338: What if you thought you got away with it?
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I believe that all of us, we have the capacity, the ability to be violent.

From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 338. What if you thought you got away with it?

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My father was definitely a hippie, aspiring artist in the late 60s, early 70s from the South. My mom, she was also a flower child, grew up in the Atlanta area, started art school where she met my biological father. I doubt that they were married.

I don't know whether I was planned or not, but from what my mom has told me over the years, my dad would get drunk and he would get violent. My dad threw her across the room when she was pregnant with me, and so she left him before I was even born. In fact, she did not include his name on my birth certificate.

At about two, my mom met my stepfather. He was an attorney and worked on some of the civil rights movement in Atlanta in the South. My stepdad came from kind of a blue blood, pretty well-off family from Nashville, pretty staunchly conservative values. And he was kind of the black sheep of the family.

Got involved with the idea of equity and justice. And my stepdad was involved not only in the civil rights movement of the South, but some of the Native American civil rights issues, South Dakota and Wounded Knee. But also they were really into the hedonistic, if it feels good, do it portion of the hippie generation as well. They were definitely using all kinds of substances and partying.

We moved away from Atlanta when I was eight, so it had to be before then. I recall waking up and there's like an orgy going on. There were definitely many late night parties. You know, I was exposed to a lot of stuff that kids probably shouldn't be exposed to.

My earliest memory is more like a feeling, kind of an emotional state of just like feeling awkward or like different. I don't know how I fit into anything really. Some days throughout my childhood, it was more like I'm a piece of shit. I don't deserve to live.

It was pretty dark at times, and I was also a pretty weird kid. I was practicing, like, Cartesian doubt at five years old, wondering, like, is this real? Are these really my parents? That's how I felt as a kid. When I was eight, we moved out to New Mexico, a small town outside of Albuquerque.

In the small town where I was at was primarily a Hispanic population. Also, the town I grew up in is surrounded by several of the native Pueblos.

I definitely looked a lot different from the folks around me, the kids in school with me, sort of physically, but definitely in my family compared to a lot of the traditional Hispanic or Native families that my classmates were a part of. A kid was really making fun of me because my parents didn't believe in God.

And it was like a big thing where he's like, your parents don't believe in God. This is also when being in a small town in the Southwest tends to have that sort of machismo attitude and approach to life. And if somebody's giving you a hard time, you fight. And second, third grade, I started fighting again.

That was kind of the first times I realized that as somebody who tends to be larger than other people, I tend to be a little bit stronger and can use that to my advantage. But then also it kind of cut off other ways of dealing with things that came up in life.

The town I grew up in was pretty high levels of poverty. And with my stepfather as an attorney, we did okay. We did a lot of criminal defense.

His criminal defense, a lot of time, had to do with representing drug smugglers and drug dealers. And I recall him getting paid in piles of cash, drugs, vehicles that had been seized as assets from illegal activities and stuff like that. I was a latchkey kid starting at like nine or ten years old and also was fairly independent.

I would get off the bus and my parents, there was no telling when they would be home. Most nights, afternoons and evenings, I spent by myself in the desert. Up until about 12 or 13, I would steal some drinks of beers or whatever that was around.

It was the last day of seventh grade, and me and a couple of the kids that lived out there were going to go camp out in the desert for a couple of nights and just kind of be kids out in the desert. Being a latchkey kid, I went to the liquor cabinet, and there was half a bottle of tequila there.

I filled it up with the rest of the liquors that were in the liquor cabinet. So I had a full bottle that I could bring out to this camping trip. Met them out in the desert and we drank a lot, made a big old fire. And I'm certain we had pretty much alcohol poisoning. But I remember that there was this sense of not feeling different, of feeling okay, of

It had been a really long time since I had had that sense of just being okay. That was exactly the feeling that I tried to get from then on. Out of every substance I could get my hands on. Seventh grade did fine. I'd always did great in school. But then that eighth grade years, things started to go really downhill.

My stepdad, sometimes he would get paid cash so I could find different piles of cash around the house. And I had all this time alone in the house, so I also spent hours just going through all their stuff, figured out where the pot was. Started to pretty much be that eighth grade kid that just had pot on him all the time. And I got suspended from school because I got caught with some pot.

