Carl Lickers was only a month and a half out of jail before he was back behind bars, facing a longer sentence on gun charges.
That was two years ago.
Lickers was in a bad place but he'd been there a long time already, even before he ran off, an angry 12-year-old fleeing his Penticton foster home and the only mother he'd ever known.
Fourteen years later, the 26-year-old still calls the dead woman mom.
The two were estranged and when he got out jail in March 2014, it took some time to learn she was gone.
But by then he was already back in the old business, dealing dope and making good money and spending it on heroin, methamphetamine or "whatever" drug he could get.
Still, the news changed him.
He got reckless.
"I went from just having guns to not caring about anything in the world and doing a lot of drugs and eventually I was travelling around town with guns and just robbing people."
Eventually someone told the police and he was arrested, later serving two years on a restricted prohibited firearm charge, he says. Released in January of this year, Lickers has another 20 months of probation to go.
His biological parents left him at four, saying they would come back, but they never did.
As the years went by, he grew violent with his foster parents, tried to burn the house down, hit his dad with a hammer.
"They tried to love as much as they could but when you're not willing to be loved and you don't love yourself, you can't let another love you and it's hard," Lickers says.
For the first time, he thinks he's in a place where, if his mom were here, he'd see pride in her eyes.
At the end of April, Lickers graduated as one of 13 former inmates to take part in a pilot reintegration training program at the College of New Caledonia.
A week after that, a local man who gives inmates a second chance hired him to drywall. It doesn't require the tickets he earned, but Lickers is grateful for the job. Just this week, he was promoted to a four-year apprenticeship which will require more schooling.
He's been working six days a week, averaging 58 hours and while it can be a struggle, he says "it's legal living and it's good."
Rehabilitation, for him, also means attending nightly Alcoholic Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings, going to sweat lodges, praying.
While the 16-week course has given him something to put on a blank resume, he says the six months before release was the turning point. He got clean - still hard, as drugs were easy to find in jail - and he met a friend who was headed to CNC.
"I grew up. I got tired of coming to jail and losing everything... My ego went away, my mom died and I stopped caring about being a gangster and cared more about living life and being truly happy and doing what she wanted me to do," he says.
"I sobered up and the reality kicked in... I could do so much more with my life and look what I'm doing."
Getting away from his life in Penticton and having a purpose in Prince George through the program made the difference.
Without it, "I would have been stuck back in the same circle," Lickers predicts.
He's been there before. Get out, go on welfare. Can't find a place to stay? Get shacked up with friends, often junkies or dealers.
"You don't stay with a dope dealer expecting to change," he says. "They throw you money, and you earn that money."
Not this time.
"I've tried to change before, it's this course that's helped me," he says. If John Howard Society hadn't had a room ready and a safe place to sleep, he never would have taken the bus north.
"It was away from people that I knew, it was a new setting, new scene."
The Reintegration Industry Readiness Training Program is a partnership with the college and Correctional Services Canada.
It was funded by the Industry Training Authority with a goal of giving better job training and recognized certificates to former inmates.
The funding also created two spots for graduates to take one of CNC's Foundation Trades Training programs.
"The setting, it taught me a lot about how to behave around different individuals," Lickers says, adding it was hard work and three others left the program in the first month.
He hadn't been in a formal classroom since he dropped out in Grade 9.
He's one course away from a Dogwood Diploma after passing courses in jail, and now he has about 20 tickets to his name. While the program's focus is mainly on parolees - or those in the federal system - Lickers was given the chance to join and complete a number of courses, including occupational first aid, rigging and lifting, scaffold awareness and inspection, and fall protection.
"I had nothing on my resume, absolutely nothing. I had part-time jobs here and there, but being that I was happier making quick short money doing illegal activity."
Jean-Paul Lorieau, Correctional Services Canada spokesman said the program will help offenders get jobs.
"Employment training supports offenders during their reintegration back into the community," said Lorieau in a press release.
Correctional Service Canada has said finding partners to give parolees employment and training opportunities is a priority.
"Almost all offenders interviewed reported that their biggest challenge was finding a job while having a criminal record, particularly as employers are increasingly asking for a criminal record check prior to hiring," said a 2014 report called Overcoming Barriers to Reintegration.
Some call jail a revolving door; Lickers calls it a circle. He spent more than four years of his life behind bars for lesser offences.
It's difficult to find data on reoffending rates for Canada's inmates, though most estimates are high. In December 2014, B.C.'s parliamentary secretary for corrections prepared a report looking at the 18,926 people sentenced in 2012 and their history with the province's jail system.
"In a 10-year period, almost two-thirds of those who enter our correctional system will return at least once, and a quarter will return at least five times," Liberal MLA Laurie Throness wrote, noting many of the repeat convictions were for breaching conditions of a person's probation.
The CNC course kept Lickers from becoming one of those statistics right away, calling it "the best thing that's ever happened to me."
"It's a circle, the government doesn't help. There should be more things like this program but there aren't."
