During the 2025 January snowstorm, I worked all night to clear snow for Henrico County to keep businesses and crucial services functioning. I’d gone straight there from my other job cleaning the county’s administrative offices, and I ended my shift at 8 a.m. Even exhausted, I stay motivated: I am making this second chance count.
I just came home from prison after 23 years. My mom cried when we got to spend our first Christmas together in decades. I earned my homecoming, a better man driven by my faith in God and my family.
But Gov. Youngkin’s proposed budget would take away the chance for thousands of other people to earn their own homecoming. Just months after he signed the expansion of earned sentence credits (ESC) into law last May, the governor wants to undo this successful program.
The ESC program is a path for people like me to earn time off their sentences. But it’s not easy: to earn sentence credits in Virginia, people behind bars must follow the rules, educate themselves, maintain a job, and participate in rehabilitative programming.
I’m living proof that ESC works. Getting to earn ESC inspired me to be my best self by providing a pathway for me to reunite with my family and my community. Now, the friends I made who are still in prison tell me that my journey inspires them to stay on track. They say my success proves to them they can grow enough to earn their freedom, too.
Why take that away? Isn’t rehabilitation what prison is supposed to be all about?
Now, the friends I made who are still in prison tell me that my journey inspires them to stay on track. They say my success proves to them they can grow enough to earn their freedom, too.
Certainly, the statistics show us that Virginia is safer because we give incarcerated people an incentive to demonstrate their growth. As homecomings have risen, violent crime is down 13.2 percent, and homicides have fallen 31.3 percent in just one year across Virginia’s major cities, according to the Real-Time Crime Index.
Even Gov. Youngkin and Attorney General Miyares acknowledge how safe Virginia has been recently.
It’s no accident that Virginia has gotten much safer – cementing it as one of the safest states in the nation – during the same period of time that more people have earned sentence credits to come home.
After all, the vast majority of people in prison will come home one day one way or another. But now, when we do, we have habits and skills we were incentivized to learn through the ESC program. That’s what happened to me.
I can only imagine that Virginia taxpayers want to pay for programs that work – programs like ESC. It costs more than $45,000 to incarcerate just ONE person for ONE YEAR in Virginia. ESC cuts those costs by making sure we don’t incarcerate people any longer than we have to – saving Virginia tens of millions of dollars over the next two years alone.
Or we could do what Gov. Youngkin is proposing: take ESC eligibility away from thousands of people and cost Virginians in the process. A separate proposal to disqualify a smaller group of people from this program will cost taxpayers over $22 million in just the next two years, according to the non-partisan Sentencing Commission.
All that money, just to house people who’ve already proven they’ve rehabilitated themselves – all while crime is already dropping.
That’s not tough on crime. That’s tough on law-abiding Virginians who need well-funded schools, healthcare, roads, and infrastructure.
Take it from me and the snow I recently shoveled: our water system would be a better investment.
I’m living proof that ESC works. My days begin and end with gratitude and determination to support my loved ones, prove my character, honor the gift of freedom that God provided, and be the best employee at every one of my jobs. I attend the church that embraced me while still inside, and I eagerly await the chance to go back with them and reach others inside the same way.
My whole family benefits from me being home. I help my sister pay bills and mentor my teenage nephews. Before these credits took effect, I wasn’t sure I would see my 81-year-old mother again, and now I can help her take care of her health.
I couldn’t do any of that without ESC. Gov. Youngkin, Speaker Scott, don’t get rid of it now.