And my mom came and picked me up and she smacked me on the way home. And her concern, she said, don't you ever steal from me again. Right around this time, I also started to break into neighbors' houses. We didn't have cable television. We didn't have like any sugary cereal or anything. So I would break into the neighbor's house and watch Nickelodeon and eat Captain Crunch.

One day I convinced a neighbor kid that we should ditch school and go into the neighbor's house and have fun. And while we were there eating all their food and watching their television, we were like, man, we should take something. We're already broke into this place. And so these kids walking down dirt road in broad daylight with a giant tube television, we were just asking to get busted.

The first time I was arrested was at 13. One of the interesting elements of being raised by a criminal defense attorney is that the message I took home that I kept with me was a lot of the laws are bullshit. And, you know, if you can get away with it, then it's fine as long as you can figure out how to get away with it.

That wasn't how my stepdad or my mom really approached it. But the message I took home was like, as long as I can get away with it, then I'm okay. At 13, I was on probation already.

The next couple of years were ditching school, not even doing anything as far as work. And by my third attempt at my freshman year of high school, my stepdad said, well, we could get your GED. And if you want to just work, then we could do that. I was like, yeah, I was 16 going on 17. I was like, that sounds fantastic. I got the job washing dishes. I loved it.

The people I worked with were all that sort of restaurant crowd where we were into partying. When I was 17, my mom and my stepdad broke up. My mom kicked my stepdad out of the house, and then she ended up with a new boyfriend who she moved to Florida with. My stepdad was staying in Albuquerque and convinced him and my mom that me and a friend of mine should stay at the house.

It was party time. I would show up from work and there would already be people at the house partying. We just left the doors open. I'd get up in the morning and walk around and the floors were just sticky with beer and whatever else. It was nuts. I do remember times when I'd wake up, my hands were shaking and my brain was just this constant noise of like,

like a freight train. And I knew what I needed. I needed to go out to that warm keg and get some warm, flat keg beer so that I can be okay, that I could quiet my nerves. And then I would start drinking and smoke some pot and then go to my restaurant job. Eventually, my parents figured out that we were essentially destroying it. So they kicked us out.

My focus in life at that point had narrowed to finding and consuming substances, whatever that looked like. I didn't really think about much else. When I didn't have these chemicals in my body, I felt awful. I was basically couch surfing with that same friend of mine, John.

We were driving around in his car. We had a little bit of money. And so we started drinking a bunch of 40-ouncers, the small liquor. We'd had probably four or five each, so we were pretty wasted. And we went out to another friend of ours' house. There was another guy there, an older guy, a Native guy, who was also really drunk.

Him and the friend I was there with, John, him and this native guy, they got into a little bit of an altercation, nothing really big. My friend John and the friend who we were there to see were out smoking cigarettes and talking about it. And he's like, man, this guy has a lot of cash. Like, you wouldn't believe if you're going to fight this guy, we should also take his money. So we're like, yeah, that's a great idea. Yeah.

The native guy, older guy, he was pretty much passed out on the back porch. And a friend's mom comes out the back door and says, can you give him a ride home? He's really drunk and I think he needs to go home. And we're like, yes, in fact, we can give him a ride home. We put him into my friend John's car and we drove out to some ditches outside of the small town. It was November, November.

The ditches were dry, so we pushed him down into the ditch and jumped down there. Kind of beat him up a little bit, but then we grabbed his wallet, and there was literally just a single dollar in his wallet. Once we saw that he only had a dollar and we searched him and he didn't have any more money, this rage just bubbled up and just came out of me like I've never experienced before since.

And I remember observing it. It was like I was watching someone else doing these things, but I knew it was me. We got really angry and we started to beat him up more. And like just something clicked. Not one point did any of us say, hey, we should stop or, you know, that's enough or anything like that. We beat that guy up really bad.

I remember that sense of just rage and hatred that just came spewing out of me. The part that really trips me out to this day is that all three of us, it was like this, you know, sort of mass madness between the three of us that were there. We just all broke and started being really violent. And I know both of the other guys. They're not violent guys either. They're really sweet.

To this day, I can't really define it, but I know that I don't consider myself a violent person. But I believe that all of us, we have the capacity, the ability to be violent. The logical part of my brain shut off at that point and just the rage existed. That was what was in control of my body.

I remember the feeling of it coming up and like taking over. There was a part of me that was just horrified that that's what I was doing. But from that point, I was like observing myself doing these things.

