Evaristo Salas Jr.

I said, look, how about this?

I'll buy the car from you once I make enough money to do that.

Because I need to be responsible for myself for 20,

Seven years, the state has basically handed me meals, and I don't like that.

If they had a program where they said, okay, well, we're not going to provide you with much, the basics, but you have to work for everything else.

Guess what?

I'm going to get up every day.

I'm going to work for that because there's honor in that.

There's a certain amount of appreciation when you've gone out there and you've earned that money rather than somebody just coming up to you and saying, here you go.

For me, I mean, some people, they enjoy the fact that they don't got to do something.

Some of them sleep all day, and they're not worried about their future.

But these are the guys that go out, come back, you know, within a month or two.

You know, some of these guys have been out seven different times and are back.

And it's like prison is not my life, you know.

The maximum amount you make in a correctional industry job is $0.85 an hour.

So, well, they give you $1.70 an hour, but then they take half of whatever you take on, you know...

what they call a cost of incarceration, what they put 10% away to your savings and that kind of stuff.

That's a good practice.

But it's, at the most, I made every month was $120.

What I did is I budgeted that.