The Choice Is Yours

The Choice Is Yours

$20.00 plus 2.99 shipping

By Shirley Dicks

Teachers, buy the video for your classroom. It's been shown in many states, from grade four to college.

Makes an impact and it

Changes Lives.

About	Kids Comments	Media	Prisoners Comments
Speaker	A long Road Home

The Choice Is Yours is a cd showing Tennessee's death row inmates talking to the teens about what happens when they make the wrong choices in life. What they have to look forward to, if they get involved in drugs, alcohol, violence, committing crimes, joining gangs. It shows the electric chair where its the last place inmates see in life. The guys pull no punches and tell it like it is. The program has proven effective in helping to stop crime, drug use and alcohol, with many of the kids after viewing it.

Great for Schools, Churches, Libraries, Organizations, At Risk Kids, and for home use. For kids ten to twenty.

Shirley Dicks, author of book and who taped the video on Tn death row, speaks out at schools and colleges along with her son Trevor.

This book and video has been shown and read in schools and colleges throughout the Northeast states. Shirley Dicks and son Trevor Dicks have spoken and shown the video to hundreds of schools and colleges as they tell their stories.

Read some of the newspaper articles plus what some of the kids have said
in letters to them.

Read Trevor's story of his struggles with drugs and alcohol and his long road back. HERE

Once your students read the book and watch the video, many of them will stop and think about what they've seen and heard. The life these men are living now is a horrible way to live. They will find no comfort in knowing this could happen to them.

Actually seeing the men walking out in chains, with the guards on each side makes an impact. The way they tell of what a day is like on death row
will hit home with many of them.

To have no choices any longer, not of what they eat, or who they see will make them shudder. Their food is handed in through a pie hole in the door. They are in their 8x10 cells twenty three hours a day.
They don't get to eat pizza, steak, hamburgers or ice cream any longer. Even to get enough toilet paper is hard, and they often have to beg for a roll.

They don't get to walk on grass any longer but cement dog pens when outside.
They can't call their friends when they want, only when a guard brings a phone. Some can't even hug their family members, if they even bother to visit which most don't.

All choices have been taken from them, and these men bring it all home.
Buy a copy of each today for your class.

Mothers, buy the video for your kids. Show them what it's like if they make the wrong choices in life.
Pastors, this video and book is just the thing to show your youth groups.

Five middle-aged men talk about life, death, mistakes they’ve made. Their days as carefree youths have ended. They are facing death, or, if they are lucky, a long period of isolation. They know it. They know why they are there, and they want to help keep youngsters from facing the same bleak future they face day in and say out.

The Choice Is Yours Video is a stark video containing stories from five of Tennessee’s death row inmates. It has been produced by Shirley Dicks who is author of nine books on crime and punishment. In the video, the five inmates attempt to educate teens about the dangers of crime, lack of education, drugs and imprisonment. It’s aimed at youths as young as the fourth grade and up. Shirley Dicks videotaped the inmates on death row and says her hope is to be able to get schools to play the video for students. Dicks knows the five guys on death row. She has met each of them on visits to her own son, Jeff who occupies a cell there. He was wrongly convicted and sentenced to die.

             The men talk straight from the heart. They talk about how they found themselves on death row and talk to the youths and encourage them to stay on the straight road. They explain what it’s like to be locked away with all their freedom taken away. A death row inmate spends 23 hours a day in a cell. They eat, sleep and use the bathroom there. For one hour a day they visit the yard for exercise. The yard is a pen like animals are kept in. They never touch the earth, or feel the grass under their feet. They feel nothing but cold concrete beneath their feet.

             “These men want the kids to think twice before letting someone talk them into doing something they shouldn’t,” Dicks says of the men’s advice. “If you hang around with the wrong people, you may get pulled into something and find themselves in prison, or on death row.” How the five men in the video spend their days is touched on throughout the video. The video also contains the electric chair and the kids can see where it is that people end up when they make the wrong choices in life and decide on a life of crime. There isn’t any bad language in the video, and nothing graphic.

            Kids need to understand that the choices they make in life are the choices they will have to live with, or die with. For the kids who have seen the video, they all say it’s made an impact on them. What the men have to say is something the kids can see and hear. They see the men coming out with chains on their wrists, and the guards who are there to watch over them. They are told that they have no choices in the prison, not on what they eat, or when to talk, to visit, and to even go to the bathroom. All choices are then taken away and they’d be lucky if they could mow the grass, or do chores, which they may have complained about while free.

From a Teenager --Thanks for making me think twice before I even think about doing the wrong things plus hanging around with the wrong crowd. I think you brought a message to everyone and I think your speech would get most of us off drugs. Thanks, Arnold

Read what the kids have to say after viewing the video.

MORE HERE

The Choice Is Yours Book

reg price   $19.00

SALE Price $15.00 plus 2.50 shipping

CHOICES.....We make choices everyday...from the time we get up in the morning until the time we go to bed at night. This book is for you kids out there from the age of ten on up in the hopes that you will listen carefully to what these people have to say to you. It is done in the hopes that you won't find yourself where my son was - on death row. Yeah, I know, it can't happen to you.

You're too smart to get caught at what you're doing. Perhaps you aren't doing anything but hanging around with the wrong kind of people and you think there's no harm in doing that. Well, I'm here to tell you that you're wrong....dead wrong. I'll tell you how easily something like that can happen to you.....and to your whole family. No one else is to blame anyone for your mistakes.

You and you alone made those choices. It doesn't matter if you think you deserve all the good things in life. So you're family wasn't like the Waltons, or Little House on the prairie. So you didn't wear designer clothes to school....or have a lot of spending money....perhaps you were abused as a child, mentally and physically. Perhaps you feel that you have the right to take what you want in life, no matter what you have to do to get it....even committing a violent act against someone else. You don't....

You can't blame anyone for the choices you alone have made. You can overcome your past. Don't blame society because you started doing drugs....even if you did see you're parents drinking and doing drugs. You don't have to follow in their footsteps.

            In this book you will hear some of the guys who are in prison, some who are on death row, who have done drugs, alcohol, been in gangs, committed robberies, killed and on and on. They will tell you about prison life and what it feels like to wait to die. To sit in a cell 24 hours a day and see the electric chair...knowing that one day they will be placed in it and will undergo the most horrible pain imaginable. All because they made the wrong choices in life.