My entire focus at that time had been trying to consume chemicals so that I could numb this pain. The fact that my parents didn't even want me, I had no place to go, I didn't deserve to live anywhere. For the first time in my life, instead of that anger and that hatred being turned inward, it turned outward. I think somebody was like, all right, we got to get out of here. And so we got back in the car.

And we left. We went and got a fountain soda at the convenience store with that $1. I don't know. It was almost like a numb state. Like, I just didn't have the words to describe what was going on inside of me. By this point in my life, any of that negative stuff that's going on in my head, I find some way to numb it out.

I don't remember well whether it was the next day or the day after that there was an article in the paper. We looked at it and the article actually said he had died from exposure. I don't know if it had to do with the police trying to minimize information while they tried to solve the crime, but I was happy that they were misattributing his death in the paper.

but then also just an immense amount of guilt. Comparing this to all the other stuff I had done, this was something different. It's just evil as it is. And that was the difference. There was no rationalizing that I was just being a free spirit when we took someone else's life.

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That night, we had agreed that we can't tell anybody. This didn't happen. Let's not talk about it anymore.

I did actually talk to a girl about it and we were drinking one night up in the mountains. And other than that, I did my best to compartmentalize that night and just kind of set it aside. It would come up and I would stuff it away, come up and I'd stuff it away.

If I had the means for the amount of drugs and alcohol that I wanted at that time, I would probably be dead. The only thing limiting me from getting to that point of being numb was the fact that I didn't have any money. With John, there were a few nights that winter where the floodgates opened and we would both start crying.

We would just sob uncontrollably for hours until we passed out, just shattered by what we had done and the fact that this was something that we just had to live with. This is who we are now. It was a really dark winter and I continued to break into houses so that I could get whatever I could.

I got my first adult felony that I was caught for was actually breaking into a friend of my parents' house. My stepdad actually came into one of my pretrial hearings and was trying to tell the judge that he shouldn't let me out.

But I ended up with a sweetheart deal because my parents knew the assistant DA for our area at the time. And he got me a plea bargain for unsupervised probation for that residential burglary. I got out of jail, moved down to Florida with my mom and her boyfriend. I think about that time and just like how oblivious I was to the world around me.

I would use drugs with my mom and her boyfriend, started waiting tables and making a lot of money, and I discovered crack. That was kind of my cure for my alcoholism, was to smoke crack. For almost a year straight, I was working seven doubles a week, waiting tables, lunch and dinner.

make a bunch of cash. We'd be like, we're going to go out over here to the bar, have a couple of drinks. And in my head, I'm like, I'm just going to have a couple of drinks. And then I'm going to take this cash and tomorrow morning, buy some groceries for my mom. Or I was staying in like a little tiny trailer for a while, like I'm going to pay my rent. But I would get a couple of drinks in me and I'm like, man, I need some crack.

And I would go and I would spend all of my money on crack. I'd get some measure of sleep, sometimes none. And I would show up and I would wait tables for a lunch and a dinner and then do the whole thing over again. It's not a sustainable practice. Couldn't keep a job. Couldn't keep a place of my own. Ended up back at my mom's. And she said, "I can't deal with this anymore. You can't come live with me."

I went to my first rehab at 22. It was a 28-day program. Got done with that rehab, went to a sober house, started cooking in a restaurant, and things are going fine. Two paychecks in, I was riding my little bicycle from cashing my check, and I see this guy on the street. He's like, what are you looking for, man? And I was like, I don't know. You got some crack?

Ended up in a hotel room, spent my entire paycheck. And the next day I went through all that and I ended up back at the detox at that same rehab. I got a little bit into 12-step recovery as much as a 22-year-old can. I got a job telemarketing, was doing some meetings. I had like a sponsor.

One day, I got back to the sober house and one of the managers there was like, "You got a message here from a detective out in New Mexico." Immediately, I called that friend of mine, John. I got this message from this detective, what's going on? He said, "I don't know what you're talking about," and he hung up. I called my stepdad and I called around. I was like, "I don't know what to do." And they're like, "Well, call him and tell him you don't know anything." I'm like, "Okay."

I called him. I said, I don't know anything. I don't know what's going on. A couple of days later, I was at my little telemarketing job. I was on a call, and I looked up, and there's these two cops there. And I put up my hand with my finger pointed up, like, hold on just a minute. And they grabbed that hand and yanked me out of the little cubicle. Patrick Hibbard, you're under arrest for murder. There was almost a sense of relief.

