An excerpt from the Los Angeles Times -
'I took someone’s life — now I am giving back': In California's prisons, inmates teach each other how to start over
By Jazmine Ulloa
The men Daniel Hopper teaches about drug and alcohol abuse are serving sentences of 10 years to life at a state prison tucked away in the Vaca Mountains of Northern California. They grew up in different places, most of them under difficult circumstances: dangerous schools and neighborhoods, fathers behind bars, brothers in gangs.
Hopper, a tall 35-year-old with cropped black hair, rectangular glasses and piercing wit, can relate to them on a level few others can. He is doing time for killing another teenager when he was 17 and a San Diego gang leader.
“Going to prison was one of the best things that ever happened to me,” Hopper said. It forced him to face what he did — and live differently, he said.
A largely self-educated inmate who had resigned himself to dying within prison walls, Hopper became a substance abuse counselor through the Offender Mentor Certification Program. Now, with Proposition 57 ushering in a massive overhaul of the state’s prison parole system, the program could bring him and his students closer to an early release that some of them thought they would never see.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-prop-57-prison-programs-20170420-htmlstory.html
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