If you’ve been following my Heart-Strong Adventure for a while, you know Sam Harris.
You know he spent 24 years, 8 months, and 10 hours in prison. You know he came home on July 1, 2024 and immediately started working to help others do the same. You know he co-founded the Re-Entry & Recovery Alliance. You know he goes back into the facility where he was incarcerated and facilitates the I OWE MORE group, a program he started from scratch while still serving his sentence.
You may have read my reflections on our lunch together1 or my visit to Lawrenceville2, where Sam brought me inside a prison for the first time.
So, when I sat down with him in my brother-in-law’s backyard in Virginia Beach for a Campfire Conversation, I didn’t want to start where we always start. I wanted to go deeper.
This past fall, we built a fire, talked about love, fear, and what it means to come home after 25 years. What came out was one of the most honest explorations I’ve had of what love actually looks like when everything else has been stripped away.
The fire helped.
What Love Looks Like When It’s Gone
There’s something about sitting around actual fire that changes a conversation. The smoke doesn’t care where you sit. It finds you anyway. The crackle fills the silence in a way that makes silence feel okay. And somehow, the things that are hard to say in a restaurant or on a phone call become a little easier to let out.
Sam started talking about love. The kind of love that’s so ordinary you don’t notice it until it’s gone.
“You really don’t know something until something’s taken away. I remember being married when I went to prison and losing everything. How bad you miss that word. I love you.”
He went in during November 1999. His release date said May 2052. He would have been 80 years old.
“You get in prison, you’re facing that release date,” he said. “Mama gonna tell you she loves you. All my sisters. But that’s a certain kind of love. And when you miss that part there. And then the friend love, the friends that you had out here, most of them are gone.”
Then he told me about a man he’d met inside. Had to be 2003 or 2004, he said. A mail call. Someone announced this man’s name. And the man said no.
“He wouldn’t go get the mail. ‘Cause he had been locked down so long. He had never got mail before. He said, ‘No, that ain’t for me.’ He had been down 20 something years.”
Sam let that land.
“Could I ever get to that point where nobody knows me?”
Long story short, it turned out to be a long-lost niece who had tracked the man down. Sam’s face shifted when he told me.
“Look at love. His niece. Never met. But to know that you meet people like that in a prison. That now you have to go in this environment and recreate this thing called love.”
Coming Home to More Anger Than He Left Behind
Here’s the thing about Sam that I keep coming back to.
He spent 25 years in one of the most fear-based environments imaginable. And when he came home, he expected the outside world to feel different. Lighter. More open.
What he found surprised him.
“When I came home, one of the worst things that I deal with now is the amount of hatred and anger in the world. And I am like, why are people so mad out here?”
Sam was a time capsule. He went in during November 1999 and came out 25 years later. And the first major change he noticed wasn’t the technology. It wasn’t the kiosks or the smartphones. It was the anger and fear.
There was more of it out here than there had been in there.
I’ve been sitting with that ever since he said it.
Love in Action
Sam didn’t come home and rest. He came home and got to work.
He’s now a peer navigator with the Suffolk Public Defender’s Office, sitting with people who are where he used to be, not just incarcerated, but desperate. He described one man who was being belligerent in the courthouse. The attorney walked out. Sam sat down.
“I said, look, man. They’re trying to help you avoid what I just went through. He said, ‘I know your story.’ And him and I sat there and had a dialogue for about 20 minutes. Did he change right then? I don’t know. But I know his demeanor came down. And I believe he saw someone who cared. To stop and talk to him.”
He also has a proposal that he’s been bringing to anyone who will listen. He calls it the front door policy.
“I remember November ‘99. I remember walking the streets of Suffolk. I remember one night calling 911. The lady’s like, what’s your emergency? Like, I just need help. Because I was addicted to drugs and just walking around. She said, I don’t know if we can help you.”
He paused.
“Well, if I throw a rock through this McDonald’s, now you come and lock me up and put me in jail.”
He isn’t telling that story to excuse what happened. He’s telling it because he drives past people on the street now and wonders. Are they thinking what I thought in ‘99?
