Former inmate Pretty Rich seeks opportunity for reform

Colin Coyle, a 31-year-old ex-convict who spent eight years in prison for armed robbery, is begging for a second chance at life on the straight and narrow path.

Since his release from prison on September 29, 2021, he has been finding it difficult to gain employment.

“I came out and I'm out here seeking and I realise that everybody nuh want nobody weh go a prison a dem workplace because mi check a lot of places,” a dejected Coyle told The Gleaner as he pleaded for help to make a fresh start.

“Downtown, I've been there trying to seek work. I go Half-Way Tree because mi serious when mi seh mi want a change,” he explained.

The disappointment has made him resort to doing tattoos with a machine donated to him, but even that has not been sustainable.

“Tattoo [business] very slow because a really walk mi affi walk and find out if anybody want tattoo because mi is an artist. Mi need a job,” said Coyle, who developed rapping skills in prison and goes by the moniker Pretty Rich.

Before exiting the doors of the Tower Street Adult Correctional Centre nearly seven months ago, he was encouraged to apply to the Ministry of Labour and Social Security for a rehabilitation assistance grant, which provides an opportunity for individuals or families to undertake income-generating projects to improve their economic status. It provides assistance to establish small projects or boost existing projects such as haberdashery, trading, etc.

He is banking on hopes of receiving the grant to turn around his fortunes by opening a clothing store in Kingston.

Having submitted invoices to the relevant office at Lockett Avenue in Kingston as he applied for the grant, when he made checks last week on the progress of his application to pay for the stock, he was told that receiving the grant was not a certainty.

Now, he is left in a limbo.

“When mi leave prison, I was told, even before I left, that there is a thing called the rehabilitation [assistance] grant and you'll get this grant when you leave prison to assist you in getting your life back on track, starting a business of some kind,” Coyle said.

“So I was dealing with this from behind the bars. I came out and I went to the probation office and I was trying to get it sorted out. That was last year,” he further explained.

“These people actually tried in every way. The lady that I was talking to, she was telling me that the only thing they could do is to start a farm – a chicken farm or something that has to do with animal rearing. I don't know anything about animals. I've never even hold a live chicken in my hand before, so I tried to ask her [for] other options,” he said.

Coyle told The Gleaner that in 2013, he had committed a crime out of desperation as a vulnerable youth in his inner-city community.

“It's something that I did out of desperation, not because mi have any love fi do nothing wrong or because mi like tek weh people things. None a that. A because of desperation,” he said. “You know how it go when you young and desperate and you a seek and you can't find, and when you do find, a somebody wid a bad influence. Then you end up do things illegal.”

Ran away as a teenager

Losing his mom at the age of two and his dad a year later, the orphaned Coyle was once placed in a residential home operated by a charity.

“While I was there, they realised that I had so much potential and promise, so they wanted for something to become of me, so they sent me to the Alpha Boys' School,” he explained.

He was enrolled at Alpha at six years of age, but ran away as a teenager.

“Alpha wasn't a place that I wanted to stay because it was far from freedom. You actually felt like you were in a boot camp and your moves were always monitored and I even saw a lot of abuse going on there, so I had to leave that place,” Coyle told The Gleaner.

“I was sleeping on the road fi a while and then one day, I walked into a store in Spanish Town and start crying and asked some Christian people to get to my brother for me because he was the only person I knew as family. I remembered clearly where he worked and they called the place and he came and picked me up.”

He was taken in by his brother, whose girlfriend eventually forced him to leave and he was then sent to live with an old lady.

Coyle told The Gleaner that he then became “a yard slave” for her and soon ran away again.

He was again found by his brother, who took him to live with some aunts in Bull Bay, but Coyle said that while there, he was constantly teased about his deceased mother, who they called a whore.

With all the disappointments and not feeling loved, the impressionable youngster started hanging out with criminals, who, at first, showed him a good vibe in Rockfort, then things changed for the worse.

“All they kept doing was giving me the gun. They kept using me whenever they wanted someone to go for something. Whenever a war was going on, we had to bleach in the nights and so,” he told The Gleaner.

Vowing never to turn to the gun again, when asked what he thinks he would have become if he was raised in a nuclear family. A police officer or a soldier, he responded.

“If I should have had a normal life with a mom and a dad, with equal opportunity like everybody or a normal family, I think I would have been something or someone people are proud of because if I had a good family structure or good people who really cared for me, I would do my best to make them proud,” he said.

He is appealing for help to secure a job and despite the constant disappointment, he remains hopeful that he will soon be gainfully employed or receive the grant he desires.

“I don't eat if I don't work. A man like me needs this grant. All mi want a just little help fi get back pan mi foot. A eight years mi do ina prison. I'm always searching and looking for a breakthrough. That a di story a my life,” he said.

ainsworth.morris@gleanerjm.com

How you can help

Persons interested in helping Colin Coyle to get a steady job can contact him at 876-402-3346.