Jason Holloway
Professor Michelle Zuppa
EN-110
14 February 2015
Prison changed my life Growing up I loved reading books. I would always be at the library reading books about a dog hero or a person that wears underwear saving the world. I didn’t like to write though, during the third grade I broke my leg and ended up being home schooled, while my leg was healing I missed the classes on how to write cursive writing. When I got to the fourth grade, there was a program that allowed a free personal pizza for reading ten books. In order to obtain the ticket for the pizza, you had to have your parent or guardian sign the form to hand into the teacher.
At the end of the fourth grade I found out that I failed my English exam by one point and it was left up to my parents to decide if I was going to have to repeat the fourth grade or be moved on to the fifth grade. My father decided that I would repeat the fourth grade, since that moment I started to slack off in school; getting a minimum grade of sixth-five to pass my classes and never doing any extra work. While in the fifth grade I was transferred to a school and started to do more work and write more but still did not like to read. During the eight grade, my English teacher would always call me to the front of the class to read my essay because he knew I didn’t like to read out loud due to my speech impediment and after I would get done reading the essay he would always criticize the essay but never tell me how to improve it, because of this I started to only do the bare minimum to pass my classes and dropped out of all my advanced classes. This all changed in high school, where I came to realize that all I was doing was hurting myself. I started to take my classes serious and did all my assignments that were due. Once I dropped out of high school, I didn’t want to read anymore or do any writing at all. Then in March of 2008, I got into a bit of trouble when I was caught hacking into banks and using people’s bank accounts and credit cards to buy goods and services. When I was in the county jail I started to read more books than I normally would have, starting with Harry Potter and then moving to Steward Woods, Steven King, and Ken Follet. I would be able to complete five books a week with each book being between 300-400 pages each. Soon I was running out of books to read due to their small selection that the library had to choose from.
After doing my short stay in the county jail, I was moved to a federal prison and was able to request outside reading material, where I would use my two allowed books