My Story of Doing Time on the Other Side of the Bars by Ivan Godfrey

Author:Ivan Godfrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-63710-533-7
Published: 2021-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

A Thirty-Seven-Year-Old Freshman Chasing Paper

I began to think about returning to college. I attended Mercy College directly after high school, and that turned out to be a disaster. At the time, little did I know that I was too immature for college. I was never exposed to discussions about the challenges of undergraduate studies and what that entailed.

No one in my family had ever attended college before my sister and I. We started at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, NY together because a recruiter named Mrs. Carlyle from Harlem convinced her that Mercy was the place to go. I was planning (if that’s what you call it) on attending Lehman College in the Bronx but gave in to my sister’s repeated accounts of how great it would be for both of us to attend Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, New York.

Unfortunately for me while at Mercy College, I did everything but attend my classes with any degree of regularity because in college (I was never prepared and shouldn’t have been there), no one cares if you don’t attend classes, and that practice of cutting classes unremarkably reflected on my transcript. I left Mercy College unsuccessfully in 1977 after two years, started looking for employment, and wound up at the aforementioned New York City law firm working in the mail room.

After a lot of consideration, I decided it was a good idea to attend John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. My first day returning to college was a disaster. I was under the distinct impression that having worked as a correction officer in law enforcement, this school would be the perfect fit, a walk in the park for me. Imagine, if you will, I’m a correction officer. It is 1993, and I’m thirty-seven years old in a classroom full of eighteen- to twenty-year-old kids who are wearing do-rags on their heads and pants down almost to their knees with their underwear and backside showing. To make matters worse, the university was playing the latest rap and hip-hop music over the university’s intercom system.

I went home that day thoroughly frustrated and truly disappointed about my plans for getting through college in that environment. I thought about another correction officer friend and colleague, Ronald Bolton, who had a college degree and had graduated from John Jay.

I called Ronald, and I expressed my frustration with my first day of class. I told him point-blank, “I can’t do this with all these kids running around here. What am I going to do?”

He said, “Godfrey, you don’t need to go to John Jay. I want you to call this number tomorrow. Ask for Jack Gervan and tell him I spoke with you about attending college.”

This is where I learned at the ripe age of thirty-seven years old that it’s not what you know. It’s who you know that really matters. Mr. Gervan, as I discovered, is a powerful man in a New York City Organized Labor Union.

I called the number and asked for him by name.

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