The secret I'd been carrying with me for so long was finally out there.

The girl I had talked to about that night when we killed that guy, I talked to her later on when we were staying with the hippies up in the mountains. She ended up talking about it with her boyfriend, who ended up getting in a whole bunch of trouble for other things and started trying to talk his way out of it by telling the police as much information about different crimes as he could. And so that's how they had found out.

Turns out that that friend of mine, John, the reason that he hung up on me was he was already giving statements to the police. And then the other guy that was there, he had also given some statements. They took me to the county jail. There was still a sense of being somewhat disconnected from reality.

I hadn't fully kind of gotten back into my body. I hadn't had that much recovery at that point. It was probably about nine or ten months from the time when I went through detox. There was still this dissociation, this compartmentalization that would happen. There was underneath a little sense of relief. There was also the shock of this was my reality right now.

After about a year of the legal process, me and the other guy, John, ended up with a second-degree murder plea bargain. At the time, it was a maximum of nine years. Also, at the time, New Mexico was giving 50% good time. So it didn't seem like that bad of a deal.

After I signed the plea bargain, they do this pre-sentence report and a probation officer does like an investigation of the crime and the victims and the victim's family. And they do an investigation of the person who signed the plea bargain. This probation officer did an interview with me. He asked a bunch of questions about my education and my upbringing. At the end, he asked me, "Do you have anything to say?"

And I said, well, yeah, I'm not an animal. This death really affected me. I told them about how awful it was for that whole winter and how this has been something that has just been with me this whole time, and it's really bothered me. Rightly so, that probation officer wrote in the pre-sentence report that Patrick Hibbard seems to be more concerned with how this death impacts him than the fact that somebody died.

That was kind of the definition of my focus. Something that had changed while I was in jail for that year is I got this sense of entitlement. Well, if this is what my life is like, then why would I do recovery? I'm in jail. Life sucks. There's just no way to avoid this pain except for getting as many chemicals as I could.

Even in jail, we would get some stuff smuggled in or we would make hooch. The nurse came in for med call twice a day. I would ask for cold medicine that I had a cold every single time she came in and I would save it up for three, four days or a week and I would just take all of that. I remember there was lidocaine that I got for tooth pain and I saw that the lidocaine had alcohol content in it, so I ate it.

Again, back to this sort of oblivious state, narrowly focused on myself and what's going on inside my head. One of my character defects is trying to fit in. One of my biggest fears I've come to find out after years of work is that people aren't going to like me, that people aren't going to appreciate me. And so I tend to do my best

to try and fit in with the culture that I'm around. Even in jail, I did my best to be that machismo tough guy trying to come across as just another tough guy. As I was in jail going through the process, the legal process for this case, there was kind of a sense of resignation and acceptance of like, this is who I am. I'm a bad person.

Recovery has to do with self-awareness, trying to do the right thing. And I'm like, I don't want any of that shit. This is who I am now. I'm an addict. I'm a bad person. This is my life. This is how I'm going to be. I had let go of the idea that I was a good person up to a point. That point being, I still had that moral compass that gave me so much guilt for actually killing this guy.

That was still there, but I would fight. I had learned that one of the ways that you make sure other people don't mess with you is you show that you're willing to be violent. Now I have one of the worst rap sheets you can possibly get with a murder on my record and integrating myself into the culture of incarceration. That's now my identity and now I have kind of a place where I do belong.

I remember going into sentencing and still having, for some reason, this hope that the judge would somehow sentence me to life. My lawyer prepped me for the sentencing hearing and what a judge looks for is that you're remorseful. Our strategy to avoid admitting full guilt was I had him convinced that I was just there.

I didn't take any part in the beating. I tried to like mitigate my role, tried to admit just enough of it so that I seem like I'm being honest, but then carved myself out of the actual act of like robbing this guy and beating him.

My lawyer felt like he had pretty good arguments, like, hey, he was 18 at the time. He's still a young guy. There's still a lot that he can do out there. When he went down to Florida, he actually got into recovery, went to a rehab. He's trying to take care of his problems. When I had a chance to say something to the judge, it was really mainly gibberish. None of that made sense.

I do remember that the guy who we killed, his wife was there and she wished that I had gotten more time than the nine years possible. And she looked over at me and she said, I wish you were dead instead of my husband. It was almost surreal that mitigated role that I was trying to portray to my lawyer, to the judge. I'd almost convinced myself of that.

