VINCE

August 10, 2014

Excluding good time, and any other early release programs, my release date is July 25, 2017.  If I am accepted into C.I.P.  I will leave prison six months from the day I arrive in Willow River.  The Challenge Incarceration Program there, otherwise known as boot camp, is designed to be as fast paced and rigorous as army boot camp, but also includes drug treatment, education, cognitive thinking skills classes, job training, and when that’s over there’s a 6 month intensive supervised release that they say is the real challenge.  For 6 months: every day is the real challenge.  For 6 months: everyday contact with an I.S.R. officer.  Drug tests 4 times a week.

Must spend 8 hours a day actively seeking employment until you have a full time job.  AA/NA involvement.  Community service, 8 hours per week.  I.S.R. officers can walk into your home at any time day or night with the key you have provided them.  They can follow you.  Their job is not to help you succeed.  Their job is to make sure they are there to catch you slipping.  They give you one fuck up.  Then they put on an ankle bracelet.  If you mess up again you go back to prison for your full term and they add on six months.  Id’ be out in 2019.  Oh, and to not be a burden to society, they take your pay check.  Pay your bills, give you some small allowance and keep the rest.  After that is parole for one year.  Then I’m free.  

Believe it or not the success rate is quite high.  Recidivism is low.  And everybody comes out of boot camp in the best shape of his life.  5 miles rain or shine, daily workouts, healthy diet.  Sounds like a challenge to me.  I can’t wait.  Oooh but I will.  My guess is that I’ll get to go to boot camp in roughly 3 months.  Until I leave St. Cloud, I’m locked in my cell for an average of 21 hours a day, 23 on weekends.