Troy's Times - August 1st, 2007
Hi Friend! (Some ch^racters in th1s newsletter have been altered to keep it from being filtered out as spam) IN THIS ISSUE
“It is not important How we come to the events in our lives, but how we Deal with those events”- Troy
This Month's Featured Article: Why Was I Given This Article?
If you have a good friend, you don't need a mirror.
German Proverb
If you’ve been wanting to make a life change, chances are, you were given or forwarded this article by a good friend to help you take those first steps. If that is the case, I hope this helps and I’m glad that I’ve been able to touch your life in some small way. If you haven’t been planning any sort of life change and you can’t imagine why you’ve received this article, then it is probably because someone who loves you, likes you, doesn’t like you so much, works with you, etc. thinks you need to rethink the situation. Maybe they even just left it on your doorstep in a clear attempt at literary ambush. To you I say this, it might be worth taking the suggestion. It is all too common that people only see the things that they want to see and at times it can be hard to look at the things that don’t foot that bill. When I was just a few years into my prison sentence, just starting to get on a roll with my education, we had an incident in the prison. I’m not sure exactly how it started, but for some reason, a couple of members of the Mexican Mafia had a beef with one of the members of one of the black gangs (I don’t remember if it was the Bloods or the Crips and frankly it doesn’t matter). At any rate, these two guys in the Mexican Mafia jumped the other gang member and did some pretty good damage before it was broken up. A couple of days later there was a retaliation and a member of the Mexican Mafia went down. Racial tensions were out of control and everyone’s radar was tuned up extra high. It was no longer enough to simply make sure that you didn’t tick anyone off. Now there was a threat that you would become involved in something just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Things were bad. A couple of days went by and the heightened stress levels and racial tensions raised the stakes even higher. After lunch, about 75 guys actually rose up against the guards and started pelting them with rocks and swinging broom sticks at them. It was an impromptu act that had very little planning behind it and the guards quickly broke it up. The prison was put in a low-grade lockdown. We were still able to go to our shift jobs, but for the most part, we were stuck in our cells for a few days. The hope was that this would be enough to calm the tension around the prison. When they released us to normal status just a couple of days later, however, it seemed that all they had done was provide some of the inmates with the time they needed to plan. This time it wasn’t 75, but nearly 300 inmates that surged up. It started in the recreation yard and quickly spilled inside the prison walls. Within each bunkhouse of that particular institution, there were escape doors inside of the guard’s office. When the guards fear for their lives, they are supposed to seal the office and use the escape doors to make it to safety. We weren’t supposed to know about the doors, but just try to keep a secret like that from the people who are looking for any and all ways out. The prisoners were going for the doors. In the end, none of them made it out of a door, but neither did one of the female corrections officers. Now the stakes were even higher. You can imagine that they roughed her up pretty good. A few of the guys wanted to rape her as well and it was only through an intervention by some of the prisoners that she wasn’t ravaged on the spot. For the time being, she was going to stay alive, and intact, but if we thought there was going to be a problem before, now we were sure of it. There was a hostage. For a day and a half, the prisoners held the prison. During that time, I stayed tucked away in my cell or an office trying not to draw any attention. I just hunkered down and prayed that this wasn’t going to end as badly as I anticipated. The actions of the rest of the population varied. There were those, who like me, just wanted to stay away from it all. There were others who took part in some of the looting and enjoyed other small bits of freedom that they might not otherwise have, such as more television time, days off from their prison jobs, etc. And then there were the fraction of the population that had started the entire thing. They were running rampant, usually without purpose, with no way out, causing nothing but violence and destruction. Meantime, through the few small windows to the outside, we could see every state and federal law enforcement agency they could assemble preparing. They set up a manned perimeter around the prison. Guards and police were armed with M-16s and shotguns and told to shoot anyone trying to make a break for it. Command posts were set up and a special prison task force was brought in. On day two, they were ready to take back the prison. They rolled an armored vehicle into the yard and literally smashed it right into one of the buildings (the one where the female guard was being held). That was the first section of the prison they took back. A storm of armed officers began to sweep through the prison. Tear gas was sent into the ventilation system and suddenly anyone who was inside the prison was on the floor just trying to breath. The officers swept from room to room, beating anyone they encountered, regardless of what they were doing, into submission and handcuffed them to whatever was close by and immoveable. If you were lucky enough or smart enough to be in your own cell when the breach occurred, you were able to escape with only the effects of the tear gas. Our doors were simply shut, and frankly it was the first time I had felt safe in two days. If, however, you had the unfortunate happenstance of being one of the people who had decided not to participate in the riot, but to take advantage of the extra television time, then you were beaten down and handcuffed wherever they found you. Anyone suspected of being involved, was basically hogtied and dragged out