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When Harvey Goller tells me he’s stubborn as hell, I believe him - it’s that same stubbornness that kept him from giving up when the world seemed designed to make him fail.

I’ve talked to a lot of guys who’ve been through the system, but Harvey’s story hits different. When I sat down with him for the podcast, I wasn’t expecting to hear about a kid who grew up in Times Beach - yeah, that Times Beach, the one that became a literal ghost town after they discovered the roads were sprayed with toxic chemicals. But that’s just the beginning of Harvey’s journey from a chaotic childhood to multiple prison stints to becoming a voice for real reentry reform.

From Times Beach to Section 8 Housing Next to Golf Courses

Harvey was born in St. Louis but spent his toddler years in Times Beach when the environmental disaster hit. His family had to evacuate when they discovered the contractor hired to keep down dust on gravel roads was actually spraying dioxin - the same chemical used in Agent Orange.

“We were there at the time,” Harvey told me. “It was weird as a kid, right? They literally left it as a ghost town and then flooded it.”

His family moved to Reston, Virginia, where Harvey experienced something unique - living in Section 8 housing literally surrounded by golf courses. This gave him access to excellent schools while still growing up in marginalized conditions. But his home life was far from stable. His father was in and out of prison for armed robbery, his mother cycled through relationships with men battling their own addictions, and Harvey was introduced to drugs by age eight or nine.

The secrecy started early. When neighbors asked about his dad, the family would say he was “working out of town” - technically true, since his father had a prison job, just couldn’t come home.

Normalized Chaos Led to Heroin at Age 12

What struck me most about Harvey’s story was how addiction became completely normalized in his household. By age 12, he was sniffing heroin, introduced through his mother’s boyfriends who were Vietnam vets struggling with their own demons.

“It was normalized for me very, very early,” Harvey explained. “Even my friends, we’d make fun of junkies, even though we all would go snort heroin.”

This led to the predictable cycle - in and out of prison on drug-related charges and violations. But Harvey had something keeping him tethered: his grandparents, who became his father figures and pushed him to graduate high school. Even in the chaos, he knew he had to complete something.

From Prison Tattoo Artist to Washington University Graduate

Harvey’s last stint in prison started different than the others. He’d violated parole on a sex offense charge - not for committing a sex crime, but for failing to report knowledge of one while he was struggling with addiction. When he got to Pacific Correctional Center, he made a decision that changed everything.

“I had to make that separation,” he said about walking away from his lucrative prison tattoo business. “Being a college student full-time, taking six classes at one point in time, and trying to support myself in prison through tattooing and not go to the hole for it - that was a task.”

Harvey discovered Washington University had a program where professors drove 45 minutes each way to teach real college courses inside the prison. He taught himself college algebra using library books that hadn’t been checked out in years, studying two to three hours every night. The dedication paid off - he earned his Associate’s degree in 2019 while incarcerated.

What blew me away was learning that this wasn’t some prison-friendly program. The COs weren’t supportive, and it was “an uphill battle every day” just to attend classes.

Building Something Real on the Outside

When Harvey got out in 2019, he could have just focused on staying clean and employed. Instead, he saw the gaps in reentry services and decided to fill them himself. Working initially with Washington University’s reentry program, he quickly realized that even well-funded institutions missed the mark on what people actually needed.

He started the St. Louis Reentry Collective, funded by small donations - often just $5 or $10 from people who believed in the work. But Harvey’s vision goes deeper than emergency assistance. He’s working on a documentary series and trauma workshops because he’s tired of seeing formerly incarcerated people portrayed as either demons or charity cases.

“I realized I could normalize the fact that we’re not violent people,” he told me. “We’re just like everyone else, looking for a second chance. And it’s not always necessarily personal barriers that send us back - there are systemic barriers as well.”

Harvey’s approach reminds me of street medicine programs that meet homeless populations where they are instead of expecting them to come to hospitals. He’s building reentry services based on what people actually need, not what bureaucrats think they should need.

When I asked Harvey what kept him going through everything, his answer was pure stubbornness: “I just can’t give up on myself, right? If I do give up on myself, then I have this mentality that they’ve won, they beat me, then they were correct and I did belong in that institution.”

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