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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
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.