Prior to my time as an art student at FHSU I worked in public service as a prison guard and a soldier. As a prison guard I would get into just the most inane arguments with people.  I was tasked with enforcing the facilities posted rules.  The authors of those rules felt that the best thing to do was make the rules more strict then those that you would find outside.  I suppose they felt that it would help rehabilitate people and maintain an organized facility.  I think to a degree it did but there were a few problems with this philosophy.  Some of the guards, 22 year old me included, considered it a competition.  We would try to get as many convictions as we could as opposed to handling it at a lower level.  We even viewed guards who didn't jump straight to a charge as weak, like they were coddling the inmates.  I felt that way for quite some time after I left the prison to get my degree in Criminal Justice and Sociology, at least until one of my instructors explained to me that it cost the government money to enforce all the write-ups I was making and that they pulled that money from schools and the department of transportation.  The remark really made me look back at some of the things that happened while I was a guard.  I was deployed to a very large prison riot toward the mid-later part of my stay as a prison guard.  While there I noticed that a lot of the inmates who were their were people I had written up.  They hadn't been sent to a prison with increased security just a different one.  That really made me think that maybe there had been bigger implications to what I had been doing.  Maybe if we had had a fairer policy in place, the inmates would have been less hostile.  Maybe we had inadvertently sent our more hostile inmates to a prison that couldn't handle them.  I started to regret some of the decisions I'd made.  They no longer seemed fair to me.  When I returned to my prison I discovered my former friends weren't really on board with the new me.  I had become just another inmate-lover in some of their eyes, to others I was too strict as I had found ways to get my unit in line without sending people up the river.  This was especially problematic when I found guards who were using their power as retaliation.  They didn't really like it when I pointed out that it is a far more mature and stable choice to de-escalate the situation and walk away rather than trying to bait the inmates into a write-up.  Wasn't too long before I found myself being slammed up against walls by people just like me when I was 22.  Eventually I left the prison guard world for what I felt was a healthier alternative the Army.  The Army supplies me with a ton of inspiration for my artwork as well but I still consider my initial love of the penal system as my primary inspiration especially since that politicized boldfaced lie of an IG report the Obama Administration released in 2016 indirectly shutdown the prison I used to work at so now I'm all kinds of sentimental about the place.  Needless to say with all this government background a good deal of my work right now is political cartoons.  I spent my whole childhood idolizing Todd McFarlan's work on Spawn and the Amazing Spider-Man so my background is real heavy in the comic book style.  I've recently started experimenting with oil and acrylic painting, 3D design work, printmaking, digital illustration, and formal figure drawing at FHSU.  Hopefully everyone enjoys the new ventures.