It was just this crazy mix of emotions all coming at the same time. Then the judge said, "The most I can give you is nine years, and I wish I could give you more, but this is all I can, so I'm giving you the full nine years." He also said, "With the good times statutes where they are now, you're going to get out in four and a half years. It's not really that big of a sentence. You'll be fine."

Throughout my life, I've had a different face that I present to different people. There's still this sort of different compartment inside of me that knows the truth. I had just as much guilt as anyone else there, and his wife had every right to be angry with me and to want me dead.

There was a part of me that was like, yeah, this is kind of what I deserve, but really still entitled with the amount that I convinced myself that I didn't actually do any of the violence, that I was just there. I had this sense of like, why are you doing this to me?

just kind of cemented the idea that my life now is prison and I might as well get myself ready for prison and toughen up and be that person. I saw a good amount of violence. I saw somebody get stabbed to death walking down the hall from the chow hall.

But when I'm in that frame of mind, like I was at that point, I'm just oblivious. I'm just like, okay, this is reality. This is my life now. I'm just kind of existing. In prison, the most bang for your buck you're going to get is heroin. That was the most sought after substance.

Since my stepdad was a lawyer, I ended up working in the law library. I had that kind of mind where I could help folks with reconsideration pleas and people will pay you in money and drugs if you can help them with that stuff. That was kind of my hustle while I was in prison.

I also ended up in the rehab in prison, the therapeutic community. The main motivations I had for that was that you could sit around and get paid. You'd get like a little bit extra good time. But mainly it was because the people I was closest with in prison that had access to the most drugs were in the therapeutic community.

For those four years that I was in prison, I kind of honed my skills for trying to fit in. I learned how to act like I was doing this whole recovery thing so that I could convince the authorities or the powers that be that I was a good boy, when in fact I was not, and convince the Department of Corrections or a judge or whomever that I was doing better.

I got out in 2002. I paroled out here in Albuquerque. I had two years parole. By the time that parole was done, I found another cure in meth. That escalated really quickly right at the end of my parole in 2004.

Throughout 2004, I was arrested nine times. I was driving around Albuquerque in a stolen car with a bunch of dope and weapons and scales and fake IDs and fake checks. It was just nuts.

I was trying so hard to get as many chemicals as I possibly could, and it was all intravenous at this point. I would drink a bunch of hard alcohol, but really just anything I could get in a needle to put into my body to make this not hurt, I would do it. In 2004, when I got arrested, they quit letting me out.

It was going to be four years incarceration, five years probation. Signed the plea bargain, went back to the jail, and I got caught with some tobacco. Possession of contraband like tobacco in New Mexico is a fourth degree felony, which by itself carries 18 months. And then you add in the fact that I was a habitual offender at this point.

Then you take the nine cases that I had just signed a plea bargain for. That's a violation of that plea bargain, which brings back all of those nine cases. And if you stack all those nine cases together, plus the new one, plus the habitual offender additions, I had literally just sold my life for a tiny bit of Bugler tobacco. That's kind of what broke me. This is kind of my moment of clarity where things changed.

I had this realization, finally, that I was the reason. I was responsible. You have to be very intentional with having contraband when you're incarcerated.

This was my fault. This wasn't my parents' fault. I was in my 30s, early 30s at this point. I hadn't lived with them for a long, long time. This wasn't society. It wasn't somebody else around me or whatever. This was me. I knew it was wrong. I very intentionally skirted the rules so that I could have tobacco. And for that tobacco, I was going to spend the rest of my life in prison.

I took ownership. This is the real Patrick. This is what I amounted to as a person whose decision-making was so fucked up that he was willing to give away his life to be able to smoke tobacco. My mental state from that point for the rest of that incarceration period was fucked. I can't figure any of this shit out.

As much as I try and convince myself that I'm a smart guy, the utter mountain of evidence at that point was that I was good at getting high and doing crimes to get high and doing time. That was like what I was good at. And that was my fault. I had caused that. I felt 100% hopeless. There was no hope for me.

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February 25th of 2008, I was released from prison. And up to that point, I still had in the back of my mind, and this is how strong my delusions are, that I was going to hustle still. I wasn't going to use drugs or alcohol. I had some time off of that, so I didn't need it. But I know there's different hustles I can do so I can get some money and get things in order that way.

