For Christmas, Michael Franklin Barnhouse received a 20-year sentence at the Maryland Correctional Training Center in Hagerstown.
On Wednesday, the 28-year-old former crack and heroin addict gave students from two Baltimore County elementary schools a graphic picture of the life that landed him in jail.
"My mother won't talk to me, my father won't have anything to do with me and I've lost my 6-year-old son because of my drug addiction," said Barnhouse, now serving eight years for committing three robberies in October. "I have a miserable life. I've been living as an addict for close to 15 years of my life and I'm just sick of the way I've been living.
"I just wish that I knew what I know now when I was your age," he added. "Maybe I wouldn't be here today."
Barnhouse and three other inmates told 47 students from Scotts Branch and Owings Mills elementary schools and many of their parents about the vicious cycle of drug addiction and how it led them to time in prison. Their talk, at the Police Academy in Dundalk, came as the result of a letter Barnhouse sent in December to a Garrison precinct patrolman, asking for permission to help students.
"I was looking out my window and a tear came into my eye and I thought about my family, my kids and my niece," Barnhouse said. "That's when I realized I needed to get out there and talk to these kids so they wouldn't end up like me."
The students were riveted by the stories of Barnhouse and other inmates.
"I'd sell anything I had to get high or I'd take whatever you had and sell it to get high," said Carl Rafferty, 23, of White Hall, a crack addict who has nine months left on a burglary sentence.
Then he pointed to silver leg irons around his ankles. "If you remember one thing, remember these -- because you don't want to bear them," he said.
Students gasped when Bettina Laing, 26, a crack addict from Essex, told them she first used drugs at 11 -- the average age of her audience. They shook their heads in sympathy when she described the loss of a 4-year-old daughter to foster care because of her drug binges and conviction for dealing crack.
"Besides the materialistic things that you lose, you also lose your self-respect," said Laing, who is nearing the end of a five-year sentence. "And in my case, I lost my daughter. It's a hard life and you don't want to have to go through it."
"There are so many things that go on in [jail] that are inhuman," said Barnhouse, who was first arrested at 13. "Drugs will only get you in trouble. There's nothing you haven't been through that I haven't been through. I can relate to all the problems that a young child can go through to get involved in drugs and I'm just trying to tell you that it's not worth it."
The inmates also shared their hopes and dreams. Laing wants to become a drug counselor. Rafferty wants to study cosmetology. Barnhouse wants to counsel children. For some youngsters, the stories were signs of hope. But for others, they were warnings.
"It made me feel good because I know they won't do what they did again when they get out of jail," said Keon Crowell, 10. "A lot of what they said scared me to think that I might end up like them."
The program was an eye-opener for parents as well as their children.
"It's a very good experience for myself and for my son," said Montrae Y. Mercer of Owings Mills, who took the day off from work to join her 10-year-old son, Damion. "I'm a single mother raising three boys and I just wish my two other boys could have been here to learn from this."