They Closed a Prison Join the list

A novel · forthcoming

They Closed a Prison

Three names. Two hundred years. One prison closes.

“And today is the day I get out of prison.” Chapter one, first line

Three timelines. A boy who kills a man at eighteen. A man who comes home and builds an empire to buy his soul back, and loses it. And an old man who spends the rest of his life trying to close one.

Join the list The three names

The three names

Junior. Reed. Ryu.

Junior
Age 16

A boy running a small economy in a town where nobody is watching him closely enough to stop him. He is good at it. That is the problem.

Reed
Age 24

He comes home with two hundred dollars and a felony, and builds an empire out of the only discipline he ever learned. He does not slow down long enough to find out what it is for.

Ryu
Age 68

He has the money, the name, and the years. What he does not have is a way to pay it back. So he spends the rest of his life trying.

They never share a page. That is all I am going to tell you.

The machine

The book is fiction. The arithmetic is not.

716
People incarcerated per 100,000 in the United States. Norway: 53.
70%
Approximate recidivism in the United States. Norway: about 20%.
$34k
Upper end of what one year of incarceration costs. Norway spends $127,671 and gets a lower return rate.

Figures and sources are being verified for publication. Nothing on this page is a claim about a specific facility.

The Foundation Stone

The other thing this book is for.

A man leaves prison with two hundred dollars and a bus ticket, and is expected to rent an apartment in a state where a landlord may refuse him for his record, and find work in a system where his record is an automatic disqualification. That is not a moral test. It is a machine.

  1. Acquire modest homes in places that already have jobs and transit.
  2. Place returning citizens in them, at market rent, under a normal lease.
  3. Put every dollar of that rent into a dedicated escrow account instead of a landlord's pocket.
  4. On the day parole ends, the escrow becomes the down payment on the home they are already living in.

Tenant becomes owner. Nobody is given anything. They buy it, one month at a time.

The Foundation Stone is not accepting donations. It has no entity yet, and it will not ask for a dollar until it does. thefoundationstoneproject.org

The list

Two doors. Pick either, or both.

There is no publication date yet, so there is nothing to buy and nothing to preorder. When there is, the list hears first. That is the whole arrangement.