Imagine waking up to darkness, eyes open, surrounded by stillness, musty air, and suffocating closeness. Sound? None, but breath and the rustle of silken fabric. You can’t move your arms or legs. Restrained? Lack of room? Dead? Maybe that’s it. My arms and legs are dead. Or I’m dead? Maybe. No, I’m dreaming. That’s it. Maybe I’m dreaming. Emotions swell, but panic is oddly absent. Just as oddly, strangely, you feel safe—safe but not free. Trapped, still a prisoner of this something you can’t quite grasp. “It’s a dream,” you think. That has to be it. Yet it’s far too real to be unreal. Or is it too unreal to be real? Yet, it IS real, and now you realize, “This is MY LIFE; this is MY REALITY.”You can handle this, you say to yourself. Five years in prison, now five years of probation for good behavior in prison. You’ve done nothing illegal, bad, awful, disgusting, or harmful to another person during five dark years of probation. You’ve done everything they asked you to do, hoping to escape the darkness that restricts, constricts, limits, and threatens to emotionally suffocate you. But somehow they find a way to suck you back into their stultifying darkness. “You didn’t do this right. You didn’t do that right. No, you didn’t commit a crime, you just didn’t think the way we want you to think, act the way we want you to act, suffer as much as we think you should suffer.”You may not have had a nightmare like this. Still, most of us have experienced some level of oppressive hopelessness, surrounded by the impossibility of escape, until we finally wake to the light of freedom shining on our faces. Whatever your nightmare, imagine spending the rest of your life trapped in that nightmare, never waking to life-giving light. A nightmare trapped in a coffin that you are shoved back into with the top slammed shut on you again and again. That’s what it is like to be a convicted sex offender: endless, circuitous punishment that ostracizes, marginalizes, and dehumanizes.After a convicted sex offender serves his prison time, he must then endure probation with quarterly polygraph examinations laced with questions that make it impossible not to tell the truth about obeying a multitude of laws and punitive restrictions cobbled together over many years by moralistic legislators and vindictive psychological professionals determined to “fix,” not heal. He must attend monthly psychological counseling that he must pay for after having lost his job because he was in prison, as well as now being unable to gain employment because of his criminal record. The offender must also attend group “therapy” sessions (which he must also pay for), of mostly men led by a woman of meager social work credentials who makes no secret about how deeply she abhors his very being as a convicted sex offender. He must sit there session after session as the counselor works to convince him that he is virtually the scum of the earth and needs to admit it to himself over and over until he begins to believe about himself what she believes about him. He sinks into depression as the counselor gaslights him and melds his personhood with his crime, until he and his crime are one, and he is no longer Joe who committed a sex offense but is now the crime incarnate. He can do nothing about the relentless degradation of his personhood but return to the suffocating darkness of the nightmare that never ends. Even if the offense is one of a lesser nature, the medieval nature of probation ultimately leaves the offender emotionally scarred by the system designed only to punish through deprivation, exclusion, and humiliation by psychologists, vindictive probation officers, and insufficiently trained counselors devoid of empathy and desire to heal.Surely, in the name of emotional justice, we can find a better way to vindicate the victim without emotionally destroying the offender.

So, what happens to this guy? Great details of his years growing up and what his family's influences were, his dedicated service in the US army, his happy marriage, the accusations and charges that put him in years of jails and prisons, followed by more decades of hell - all coming about from false charges - because probation counselors couldn't persuade him to lie. It is a must read by law enforcement and probation supervisors who should be fired if they don't remedy this situation! In my mind, it's the main reason for recidivism! No wonder our jails and prisons are full - those falsely accused and charged pay dearly for the rest of their lives, even once they are finally released! This guy loses everything, his wife, his children, his friends, costing him thousands of dollars, loses his property including the clothes on his back. This reviewer knows this guy personally, and he has survived 60+ years of recrimination. He's been denied of his basic rights and freedoms because of a teenager's falsified, exaggerated claims.

A gripping, unflinching story about a life of adversity that most of us can hardly imagine. That it turns eventually into a story about hope and the strength of the human spirit is amazing. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

I would definitely recommend this book for anyone who has a compassionate heart and an open mind to the feelings and inner struggles that people so often hide from the world.Days after reading this book, I am still reflecting on what I have read.The raw and unfiltered honesty of the author is extraordinary.The story is a gripping walk through of a tumultuous and challenging life.What begins as a simple yet sometimes disturbing account of the authors childhood, the storyline slowly becomes much deeper and more complex. This book is filled with lots of love and friendship, along with emotional and mental turmoil. So many different human emotions resulting from choices made both good and not so good. Not to mention a broken criminal justice system that often creates emotional and financial barriers for people who are determined to live crime free, healthy lifestyles.I found this book to be engaging, and deep. Even though I found parts of this book a tad bit uncomfortable to read and comprehend, I must commend the author for his extremely raw, honest and vulnerable admissions. A book that leaves you pondering so many interesting notions and will stay with you for a while.

Paul Bradford’s memoir is a bold traversal through the most harrowing and fraught chapters of a life that, by turns, inspires horror, sorrow, and introspection. From his earliest years shadowed by neglect and loss, to his time in combat and the long aftermath of a crime that shattered the fragile structure of his life, Bradford refuses to sidestep or soften the contours of his own story.He writes in a straightforward, unembellished style that, while lacking ornamental flair, delivers emotional force through its very restraint. This is not a book about redemption in tidy, cinematic arcs—rather, it is a chronicle of irreversible ruptures and their lingering consequences. The story does not ask for forgiveness as much as it demands understanding—understanding of how a lifetime of unaddressed wounds can infect one’s moral compass, leading to actions that cannot be undone.Bradford doesn’t define himself through his achievements or recovery. Instead, he opens a window into the relentlessness of legal and social punishment: the lingering stigma of incarceration, the tenuous reintegration into community, and the weight of societal rejection. What he shares is not an escape narrative, but a gauging of how deeply shame can burrow into identity, reshaping future steps even when one yearns to move forward.The narrative structure juxtaposes recollections of earlier deprivation—aggravated by secrecy and silence around his sexuality—with the isolation of his adult collapse. Yet there are no heroics here, only the quiet endurance of someone trying to confront their past without shrugging it off. Bradford’s command of plainspoken description turns even the most brutal recollections into something uncomfortably vivid, as though you're an observer perched just behind his consciousness.What lingers when the last page is turned is not admiration, nor revulsion, but a renewed exposure to how human frailty can manifest in the most incomprehensible ways. The book prompts you to consider how cycles of trauma perpetuate themselves—not through heroic resilience, but through invisible, cumulative damage that may surface decades later.In essence, Walk a Mile in My Shoes is less a memoir than a reckoning—not with the world, but with the self. It’s unlikely to leave you comforted, but it may leave you altered. If you’re inclined toward narratives that interrogate the roots of wrongdoing rather than the narratives of salvation, this is a work that challenges complacency. It compels acknowledgment that sometimes, to understand a person’s life, you must bear witness to their worst failures—and, in doing so, confront uncomfortable questions about empathy, accountability, and the scars we rarely admit to carrying.