But the night I got out, I was the only person getting released from the prison. The guard was taking me out to the van in the parking lot, walked out of the prison and at the gate. And the guard said, oh, shit, I've got the wrong keys. Wait right here. I'll be right back. And he went back in the prison to get the right keys.

So I turned around and I looked at the prison that I was just being released from. And this clarity came over to me that I don't ever want to go back there. I don't care if, you know, if I'm poor for the rest of my life. I don't care. I'm going back. Even though there was this sense of hopelessness, there was also hope.

Like a rebirth. Like, I can't do it. I can't do it anymore. I don't know what else I'm going to do. You know, I don't know what the future looks like. Not doing that. Not that person. That Patrick that did all those things. I just, I had to leave him. I had to leave him. I had to leave him. That person. I can't, I couldn't do it anymore.

That Patrick that took advantage of every person in his life, it was just so self-absorbed that I was more concerned how that murder impacted my life than the fact that somebody died. Somebody lost their father. Somebody lost their husband. I couldn't handle it. It was building up, but it all came to a head at one moment.

It just baffles me, like, the role that serendipity plays in our lives. If that guard had not picked up the wrong set of keys and had to go back in, would I still be doing it? It seems so small, but it just means so much. I had built that Patrick.

When I said goodbye to that Patrick, the guard took me down to the bus station and I got on the bus and came up to Albuquerque, went to the halfway house. It was just like a kind of a blank slate in this position of, I don't know what the fuck I'm going to do. I don't know who I am. I know I'm not that person. I don't know what to do.

The second day I was out, I went to the Social Security office so I could get a temporary Social Security card. Walked out of that office and I was just lost. I had no idea what to do. And I remember this 12-step club and I knew that if I showed up at this club, I could smoke indoors. It would be warm. We had coffee and I knew I wouldn't get in trouble.

I wouldn't be that Patrick. I showed up to this 12-step club and sat down and smoked cigarettes and drank coffee. And I just felt like, okay, like I wasn't going to hurt anybody. I wasn't going to get in trouble. And I loved that. You know, like I needed that. I needed a safe place. I had been dry. I hadn't consumed anything for a long time. But I was so...

And I had no idea how to do anything. I stayed, it was a four o'clock meeting that I was at, and I stayed, they had a six o'clock. I stayed for that. I remember feeling safe, like accepted. Like I didn't have to do anything to fit in. I didn't have to manipulate anybody, like be a certain person. They accepted me for who I was.

That became my life, doing the 12-step stuff. I started to hear what they were saying. They had been there too. They knew what it was like to feel desperate, hopeless. I really latched on to that. I felt like I belonged.

I went to a lot, a lot of meetings and just listened to what they said and started doing what they said that they did. Some of that seems kind of small and dumb, like right in the morning, like, guys, tell me, tell me, stay sober today. For me, it was like, just help me to not hurt anybody. Help me to be a good person just today.

My day started to look like I'd get up at like 5 o'clock and I'd do the little prayer, catch the bus to my little shitty minimum wage job, and I'd go see my PO. And then I'd go to this 12-step club and stay for the 4 o'clock and 6 o'clock, probably see my sponsor, and then go home and do some writing. And then I would pray and I would go to bed and then I'd get up the next morning and do the same thing.

These things that I did every day, no matter what, I know that they are good. I know that they're not going to hurt anybody. In trying to be that person who was there for me when I showed up, I started to realize that I'm not that fuck-up. I did do some bad things, but it's because I was sick. I'm not a bad person. I can do good things. I am the Patrick who did the awful shit.

I'm the Patrick that helped to kill a person. I'm also the Patrick who can be loving and accepting of every single person who comes into 12-step rooms. Try and use that experience of all the damage that I caused, try and turn that toward the good so that I can be more of service.

In 12-step recovery, there's an amends process where we try and make amends for the things that we've done in the past. We try and make it right. In certain cases like mine, there's literally nothing I can do to make it right. We killed that guy.

There's nothing I can do. But what I can do is try and help other people. I can try and be the exact opposite of that person. Not only is that potential for violence, the potential for each of us to kill somebody within every person, but that potential to save a life is also in all of us.

We're all a mess. We all have really good and really bad stuff, and most of it's in between. And what I can do is feed that good side of me and try and do the best I can to save as many lives as possible. That's the best I can do for men's.

