off, leaving his father in a pool of blood on the front doorsteps. Next he drove to his ex-girlfriend’s apartment, the one who had cruelly jilted him when she learned Tom was on the sex offender registry. Using a pistol equipped with a silencer, he unloaded the gun on her. Tom stared her down as she died, wanting his to be the last face she saw.
Tom saw no hope, no heaven, no help for himself. He became like a giant black tornado tearing through the land in the middle of the night, striking with little warning and no mercy. He became death incarnate. Tom arrived at his job site, taking an AK-47 and killing all ten of the workers that were there, including the jackass who had looked him up on the internet. Next he drove to that church where the pastor snickered at him. He walked onto the property. It was not a very big church, it was unguarded, and there was no school. The pastor’s secretary stood up to ask him why he was there but he gunned her down with that silencer-equipped pistol. Next, Tom strode into the pastor’s office. The pastor was shocked, and then he was dead, hit twice with a sawed-off shotgun. Tom then shot the Bible on the dead pastor’s desk and blew the wooden cross in half that had been standing in the corner. The prison preachers had lied to him about God’s love and forgiveness, so damn them all.
Tom drove to the law firm where the liability lawyer and others worked who advised churches not to admit sex offenders. He found the lawyer who was on the board of the church he had just came from. Before the man could say much of anything, Tom pulled out the reloaded pistol with the silencer and unloaded it on him, but not before telling him why he was going to die. Leaving the bullet-riddled corpse of the lawyer slumped over his desk, Tom went to find the senator who praised Jesus Christ on Sunday and spent the rest of his time making sex offenders think they had no hope. Tom had been convinced, and he was going to serve this hypocrite with a lethal dose of his own medicine.
By then sirens were wailing in the distance. Tom, the ex-military man, dispatched the four bodyguards on the senator’s home property. Entering the house, he mowed down the senator’s wife in front of him, then slowly, methodically, blasted the senator himself with the sawed-off shotgun until he was dead while he coldly informed him about why he was being killed. As the sirens drew closer Tom ran out of the house. He had to get to the state capital and somehow blow up the capital building while the legislature was in session. He wanted to kill every last representative, senator, the lieutenant governor, and the governor himself, who had gotten reelected on a campaign to get tougher than ever on sex offenders.
It was not to be. The cops caught up to him just three blocks from the capital building, stopping his car with the PIT maneuver. But Tom had one more trick up his sleeve. In case he didn’t make it to his objective, he had rigged the explosives in his car to explode at the touch of a button. The police surrounded him, guns drawn. Tom came out, a pistol in one hand and the detonator in the other. As the bullets pierced his body, as he began to die, Tom hit the button. Fifteen of the 22 officers on the scene were killed in the explosion, the other seven suffering grievous and life-altering injuries. Although Tom never made it to the capital, he did manage to kill one of his other targets. The governor was driving by the scene when the car exploded. A huge piece of debris shot through the vehicle, fatally injuring the governor. In all, a staggering 37 people had died at the hands of this man who had lost all hope. Tom went out in an inglorious blaze of death, blood, and guts, proving what can happen when a man has been pushed beyond his limits.
Steve was locked up at the age of 19 for a combination of sex offenses and property crimes. He came out on probation at the age of 31. Like Tom, Steve became a Christian while he was in prison. Although Steve had some challenges coming out of prison, not the least of which was being on probation as an SO, he did have family support and was able to stay with his parents for as long as needed until he could become financially stable. It took several long months before he finally landed a decent job. Steve was required to wear an ankle monitor for two years, and although it bothered him a great deal sometimes, he got through it, depending on God to stay strong.
Steve’s coworkers at the candle factory where he was employed found out about his past. Although some gave him a hard time about it, Steve was resilient. His determination to go on and live his life eventually won the respect of even some of his enemies. The rest simply left him alone, unable to get him in trouble or otherwise discourage him. Like Tom, Steve underwent church rejection. However, Steve was able to understand that what he was experiencing was not a reflection of how God felt about him, but rather it was the outcome of churches being too close to the world system. He continued looking for a church home until he found one. It was a Southern Baptist church, one where his past was not held against him and where he was not required to have an armed escort or chaperone or sign a legally binding contract. Steve weathered probation, completing his required counseling and enduring the BS polygraph tests with their price-gouging greed and coming off all paper, a free man except for the registry requirements. Despite being subject to the proximity laws, Steve always found a way to have a place to live and successful employment without having to constantly change jobs or move.
Steve knew of people who had given up on life. Some returned to sex offending, an outcome the system publicly decried but privately wanted because it kept people employed at prisons, in parole and probation offices, and in other posts related to it. He knew that recidivism helped hypocritical politicians have that much more in their arsenal to pull support out of scared voters. Not only did Steve have no desire to reoffend, becoming a Christian had changed him from that type of person anyway. Because he lived in the same state as Barry and Tom, he had heard their stories on the news.
Steve was saddened that Barry had given up on life and had killed himself. He was horrified and heartbroken at what became of Tom, the man’s manifesto having been made public on the news. Two needless tragedies, Steve reflected, with much collateral damage. If only Barry had done a better job at reaching out to people! If only Tom had not given up on God and turned to vengeance! Both would still be alive today, but instead they were gone. Steve was not about to become a statistic. He elected to light his life on fire, but with the fire of success and the light of the Gospel. He would become an example of what faith in God could do for someone. No matter their past, no matter the obstacles thrown in their way or the hatred leveled at them, Steve would show that indeed he could do all things through Christ Jesus who strengthened him. The fire of his life lit the pathway of success to others.
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