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A Chattanooga therapist solicits notes from prisoners for book warning at-risk teenagers

By: Clint Cooper
(Contact)

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Monique Holeyfield

A Chattanooga therapist is hoping people who have “been there and done that” will have an influence on teenagers who think the street is the best place to learn about life.

Monique Holeyfield, a case manager and child development specialist at Joe Johnson Mental Health Center, has seen clients fall into the juvenile detention system and even jail. If more people knew what awaited them there, she reasoned, maybe they would seek to avoid it.

Too often, she said, “by the time they figure it all out, they’re already in jail.”

“Letters From Jail,” a recently published book written by Ms. Holeyfield, includes 31 letters from young people incarcerated around the country. Six of the letters are from people in the Hamilton County Jail.

Suzette Francis, a Signal Mountain resident who is in a writers group with Ms. Holeyfield, said she was present when her friend conceptualized her book and now has read it.

“It’s a very timely work, considering the fact we have so many young people going into prison at a rate higher than ever,” she said. “It’s a warning book and a book of regret and a book of optimism as well.”

Much of the advice is not new — stay in school, follow the advice of people who know better, jail is no place for anybody — but it’s coming directly from the hands of people doing time.

“I want them to know the reality of it,” said Ms. Holeyfield, 49.

She’s seen the dark side of life herself.

An acknowledged crack cocaine addict for 16 years, Ms. Holeyfield now has 14 years of recovery, an education and a job in the recovery field.

“I’ve done some treacherous things,” she said. “I’ve stolen money from my job (prior to her recovery), but I never ended up in jail. If I stayed out any longer, (jail is) probably where I would have been. It was very possible.”

Just short of getting to the point of being homeless, Ms. Holeyfield said she got into recovery.

Sometimes that fact helps her get through to her clients.

“When they realize I have been in their shoes,” Ms. Holeyfield said, “I can see the relief come over their faces.”

Still, though, she wanted young people to have an idea what else they could face.

Responses to her solicitation came from inmates in notorious state prisons such as San Quentin in California and Attica in New York.

Ms. Holeyfield’s favorite letter came in the form of a poem from a San Quentin death row prisoner, who talked about having nothing but time, but that time was running out and that another day was just another day closer to the end.

One letter from a woman lamented that jail caused her to lose her children, and one from a man told of how he felt responsible because some of his children had been in the same jail he was in.

A letter from a woman in the Hamilton County Jail detailed what it was like being raised on the streets of Chattanooga.

Nearly all of them, Ms. Holeyfield said, expressed gratitude to be part of the book, which is written in workbook form and has room for journal responses.

She hopes high school students, especially from the Hamilton County Schools, will be interested in examining it and learning from her mistakes and those of others. She realized just in time, she said, that there was a better life than the one she was living but that it would take hard work to get there.

Life on the streets, Ms. Holeyfield said, “is a comfortable zone,” although those living it “get this idea, ‘I’m in the hole, and I can’t climb out.’”

However, she said, there is something worse. And she’s got the letters to prove it.

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