Meet the three parolees profiled in A HARD STRAIGHT.

Regina Allen Regina Allen was born and raised in San Francisco and is the mother of three children. With her ready smile and infectious laugh, she spent her early years charming everyone she met and living life as a hustler. Throughout her 20s and 30s, she ran check fraud scams and eventually got convicted, resulting in a short prison sentence. As seen in A HARD STRAIGHT, life became very complicated very quickly upon Regina's release from her second stay in prison, for receiving stolen property. Escalating friction with her oldest daughter Tera, who was raising her two young siblings in their mother's absence, came to a head over Regina's struggle with methamphetamine addiction. As Regina fought to stay clean, and Tera faced the possibility of losing her yet again, mother and daughter come to understand that getting out of prison and staying out of prison are two very different things.

Richard “Smiley” Salazar Richard "Smiley" Salazar has the soul of a poet and the scars of a gangster. He spent his childhood bouncing between foster homes, juvenile detention and life on the streets, his fellow gang members the only family he had ever known. After he was paroled directly into the heart of gangland San Fernando, California, Smiley had to choose between wanting to and not being able to escape the lifestyle. The one thing he knew for sure was that he was a “two-striker.” Under California's three-strikes law, his next conviction would land him in prison for the rest of his life. Smiley is a talented artist and is able to earn a living doing tattoo work. But his gift and the financial security it provides was small consolation in his battle with the dangerous allure of gangster life.

Aaron Shepard Almost a decade ago, Aaron "Shep" Shepard was sentenced to one year as an accessory to armed robbery. Since then, he has spent more time in prison on petty parole violations than for his original conviction. A vivid illustration of the "revolving door" aspect of recidivism, Shep had no one on the outside and found little help in the seemingly endless line of parole agents he was required to visit a weekly basis. "My friends are few, and my world is cold," he confided in A HARD STRAIGHT.