Success Lockdown: Life After Incarceration

By Dr. Tori Brown

People make mistakes, but our society doesn't always make it easy for them to live them down. Dr. Tori Brown discovered this the hard way. While a student at Eastern Michigan University, she made a mistake that changed her life forever. She was charged with two felonies and sentenced to a year in the St

• Language: English
• Publisher: Success Lockdown Group LLC
• Release date: Jun 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9780578297293

Book preview

Preface

Although I have only known Dr. Tori Brown for a short period of time, our immediate connection has made it feel like a lifetime. She is one of the smartest, most ambitious, and most caring people I have ever met, and that's why I am drawn to her.

From our very first encounter, I knew she was someone who would change the lives of many people. It was a goal we shared in common. Like myself, she saw the inequities in our society and wanted to do something about it.

When she trusted me with her story, I didn't see an ex-felon, I saw the American dream at its best. I saw a beautiful woman who made a mistake, paid for her mistake, and refused to let society keep making her pay for it. I saw a beautiful woman who had more power than she realized, an anointing that put her in a special place to do God's work. I saw a beautiful woman who needed to heal from a mistake that happened two decades ago, and use that healing to deliver others so that from their mistakes, they too could Lockdown Success as well.

I went to law school to help people from a legal standpoint, but Dr. Brown has all the capabilities of helping them from a business standpoint. She didn't write this book to make a profit, she wrote this book to make a difference. I am glad to be a part of this difference, and hope that it makes a difference in your life, the same way meeting her, and knowing her, has made a difference in mine.

Read her story, take her advice, and find greatness within yourself the same way she did! I wish you luck on the road to Success Lockdown!

Warmest Regards,

Cassandra Henderson, ESQ

Introduction

I didn’t always want to be a business owner. Things just went that way because of the set of circumstances that were being experienced in my life. Fresh out of jail with a college degree and one year of graduate school. How in the hell did that happen right? I ask myself that often until the memory of waking up out of a dream from being incarcerated all night reminds me. Yes that is true. To this day, I still have bad dreams about the year spent in county jail for serving out my one-year sentence in Michigan in 1999. Do you remember the song 1999 by Prince when it came out back in 1982? I do, in fact my siblings and I would play it and ask ourselves, What do you think we will be doing by the time 1999 comes? I sure in the heck did not anticipate jail time. I was charged with the crime in 1996 but did not get sentenced until 1998. Dealing with one wrong turn in my life cost me 10 years or more of my life. 10 years? Yes … but how? Let's calculate this together. Let’s do the math.

Year one was the crime. I admit there were problems going on in my life. I was angry at the world. The pain of life itself at an early age was manifesting in my criminal lifestyle of selling drugs and gang activity. At the time, it was a way of life. I didn’t have to have it. I wanted to be included. That’s my truth. I wanted to be rich. That was my nemesis at that time. I wanted to be influential with my gift of organization and management. What better way than to use those skills than to distribute marijuana in my community. I didn’t give a damn about community and the impact my sales were having in that place everyone was calling community. My community was filled with crack rocks, guns, and pimps. What was so important about community at the time? My environment did not seem like it was making any impact on me that allowed me to matter. So I had to ask myself why in the world do I give a fuck about community. What has the community done for me?

Here is what leads to year two: the wait time. I was going to court almost every month it seemed. All these fancy words being thrown at me by the attorney. Adjudication, incarceration, filing a motion, deposition, character witness. I was so confused. All I heard was that for one wrong turn in my life I was facing 3 to 15 years in prison. At the time I was a student in college working on my bachelor’s degree in psychology. My goals were being pulled from right under me at a blink of an eye. Depression was starting to set in. Anxiety attacks were beginning to start. I didn’t know what that was. I thought I was having a heart attack. Dying on my feet. Every day when I would look in the mirror my face was unrecognizable.

The stress was putting more weight on my body than I needed, and chest pains were starting to increase. The next thing I remember is being at a doctor’s appointment weighing 350 pounds and being diagnosed with high blood pressure. No shit Sherlock. I’m going to jail like my lawyer said. But her job would be to minimize the time I would go. Did this bitch just give me my jail sentence? Did I pay her to be my fucking judge and jury? I guess so. Officially depressed and staying in my bed more than I needed to was my year two and three as I awaited my trial date from my college dormitory. Suicide is real in the mind of the lost. I was not planning suicide but I did have ideations.

My friends did not recognize me. I was slipping away right before their eyes. Sentenced in year three was hell and hot water at the same time. I found a walk with God at the time. They say once you get in trouble like this the first thing you do is call on Jesus. Yes I am not ashamed of that. I did call him because I really needed him. I had to make sense of my life and its existence. If it had not been for my walk with Christ, life would have not been the same. At the end of the day that is the strongest thing I ever have going for me in my favor. Year four was my time spent in the county jail. According to my attorney I was supposed to turn myself into jail and she would get me a court date within the week to challenge the sentence. Apparently the wording in my sentence read, Report to jail immediately after graduation. It did not specify graduation of what or when. So the argument would be that I was currently enrolled in my first year of graduate school at the university pursuing a Master’s Degree in Community Counseling. (There goes that word community again) Again, this attorney said report to jail on new year’s eve of 1998 and you will be out of there and back in school for winter semester of 1999. Wrong information.

I sat there in the jail cell waiting on them to call my name. I told myself that I didn’t have to eat that food in there because by the time I get really hungry they will be calling my name to leave. It did not happen. I sat for a year without an out date in their jail computer system. I did the time and I lost the weight while doing the time. Year five and I am out and back in population. We called it, back in the world. I felt like Tupac Shakur my favorite rapper. I was hungry for life. I needed to find some completion. I needed guidance. I was still having anxiety attacks. I was still depressed. I did not talk much. I did not watch television anymore. I did not eat meat. I did not trust anyone. I sure in the hell did not trust the law. I hated lawyers and cursed their name. Do not talk to me. I was not taking any college courses on criminal justice ever. I was different. I was hurting. I was wounded. I was emotional inside. I could not sleep through the night in the dark. I had incarceration behavior. Most hideously, I had two felons that prohibited me from getting employment. They even told me that I couldn’t even vote. What I did have, was a bachelor’s degree and almost ready to complete my Master’s Degree. I worked very hard to educate myself and dedicate myself to helping others.

Year six I had a graduate degree in counseling. I had a degree and I still had depression and suicidal ideations. I learned how to minimize those thoughts through my relationship with Christ. I Tried to take my felonies and degrees and get a job. Don’t make you laugh right? You guessed it. Not interested. No one wanted to hire a felon with two degrees. My heart was broken. Dr. Tina Parkman was my blessing. She was introduced to me by my credit man. Yes I had a credit man. A credit man was this guy that discovered fraud on my credit report that occurred during my time of incarceration. He removed all the derogatory items from my credit report to improve my credit score. Yes, my credit man introduced me to her. She spoke words of encouragement in my life to strip me of all of the barriers that were holding me back from my success. She spoke entrepreneurship into my life. Year seven I became a business owner. I get it…I will hire myself. I will start a business that will help the lost that look just like me. They think like me, they act like me, hell they are me, they are felons.

I did get hired eventually for $22K a year. With a first year second graduate degree student I thought things would get better. It did for a while until the dreams started. I would have this recurring dream that I would visit someone in jail and they would mistake me for an inmate and lock me up. Waking up in tears hollering, "I’m innocent, I’m not supposed to