The week Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced plans to fund college classes in New York state prisons, I celebrated two years out of Auburn Correctional Facility and the Cornell University classes I took there. His proposal reminded me of a drug rehab saying I now take to heart: "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten."
I had served 8½ years, and it was my second term in prison. The first time, I served nearly 4½ years, then broke the law within four months of my release.
Addiction made me stupid. I would get sober for a while, begin building a life and doing well, and then I would use drugs again until I destroyed everything I built and sank to new lows. It seemed like my brain never got enough time to heal well enough to think.
I continued using drugs and drinking homemade alcohol for the first couple of years I was in prison, but in 2005 I went to solitary confinement for three months and was transferred to Auburn prison, where my outlook began to change. Cornell University had been offering college classes taught by volunteers. When I began my ten-year sentence for robbery and escape, I hoped to become a writer. However, without formal training and mentoring, everything I submitted for publication was rejected.
A year after completing my first Cornell writing class, a small essay I wrote about prison food was printed in the Ithaca Journal.
The struggle toward publication taught me my most valuable lessons. I learned discipline and how to manage criticisms instead of reacting to them. I became attracted to decent people who did things well. And I hate to admit it, but being busy locked in my cell gave my brain enough time to heal and develop maturity. Before leaving prison, I published three more op-ed pieces, including one about voting rights that ran on Election Day in 2008, and an autobiographical essay that received honorable mention in the book, "Best American Essays 2011."
I never got a degree or had a career as a writer. What happened is a long story that revolves around the friends I made as a college student. My business began as an act of gratitude. I fixed a clogged drain for a friend who gave me a couch to sleep on when I was released from prison in 2012. At the time, I was struggling to find a job. That clogged drain led to a new sink I got paid to install. Then my professor needed his deck painted, and the couch friend had a friend who needed some shelves put in. Within two months I had a bag of tools and a bicycle. Six months later, I had a van I bought with cash and a You Tube channel I created to show what I could do.
College, for me, wasn't about the degree. It was an opportunity to learn skills I could transfer to more practical objectives. The act of completing an essay on time turned into the practice of showing up every day and serving a customer until the job is done. The research I do today is profitable. The questions I asked in those prison classrooms, the advice I took and the powerful emotions I learned to manage all help me navigate the new life I now live in Ithaca.
Last month, I posted my 16th video on You Tube and had to struggle with the joy of paying taxes and reporting not just to parole but to my accountant.
John Crutchfield's essay "Sirens" was published in the Cornell literary magazine Epoch (Vol. 59 #1) and short-listed in "The Best American Essays 2011" (Mariner Books).