Antwaun

He had spent his teens running from pain he couldn’t name. By the time he was fifteen, he’d already done a year in juvenile. By eighteen, he’d had a daughter and thought maybe responsibility could anchor him. It didn’t. The work was steady but never enough, and soon he found himself desperate, committing robberies that landed him in prison with a sentence of ten to thirty years.
For a long time, he refused to think about freedom. It hurt too much. So, he buried himself in the rhythm of days that all looked the same; count time, chow line, lights out. Then one afternoon, long after he’d stopped expecting anything new, someone handed him a book. The Four Agreements. He didn’t know then that a few hundred pages could start breaking a man open in the best way possible.
It was the first time he asked himself why he believed what he did, why he chased approval, why anger came easier than peace. “What if everything I believe is false?” he wrote in the margin. That single question became the start of a new kind of education. Over the years that followed, he devoured more than three hundred books. He learned about money, resilience, and the quiet power of discipline. More than that, he learned the difference between surviving and living.
Years later, inside Southern Desert Correctional Center, an announcement crackled over the intercom: an assembly in the gym. Antwaun almost ignored it, but curiosity won. There he met Jon Ponder and heard about Hope for Prisoners. The program promised reentry classes, trade training, and the chance to build a future. “Anybody who wants to be part of it, sign up,” Jon said. Antwaun did.
He thought he was just signing up for job skills, but he was wrong. Through classes like Trauma, Shame, and Resilience, he began to understand the pain he’d carried from his childhood, the instability, the anger, the need to act out. “A job isn’t going to solve your problems,” Jon told him once. Antwaun laughed then, convinced that money would fix everything. It wasn’t until much later that he understood.
When he came home after eleven years, his daughter was thirteen. He had imagined a joyful reunion, but she barely knew him. The distance between them was wide and quiet. Rebuilding trust would take time, and Antwaun learned to show up at every soccer game, every school event, every moment that proved he was there to stay. “I’m the soccer dad now,” he says, smiling. “Snacks, cheers, the whole thing.”
Work wasn’t easy to find. Fifty job applications went unanswered. He took grueling temp work for nine dollars an hour, every muscle sore and burning. Then Hope for Prisoners stepped in again, connecting him through the Work Experience Program (WEX) to a plumbing company. Those six weeks changed everything. He built skills, rebuilt confidence, and eventually started his own small plumbing business, Mainline Plumbing, born from hard lessons and even harder work.
At a Hope for Prisoners workshop early on, after his release, a facilitator named Stacey asked everyone to stand and speak in front of the group. Just thirty seconds about who they were. His heart raced. It was terrifying. But when he finished, the fear had shifted into something else: possibility. “You see how much more there is to life when you step out of what’s familiar,” he said afterward.
He still keeps that truth close. Life now isn’t perfect, but it’s honest. He’s a father who’s present, a business owner finding his way, a man who has stopped running from himself.
If you ask him what Hope for Prisoners gave him, he pauses before answering. “They matched my effort,” he says softly. “They saw I wanted it, and they poured into me.”
Then he smiles, the kind of smile that comes from peace hard-won. “I haven’t had a ticket, not even a jaywalking one. I just don’t do anything that doesn’t honor the people I love.”
Freedom, for Antwaun, isn’t just walking outside the gates. It’s waking up each morning knowing exactly who he’s choosing to be.