His proposal is simple. When someone shows up at the court in crisis, before a crime happens, not after, somebody walks them through the front door and gets them help.
“I think you can avoid a lot of guys going through the bottom. Imagine saving some lives doing that.”
The Economics of It
I want to talk about the economics for a minute. Because Sam did, and it stuck with me.
The state spent roughly $45,000 a year to incarcerate him. Twenty-five years. Meanwhile, he was earning between $.27 and $.45 an hour working inside. On a good month, he made about $52.
Deodorant cost $2.45.
“Deodorant is 5% of my monthly income. Now equate it to the street. You paying $400 for deodorant. That’s what we’re doing. Would you pay $400 for a bar of deodorant out here?”
And then there’s the furniture. Sam worked for Virginia Correction Enterprises, a prison labor program that manufactured furniture for state agencies and universities. A friend of his used AutoCAD software to design it. One day they found a newspaper. A professional draftsman in the early 2000s was making $75,000 to $80,000 a year.
“These companies were losing bids because he’s paying him $.80, and this company’s paying the guy $80,000. But they’ll let me use that same computer to do that. But it won’t teach me how to clock in and out when I go to McDonald’s.”
He brought this to a parole board member once. Laid out the numbers. 200 men go up for parole in a month. Two or three get out. The state spent $45,000 per person to rehabilitate them. And almost none of them are ready.
“Your car breaks down. You take it to the shop. He keeps it three weeks, gives it back. You drive it a few days. It breaks again. How many times you take your car back to him? It’s not gonna happen. So why are we giving the state all this money to rehabilitate people? In the business world, we called that malpractice.”
The Senator
For years inside, Sam watched the Virginia General Assembly during session. Hours a day, third week of January through March. He watched bills come up. He watched one senator in particular. Ex-military, very vocal, not interested in early release for people like Sam.
Sam wanted to meet him.
When Sam came home, he got his chance. Last year. Shook his hand. Talked a little.
“I didn’t even say nothing negative or bring up how I felt about a comment he had made. I just wanted to show him. And I said, all I’m saying is, you just congratulated me on coming home, and there’s plenty more of me back there.”
Someone asked Sam later if he thought it got through.
“It may be 15 years down the road, we don’t know. A seed may be planted.”
That’s leading with love. Not agreeing. Not forgiving on a timeline. Not pretending the harm didn’t happen. Just showing up. Planting a seed. Letting go of the outcome.
The Fire Sam Is Tending
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Sam about the fires we need to tend. In ourselves. In community. He talked about the I OWE MORE group. How it started one night when he looked out his window and watched men dying in an overdose epidemic. “What can we do to help these guys?” He talked about 80 men gathering in a room without staff present because there are conversations you can’t have when you’re being watched. He talked about what his co-founder carried in those first two months, losing his mother and his son, and having nowhere to put it.
“We found out,” Sam said, “that’s a hard thing for men to do. Is to sit and just talk.”
That’s the fire Sam is tending.
He came home. He found more anger out here than he left behind in there. And instead of adding to it, he keeps going back through the front gate, and he sits with men, and he talks.
Why This Matters
This conversation is part of my Heart-Strong Adventure, a year-long exploration of where love and fear show up in our world, especially in the lives of men.
We build systems around fear and then wonder why men come out more afraid than when they went in. Sam spent 25 years inside one of the most fear-based environments we’ve created. And the first thing he noticed when he came home wasn’t the technology. It was that the world out here had more anger in it than the world in there. That observation should stop us cold.
What Sam is doing now isn’t just remarkable because of what he survived. It’s remarkable because of what he chose on the other side of it. Peer navigation. Front door policy. Going back through the gate to sit with men who have nowhere else to put it. That’s not recovery. That’s love in practice.
Sam’s story is one of the most direct answers I’ve found to the question I keep asking. What does it actually look like when a man leads with love? Not in theory. In practice. Every day.
If Sam’s story sparked something in you, I’d love to hear about it. And if someone comes to mind who might need to hear this, please share it with them.
Because the stories we tell each other around the fire have always been how we change.
Learn more about the Heart-Strong Adventure: adventure.heart-strong.org
Learn more about Sam’s work: rraalliance.com
