THROWING OUT THE NUMBERS

By this time next year, he planned to have the city of Detroit wrapped up. It wasn’t a bad dream for a young man of twenty-two. He had come to prison at the tender age of eighteen; now, four years later, he was educated with a schooling that a man could get nowhere else but in prison.
—Donald Goines, Black Gangster

I’m not going to pull some arbitrary number out of my arse like Michigan politician Jack Brandenburg and tell you how effective or ineffective I am as a convict teacher. I’ll be first to admit that our success rate for decreasing recidivism is very low. In the employee lunchroom, the often repeated joke is that we succeed 6% of the time—a number that Brandenburg claimed in an editorial to the Detroit Free Press. For some strange reason this number has been erroneously attached to our GED success rate. Good Ol’ Boy Jack would rather invest our hard earned taxpayer money in showing these men how to write resumes. Instead of fabricating facts in editorials, he should check the help wanted section. I believe the minimum requirement for a job nowadays is a high school diploma or GED.

Enough about him. I’ve been repeatedly asked about those few students that have made something of themselves. I still say the biggest success story I’ve witnessed is by an inmate nicknamed “Speed Boat.” He’s still locked-up, but that’s beside the point. There’s another inmate that comes to mind. “Bunnie.” When we first met, he told me not to laugh, that that was the name his mother had given him. Stranger than fiction. Stranger than the name “Whoreson” in a Donald Goines novel, or “Milkman” in a Toni Morrison novel.

Bunnie was the only ex-felon that I called after his release. With the permission of my boss—she provided me with the number—I delivered the good news. It was 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and when his mother told me he was sleeping, I told her to wake him up. Somewhat groggy, he was surprised that I had actually called. “You working midnights or something?”

“Nope,” he replied.

“Are you working at all?”

“Nope.”

I then told him that he earned his GED and that we’d forward his scores to his home. I also reminded him that his chances of getting a job were much better now and to start pounding the pavement. I haven’t a clue as to where he is now, but I’m hoping he’s not back in the system.

Disclaimer: The random numbers generated for the photo do not reflect my current students in the Michigan Department of Corrections, nor did they originate from the Offender Tracking Information System.