Prison, Paradigms, and Prodigal Sons
Prison, Paradigms, and a Prodigal Son I began my career as an incarcerated individual in 1989, after I committed a car-jacking and was arrested and convicted for aggravated robbery. I was summarily sentenced to 16 years in prison. I was 19 years old. I ended up serving 7 years before I was released early for good behavior in 1996 – first to a halfway house, then on monitored supervision. I was granted parole in 1997, and finally discharged by sentence in 2001. While I was in prison, I became determined to turn away from the very obvious path of career criminal behavior and gang membership. When I was 23, partly because of self-study and searching for spiritual meaning, I converted to orthodox Islam. Upon my release, I landed a job conducting phone surveys for a company that was expanding an office temporarily to Denver in order to conduct polling for President Clinton. I was quickly promoted to floor supervisor and then to Operations manager. Here I was, in a matter of months, in charg...