A Life Wasted

Halfway House

A halfway house is designed as a way to allow a person a transition between prison and freedom.  For many guys this means getting a driver's license, some for the first time in their life, and getting a job so they can afford to set up a place to live.  Those guys usually need the entire six months to get their life on track.  It is not an easy thing to do.  Without the halfway house these guys would go from prison to the street with a few hundred bucks in gate money and a bus ticket to wherever had been their home when they were arrested.  Without family support those guys have little chance of staying out of prison.  The halfway house gives them the only real chance they have without family support.

The halfway house was for both state and federal prisoners.  Most were state prisoners with just a few federal prisoners.  We all lived in the same building, but they had two six men rooms for federal prisoners.  Those rooms, just like the cells in federal prison, were separated by race.  I was in a room with two other white guys.  The other six man room was full of black inmates.

I'll explain something about the race thing here.  In Ohio where I was an inmate before moving to federal prison, all of the cells were forcibly integrated.  Meaning each two man cell had a white guy and a black guy.  They claimed the feds forced this, but I don't think that was the case.  Whatever the reason, the entire Ohio system was like this.  Every white guy had a black celly.  The federal system was the exact opposite: segregated.  The feds never put guys of different race together in a cell.  A black and white guy could cell together if they chose to, but that would be a huge mistake in that each guy's own race wouldn't like it at all.  Somehow this same mentality was applied in the privately owned halfway house.  The rooms housing state prisoners were integrated, the ones for federal prisoners segregated.

So my two roommates were both white collar criminals who had done there time at federal camps.  The true "Club Fed."  They were impressed that I had come from McKean, which was still famous for its riot.  One of the guys was an investment banker who violated federal banking laws, the other into some form of illegal trading that I never figured out.  I'll call them the banker and the trader.  The banker was my age, the trader in his 60's.  I didn't care for the banker and the trader didn't like him either, so the trader and I teamed up.

All of us had to go through a process so that we could be transferred from the halfway house to home detention.  All of us had six months to do and all of us had wives and homes to go to.  To go home, the first thing we had to do was find a job.  The difference between the three of us was that I needed a job for income, neither of those guys did.  The banker went to Pittsburgh to find a job and the Trader and I went out together looking for work.

The Banker lied about his criminal conviction and got a job at a bank knowing they would figure it out in five weeks, but it was enough to get him home.  He later told me that the only reason he took the job was to get a hold of their customer list.  That should have tipped me off as to how sneaky of a guy he was.  The Trader found a part-time retail job for minimum wage, but just enough to qualify him for home confinement.

On my first weekend at the halfway house I was allowed to go out during the day, which didn't allow me enough time to go home, so Mary drove down to Pittsburgh alone so we could spent the day together.  A river ran through the little community where the halfway house was located and I'd already discovered a nice shaded spot on a bend of the river with an isolated bench, so that's where we went.  We just sat on the bench holding hands and looking out over the river.  We talked some, but mostly we just held hands and slowly got use to each other's presence again.   Being together again felt natural and right, but also uncomfortable.  Like neither one of us wanted to say or do anything to mess it up.  Just a little awkward, but not in a bad way.