Encyclopedia defines the nature versus nurture debate as the relative importance of an individual's innate qualities and personal experiences in determining or causing individual differences in physical and behavioral traits. Does a person's DNA determine who will succeed in life and who will become an addict and a criminal? Or rather is it the person's early childhood development and upbringing that determines that? I used to believe the latter. That is until I met an unusual inmate in the Polk County Jail.
In my second letter to Todd Jones, DC # 0622141, I thought it best to relate my childhood and upbringing. If I were going to be able to encourage and comfort him, and eventually convince him to turn away from his addictions and criminal ways, then I'd better get down to his level. Or so I thought.
"I grew up on a small farm in Mississippi", I wrote. I never knew my father and my mother was an abusive alcoholic. My childhood memories were all painful. I dropped out of school and left home at the age of fourteen. Thumbing my way to a small town in Texas. "No one came to look for me", I added. Except the perverts, drug dealers and pimps that prey on young girls traveling alone.
I overcame all that and managed to land a small job, lying about my age. I had always taken care of myself. When I was eighteen I married a man 13 years my senior. Like my mother before him, he too turned out to be an abusive alcoholic. By the age of thirty, I finally broke away from this union and found myself sleeping on a dirty mattress on the floor of a rundown shack on the wrong side of town with my now two children. Despite it all, I managed to get my GED and land a four year scholarship. I eventually found a better job, a better place to live and had raised my children on my own. "If I had done it, then you can too", I suggested. I ended the letter with one of my fumbled scriptures. "Again", I wrote, "I can't say exactly where it is in the bible, but it goes something like, suffering begets endurance, endurance begets perseverance, perseverance begets character and it's our character that makes us who we are".
His letter back to me wasn't exactly what I had expected. He had a childhood just the opposite. He came from a wealthy and loving family in East Hampton, Long Island, New York. He had grown up in a life of luxury. He graduated high school and went on to trade school where he studied his passion, automobile restoration. He was first introduced to cocaine at a party for a famous Sports Illustrated model (name withheld). In 1998, he moved with his common law wife and two children to Lakeland, Florida to be near her family. It wasn't until coming to Florida, did his life take a turn for the worst. "Oh and by the way", he wrote, "that scripture you mentioned is Romans, Chapter 5, verses 3-5".
So much for the nature versus nurture debate. If anyone should have wound up a drug addict in jail in a small town in Florida, it should have been me, not him. I scrapped together 10 bucks for a money order and sent it back to him. I wanted to be sure he had plenty of stamps and envelopes so that he could write back to me. I had found his story fascinating and wanted to hear more. How does a rich guy from the uppity side of New York wind up a homeless drug addict in a Florida jail? The answer would shock me.
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