Being that person, that Patrick that holds his hand out for people coming into 12-step rooms, that Patrick that puts the damn carts away at the grocery store. I like that guy. I'm okay with that guy. He deserves to live. I was on the bus one day going from my POs to the 12-step club. And I remember just coming to the realization that I felt okay. I didn't feel separate.

or different or alone. I felt like I had purpose. I knew what it felt like to be okay. After about nine months from when I got out and I went back to college, I had to start remedial math so I could get up to college level. But because I'd done so much time and I read a lot while I was locked up, I went to English 102 instead of 101.

When I'm not out there running and gunning, I'm a really good student. It just was really rewarding. Loved my studies and was the graduation speaker for my MBA class in 2014. At the time, I had met with who's now my spouse. She moved to Florida. She got into graduate school down there. And so I moved down to Florida after my graduation.

but I could not get a job to save my life. I had all of the education, the internships that I did, all of that effort did not seem to overcome my criminal record. We ended up pregnant, and so I went back to telemarketing and was doing basically the same thing that I had done, and I hated it. And we had this amazing kid, this amazing baby boy,

Ended up getting connected with the director of a doctoral program at the university. I just let it all out. I'm like, here's all of my, you know, where I come from, you know, all that I've done so far. And I feel like I can do more. And he's like, yeah, I agree. Let me walk you through the process of what it looks like to apply for a doctoral program.

I applied for a couple of places, and when I got accepted, the acceptance letter, it said that they accepted 17% of applicants. And then I find out as I start classes in this doctoral program that it's ranked number one for the type of studies that they do. I had no idea. I went through the doctoral process. My wife got a position in academia.

And a friend of mine sent me this call out for a postdoctoral position that had to do with researching recovery support services. And they were specifically looking for a researcher with lived experience with the criminal legal system and or recovery from substance use. Like they had just built the position for me. I got into this postdoc position.

And I started to make it part of my professional identity. Like it says on the website now, Patrick Hibbard is a formerly incarcerated scholar in long-term recovery. It's a part of my professional identity.

My studies, the way they helped me to use my lived experience as something to inform the research is, for one thing, I couldn't make the right decisions and not end up hurting people until I dealt with my substance use issues and the underlying reasons why I use substances. Until I addressed that, I wasn't able to stay out of the criminal legal system.

Where I work now is focused on public health and treatment services and recovery support services. A big part of what I try and study now is how we can help people that get involved in the criminal legal system to find the recovery that they need or the services that they need, whatever the issues might be.

I've been able to take this experience, these awful things that I've done, and try to turn it into something that can actually benefit the world. Trying to use that to help those coming after me. Maybe help somebody who would end up in the same situation where all of their rage comes out and they hurt somebody. Maybe prevent that.

The most challenging part for me was just getting out of my own head. One of the many delusions that I've made myself suffer over the many years is that I got this. I'm really grateful for finally the realization that on my own, I don't got shit. What I got is I hurt people and end up in jail and prison.

It was so hard to get out of the cycle of my own thoughts, that I was a piece of shit, that the only way to get anything out of life is manipulate, lie, cheat, and steal. Getting out of my own sort of self-fulfilling loop in my head took the breaking away

when I had to say goodbye to that Patrick, like that is what it took for me to be convinced that I don't have shit figured out. You know, I don't know what I'm doing.

realizing that on my own, I really can't accomplish much. But within this context, when I try to be a creative, compassionate, loving force, whether it's in recovery or in my job or in the world or with my son, I can contribute to this greater whole. The difference between that and that guy that was just stuck inside his own head is just worlds apart.

I know there's people out there who are feeling like I felt alone and hopeless, and I really hope that they can find the belonging and the path that I was able to find. Also for folks who have loved ones who just don't get it. Why do you keep doing this to yourself? Why do you keep going back to those substances and just causing so much harm?

There is hope, and they're not bad people. They're just really sick. Finally, for all those folks who don't have these issues themselves, they don't have loved ones, maybe a little bit of understanding that we all are just struggling, and we're all trying to do the best we can with what we have. Judgment and alienation and stigma, that's not going to help anybody.

Every single one of us, we all have that same capacity for violence. We have that same capacity for love. Today's episode featured Patrick Hibbard. If you'd like to contact Patrick, please consult the show notes for his email address. From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

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