Even at this relatively early stage, Dad was becoming seriously concerned about where Reggie was heading. The stealing, drugs and other trouble were beginning to suggest a trajectory that Dad feared would eventually end with Reggie being arrested and sent to prison.

So he tried something different.

Dad arranged for a man who had spent time in Dorchester Penitentiary in New Brunswick to come to our house and talk to Reggie about what prison was really like. This was a decade or more before the TV show, “Scared Straight”, so my father had a good sense on how to scare kids into going straight.

I remember them sitting around our kitchen table. The man was enormous—about six-foot-six—and he told Reggie stories about the violence and intimidation he had witnessed in prison.

My brothers and I had been incredibly naive about prison. We had no understanding that vulnerable inmates could be threatened, sexually assaulted or coerced into sexual relationships. I don’t believe Reggie understood that either.

The former inmate wanted to make sure he did.

One of the stories I overheard has stayed with me ever since. He explained that physical size didn’t necessarily protect someone. He described seeing a large, well-built inmate—perhaps six-foot-three—being forced into a closet with a knife held to his neck and sexually assaulted.

I only heard part of the conversation.

It scared me.

Did It Scare Reggie?

I don’t know.

I never heard Reggie talk about that conversation afterward, and I don’t want to pretend to know what he thought about it. Perhaps it frightened him. Perhaps he dismissed it. Perhaps, like so many warnings he received during those years, the consequences being described still seemed too distant to be real.

What I do know is that his behaviour did not substantially change. Before long, he was back to the same things that had caused Dad to arrange the conversation in the first place.

Looking back, the episode says as much about our father as it does about Reggie. Dad could see a destination he desperately wanted his son to avoid. He tried to put someone across the kitchen table from Reggie who had already been there and could tell him, firsthand, what that destination might look like.

Years later, Reggie would eventually experience incarceration for himself.