When No One Else Will Help, This Lifer Is There
By Marie Turner
How do you turn a 177-year prison sentence into a life dedicated to helping others? Just ask Gary Settle. Cancer-stricken himself, Gary is incarcerated at Butner Federal Medical Center, where from his cell and the law library, he has successfully helped more than 40 very ill and elderly incarcerated individuals get sentencing relief. Yet he consistently underplays his role. He signs his emails anonymously as “patient/helper,” and chooses to focus on the positive he sees in others. “I have never seen hope grow in a hopeless place like it has here,” he says. Gary has been incarcerated now for 31 years.
Born in 1966 in Hawthorne, California, Gary describes a storybook childhood spent surfing, skateboarding, and playing Little League. A big reader, he named his cats Ophelia and Strider after characters from Hamlet and The Lord of the Rings. When the family moved to Ohio when he was 13, Gary developed a rebellious streak — and a taste for alcohol. “I was a happy drunk, but I was chafing at the small-town environment,” he says. He started engaging in reckless driving, hood surfing, and motorcycle stunts.
By the 1990s Gary was a husband, father, and business-owner living in Florida, but describes his life as an “alcoholic haze,” defined by a “need to test the limits of myself and authority.” Following a joking exchange with a drinking buddy who worked at a bank, he made a plan. “I have no rationale to explain how I came to the conclusion that robbing a bank would be a good idea,” Gary says, but by 1992 he was wanted by the FBI.
On September 6, 1993, he was sentenced on one count of conspiracy, nine counts of bank robbery, and nine counts of carrying a firearm during the commission of a felony. Gary was given a mandatory 177 years to be served consecutively: 147 months for the robbery and conspiracy charges, and 165 years for carrying a gun into a bank on nine occasions. Gary was 27 years old.
Thus began what Gary calls his “whirlwind tour of the federal penitentiary system,” including USP Hazelton in West Virginia, where eventually he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. In 2018 Gary was transferred to Butner for treatment, and despite more than 20 years in the system at that point, he recalls his “shock at the appearance and bearing of the prisoners” there, most of them desperately ill. When the First Step Act passed in 2018, making it easier for people to apply for compassionate release, Gary found his purpose: helping those desperate people seek early release.
His is a hard road, made easier by the support of his mother, Kay, now 83. “Gary and I have always been very close,” she says, and incarceration has not broken their bond. “Every time I talk to him, it’s meaningful, and I’m always just tickled to death to hear from him.” She loves talking about his childhood days, whether recalling his love of animals or his commitment to his friends, for whom he often cooked dinner when their families were struggling (“He made a mean biscuit!” Kay says.).
“I’m so proud of the way he’s handling himself now. I get phone calls from mothers and wives of people he’s helped, I get roses from some of them thanking me for Gary,” says Kay. “It makes me feel proud that he’s helping people get compassionate release.”
These connecting talks have become even more important as Gary’s cancer, once in remission, has returned. In 2021, Gary learned the disease had progressed to his lymph nodes, making it Stage IV, a terminal diagnosis. Finally eligible to petition for compassionate release himself, Gary faced telling his mother about the cancer, which he had previously avoided. He calls that conversation “the hardest thing I have ever done.”
Unfortunately, despite his declining medical circumstances, he was twice denied compassionate release. Today, he experiences greatly reduced mobility and lives with constant pain. But Kay has not given up her dream that her son will come home someday. She has a room prepared for him in her home. “I want to relax together on my little concrete patio. He wants to look at the yard and the squirrels and the birds and stuff. I just think we’re going to hang out and talk.”
Without compassionate release, the only chance to realize Kay’s dream is executive clemency. These days Gary is less sanguine about his future and has even contemplated ceasing treatment — but ultimately, his work helping others rules that out. “What type of person would I be if I did not assist people and their families when I could?” Gary says. “I have always rejected the concept that when the final words are written about me they will be ‘bank robber.’ That is what I was — not what I am and not what I will be.”
If you’ve read this story and feel like Gary and others like him deserve a shot at a second chance, consider giving a special gift to FAMM in Gary’s honor.
Marie Turner is a writer living in Maryland.
