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PRISONER OF THE WEEK

My Son is Doing Okay After 10 Months in the Slammer

Still recovering from his latest journey to hell and back

11 min readMay 23, 2025

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Me and Ferg on the bus a few years back. All photos by author.

He lost his housing voucher. That was the biggest negative impact. Of course I wasn’t with him there in jail, so I can’t really do the math. Maybe being in jail was a bigger negative impact than future homelessness. What was it like to be in a psychotic state, at the mercy of jailers, confined with a bunch of other crazy and possibly violent men? Probably not good. He didn’t recover there.

The loss of his housing voucher hurt bad, though. Because it was such a miracle that he received it in the first place. At that moment when he received it, a whole group of professional people was sitting around a big table at the hospital discussing his fate, and planning to conserve him for a year, which meant put him in a locked psychiatric facility for a year, which I was advocating against and not making any converts, when a housing voucher miraculously and completely unexpectedly showed up in somebody’s inbox — the pretty, young social worker, I think. It was a get out of jail free card. Because then I could say, This is a miracle! We have to give him this chance. He deserves this chance. And they agreed.

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Patsy Fergusson
Patsy Fergusson

Written by Patsy Fergusson

Tree hugger. Tour guide. Top Writer. Feminist. Newly-baptized Bay swimmer. Editor of Fourth Wave. https://medium.com/fourth-wave

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