Flint pebble

Parenting from prison had never offered advantages, until the day my teenage son told me how he felt about his best friend being shot in front of him.

“Dad, I wanna get even,” he told me over the phone.

I flashed back to the day thirteen years before, when one of my best friends was shot, and I picked up a gun in the spirit of revenge. As I listened to my son describe his emotions, I thought about what I wished someone had told me all those years ago.

Rather than lecturing him and risk him losing the desire to communicate with me, I began by asking him how he felt. My son, who was fifteen at the time, took his time to respond. “Sad. Angry. Hurt. Frustrated,” he said, before admitting that he wanted revenge.

A father attempts to break the cycle of gun violence – and fatherlessness – from a prison payphone.