into the yard for questioning and subsequent punishment. It took a day and a half for the guards to take back control of the entire prison, but we all paid for it for years. Of course we soon found our lives even more restricted than they had been before, but the truly long-term punishments, were perpetrated by our fellow inmates. I mentioned earlier that FCI Florence was a new prison. Some of the benefits of that were a beautiful gymnasium with a basketball court for use during the winter months, a law library, and a GED program with onsite classrooms. Frustrated by their failed attempt at a break, the rioting inmates had turned on the prison itself. They went into these areas that were there only to serve us and absolutely destroyed them. They broke windows, trashed computers and set fire to anything that would burn. As a result, the sprinkler system came on, destroying anything that the prisoners hadn’t, right down to the floorboards of our basketball court. As you can imagine, there was no hurry to replace these things. There was no basketball, no GED, no classes; the whole place was just trashed. So you might be saying, “Gee Troy, that was a fascinating peek inside a prison uprising, but what does that have to do with me or why I have this book.” Here it is. 1) You cannot change a problem if you refuse to see it. 2) Ignoring it will not make it better and will probably make it worse. 3) In the absence of a true solution, we will often turn destructively in on ourselves. 4) And, we will generally take those around us down too. There were quite a few conversations once order was restored about what had gone wrong. The media speculated about the nature of the caged animal, the prison found a few scapegoats and acted like they were making the modifications necessary to prevent it from happening again, but inside, the prisoners were all saying the same thing, “They should have seen it coming a mile away.” The signs were all there; they just didn’t want to see what was right there in front of their faces. Those of us who could smell it in the air had already started to venture out a little less, take a little more stock of who was around us, and had stopped blinking days before anything happened. They should have seen it coming. Perhaps you’ve received this article because those around you see your situation with more clarity than you see it yourself. I know that was the case with my addiction. My family always knew how much trouble I was in even when I thought I had them completely snowed. They were trying to take my blinders off with intervention after intervention and I was so convinced by my own lies, that I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to deal with the problem. So let me just tell you this. If someone gave you this article, you’re not fooling anyone. You have a problem and they’re trying to tell you something. It may not be drugs. It could be an emotional issue, a marriage on the rocks, a job in peril. If you look deep down I’m sure you know what they’re trying to tell you. My advice is to face it and get on the path to change today. This could be your pivotal point.
Read a
letter from a recent client - Click hear to read! I often had a hopeless feeling knowing that all I could offer were words of encouragement and support and the sharing of my own downfall....that was until I became partners with a company called DrugTALK. DrugTALK is a v1rtual life coach dedicated to helping families, parents and young people overcome the threat and dangers of drugs through the privacy of their home. They do this by delivering the insight, tools and activities needed for parents to protect their children by putting vital protection principles into practice, often without parents even realizing it. Their programs and tools are based on decades of research and supported by a dynamic team of communication experts, family intervention specialists, treatment professionals, narcotics intelligence officers, life coaches, parents and---most importantly---teens who have faced the world of drugs first-hand. The CEO of DrugTALK happened to attend one of my speaking engagements
and after talking I skeptically took one of his Drug Reference Guides
and a DVD. Having lived through the hell of drug abuse I had my whole
adult life been conv1nced that nothing short of expensive in-patient treatment
centers could break the hold that drugs have on our young people. After
thoroughly studying what DrugTalk has to offer I was blown away- I can
honestly say that h^d these tools been available to me during my teenage
years that I most likely would have avoided the hell I put myself and
family through.
Featured product for this issue! NEW HARDBACK BOOK -
If you live in or near one of the following cit1es where Troy will be speaking over the next few months, please contact The Ev^ns Groups for details on an opportunity that does not come around often- see Troy present for free!
Commission for booking me - I offer a comm1ssion of 10%-20% ($750.00-$1,500.00) for anyone who refers me for speaking engagements and/or bulk product sales. Please contact The Evans Group for details. Subscriber opinions and impressions of this electronic newsletter: I invite subscribers to write me with their quest1ons as well and I will answer them in the next issue. Also readers, I invite you to send in profiles of yourself and how you have used the inform^tion from my electronic newsletter, products or speech in your personal and/or professional lives. Once a month I will feature one individual for all others to read about!
Note: You are free to reprint any portion of this electronic newsletter as long as the portion remains complete and unaltered, and the “About the Author” section is included. About the Author- Troy Evans is a profess1onal speaker and author who resides in Phoenix, AZ with his wife Pam and his dog Archibald. Troy travels the country delivering keynote presentations, and since his release from prison has taken the corporate and association pl^tforms by storm. Overcoming adversity, adapting to change and pushing yourself to realize your full potential- other speaker’s talk about these issues, Troy has walked them.
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