This is an I-Heart podcast.

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This is our American stories, and now a story from our own Monty Montgomery about one woman's transformative journey.

Christina Dent grew up in the capital of Mississippi.

I grew up in West Daxon in a wonderful, happy home. I grew up in a Christian home and just had a

really happy childhood. My mom

homeschooled me and my brothers all the way through high school. And I grew up in a community

that had a lot of crime in it. I would lay in bed at night and hear ambulances and gunshots as the two sounds I remember hearing.

I went through a lot of anxiety as a child.

Because of that, our neighbors were held up at gunpoint while we were home, and our neighbors didn't have a phone,

and so they came over right after it had happened to use our phone to call the police.

And that happened when I was about eight or nine.

And that set off for me a lot of even deeper anxiety than I kind of already had.

And that was hard. I begged my parents to move out of state.

I thought maybe if we went somewhere else, I would feel safer.

I thought that was just how it was, and there wasn't really anything we could do to change that.

I grew up always thinking tough on crime was the way to go.

So I got there by saying there's crime in my community and I don't like that.

So we need to be tougher on crime to make that crime go away. And I associated

anything related to drugs in with that, just be tougher. If we can just get tougher, if we can just

lock more people up, then I wouldn't hear these gunshots. I wouldn't hear these, you know,

police sirens. That was my framework, and I never really knew much about it.

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