Someone asked about my record, so I figured I would save some time and just put it here for all to see.
Like a lot of my peers I started out young but I was younger than most. I still remember seeing my mother cry as I got roughly shoved into line and marched away, thru the gate of the tallest chain-link fence I had ever seen. It seemed like forever before I saw her again. That was at Central. They've changed the name since then, but it will always be Central to me. I served a couple of years there before I was transferred to Caldwell. It was newly built and I was one of the first to be moved over to it.
I served a hard 5 years there under Leon Mills. He had it out for me, but I scraped by and didn't get another year tacked on like some did. It was heartbreaking to see them when the word was handed down, the light would just go out of their eyes. There was one day a bunch of us made a break for it - we were completely surrounded by chain-link with a pretty deep ditch after that. But still some of us made it to the orange grove on the other side of the canal. We ran around there throwing oranges at each other until Mills and the rest of the teachers rounded us up and made us walk back to class.
Seven years down, six more to go. But that's another story.