One Day That Changed My Life Forever

i remember when i first got caught stealing i was 6 years old i had stolen my aunt's big fake diamond ring she had passed it around the room for everyone to see and when it got to me all of the adults were talking about something else, i figured they had forgotten i had the ring so i eased out f the room so i really thought i was rich and going to move out west and be a cowboy, like every young boy wanted to be then, until it was time for my aunt and her family to leave that was when my aunt ask me for her ring back ,and i lied and said i didn't have it that was when my mother came over to me and reach into my pocket and pulled out her ring at that moment i thought for sure i was in some serious trouble ,instead they burst out laughing , so i started to laugh to ,at that time i really thought steeling was a good thing ,and besides on the old shows like bonanza , danial boone,gunsmoke the bad guys always almost got away,it was usually a from the bad guy doing something dumb that always got him caught .so i had a feeling that being a bank robber wasn't really a bad ideal , now i kept that thought in the back of my mind,never sharing these feeling until now.
from the time i was 13 -15 years old i had been arrested about 10 times, from shoplifting to robbery,at the of 15 my probation officer told me i had to go into this scared straight program ,it was only a one day program, i thought it would be fun and it gave something to do, and boy was i every so wrong .
these are the events exactly as they happened that day in the summer of 1979.
my probation officer picked me up from my house and took me to courthouse downtown there i was meet by other teenage boys who were also part of the program about 10 boys total,next we got into a van and were driven over to the prison about a 30 minute drive ,when we got there we were line up and told to follow this yellow line they had painted on the ground, we were walked into the prison and stripped searched,then we were taken into a prison block and told to walk around the block among the prisoners until the guard got back they came back in five minutes but it seem like a lifetime, as those prisoners kept telling us what all they were going to do to us as soon as we got there,and how much they just couldn't wait to do what they wanted to do to us,our next stop was our last stop we had to go speak with the lifers ,the men that had no chance of getting out of jail as long as they had breath in their body, we meet these guys in a dark place in the prison with little light we were ordered to sit on this little bench all ten of us ,as soon as we sat down the inmates all rushed us and grabbed our shoes and snatched them off and threw them all somewhere that we couldn't see ,and dared any of us to move or go get our shoes,we were then ordered to sit up straight with our knees together and our hands on our knees for the next 3 hours,while the lifers all took turns telling us their life stories, it was so hot down there we were all just sweating like we had just gotten out of a swimming pool that was when one of the guys had gotten enough nerve to wipe the sweat off his forehead, the lifers yelled at him and told him to get up and go with them about five of them walked him into the darkness, this was the most scariest time of my life , there were no guards that we could see,and they took him to the back for some time , or at least it seemed so.then when he came back from the darkness they dared any of us to look at him ,or we'll be next but when the lifers who had taken him back there came into the light we could all plainly see they were adjusting their belt and fixing their pants up. to this day i have no idea what they did to him, because they didn't allow us to talk about it and i never saw that guy again,but he sure taught us all how to sit for a long period of time .