Wow. Well there’s certainly a first time everything then!
Randall Lee Church spent 26 years in a Texas prison for the murder of another man when he was 18, but apparently, when he was released in April of 2011, the real world wasn’t to his liking, so he decided that the only way to get back behind bars was to commit another crime – and burned a house a down!
Only 96 days after being released, re-acclimating to the modern world was just too difficult for him, so he set an abandoned house on fire, pled guilty to arson, and willingly went back into custody!
He explains:
├óΓé¼┼ôEverything had gone fast forward without me. I didn’t know how to use computers or cell phones or the Internet. The weirdest thing was walking into a store, like Walmart, and have parents hide their children from me, like I was supposed to jump at them. It was so overwhelming. I was constantly embarrassed by simple things I just didn’t know.”
And Ann L. Jacobs, the director of the Prisoner Reentry Institute at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, explains:
“I don’t mean to diminish what this man did … But when you think about what people come out to, how much the world has changed, what a disadvantage they are at and what little support they generally have, it is kind of a miracle it goes as well as it does for as many people as it does.”
Wow. What do you even say about that?
Guess it sort of makes sense – he’s spent more time in prison than he has in the outside world.
Here’s hoping that we can continue to improve the prison systems so that rehabilitated prisons can acclimate with a little more ease to real-world living.
[Image via WENN.]
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