The Journey of Marc Glover: From Troubled Youth to Advocate for Change

I’ve been thinking about authority and rebellion lately. When I had my conversation with Marc Glover, a guy I was with at Leavenworth, we got into how some of us just couldn’t take being told what to do. Marc’s from Joplin, Missouri, which is close to my old stomping grounds, and his story shows how that rebellious streak can take you places you never intended to go.

Growing Up Without Direction

Marc’s childhood was shaped by absence and instability. His parents divorced when he was two, but they lived together for about three years after that. Then his father went to prison for about five years. “My mom and dad, they probably got divorced when I was like two, lived together for probably about three years after they were divorced. And then he eventually ended up going to prison,” Marc told me.

His father was a severe alcoholic who was abusive to Marc’s mother. When he got out, he’d end up in halfway houses and run off. The man passed away at just 50 or 51 from alcoholism. Marc loved his father because he was his dad, but there were always feelings he harbored about the situation.

Marc’s mother did her best to hold things together. “We never went hungry. You know, we always had a roof over our heads. So even though we were poor and we struggled, we still never went without,” he said. But Marc struggled with authority from an early age, and school became a battleground.

The School Years Fall Apart

Marc did well in elementary school, but middle school changed everything. The routine of switching classes and carrying different books became too much. Not because he couldn’t handle it intellectually, but because he didn’t want to apply himself.

“My last grade of education that I really had good enough grades to pass was the fifth grade,” Marc explained. “I felt sixth grade and they still passed me. I felt the seventh grade. They still passed me. The eighth grade I got expelled. They still passed me.”

By tenth grade, Marc went to school for maybe two weeks and skipped almost every class. When he went to the counselor’s office to get a schedule, they told him he wasn’t even enrolled and needed to leave campus or they’d call police. His mother had reached her limit and signed him out of school entirely.

That’s when things really started going downhill.

The Drug Business Takes Hold

Without school structure, Marc fell in with people doing the same things he was doing. Skipping responsibilities, getting drunk, smoking cigarettes. He tried selling marijuana first, but that didn’t work out because he kept smoking his own supply. “I was smoking marijuana too. So my venture into marijuana distribution was unsuccessful as I owed more money than I ever made,” he said.

Then a family member introduced him to crank, a form of speed made with stuff like Vicks nasal inhalers. The first time he tried it, Marc was hooked. He felt energy and euphoria like never before. That led him to a man named Dave in Galena, Kansas, who had killed someone in self-defense. That’s where Marc learned to cook methamphetamine.

“He was very quiet, very quiet individual. Obviously, you know, very paranoid individual,” Marc said about Dave. Being left alone with someone who had taken a life was terrifying for a 17-year-old, but it opened the door to manufacturing drugs.

Marc and his family member eventually perfected their cooking process. The distribution was easy because Marc had so many friends in his circle. “It was as soon as I had it in my pocket, it was gone,” he told me.

The Long Fall to Federal Prison

Marc cooked meth for four or five years until Missouri made it harder to get the ingredients. That’s when ice started coming in from Mexico through connections he’d made. The product was cheaper and higher quality than what he could manufacture.

But on October 24, 2004, everything came crashing down. Marc had actually quit selling drugs and gotten a job with a steel supply company. He was still using, but trying to make the turn away from dealing.

At 5:30 in the morning, federal agents kicked in the door while he was sleeping on his mother’s couch. His two little sisters were there. They woke him with a pistol in his face, telling him to get on the ground.

“It was anger towards them. No shame for what I did. No regret. It happened to go through that. It was anger towards them. Because I cared about myself more than anything else at the time. But that’s what drugs do to you,” Marc said about his reaction that morning.

The agents told his mother he’d be released the same day, but Marc knew better. After being processed and interviewed, he was let out on pretrial release. But instead of changing his life, he kept using drugs and even helped steal a four-wheeler. The mindset was: what more could they do to him?

Fourteen Years for a First-Time Offender

Marc’s lawyer told him he’d probably get 11 years and 3 months. The minimum he could have received was 10 years. So when he went to court for sentencing on June 7, 2006, he expected something in that range.

The judge gave him 168 months. Fourteen years.

“I never, in my life would have bought a first time non-violent drug offender could be sentenced to 14 years in federal prison,” Marc said. He was 27 years old.

After the devastation of that moment, Marc was shipped around to different county jails before landing at the Oklahoma City Transfer Center, then FCI Texarkana in Texas. The facility was full of gangs, but Marc chose to be a loner. He respected the racial dynamics without joining any groups.

Two older inmates, Doug and Ernie, took him under their wing and showed him the ropes. They gave him shower shoes without expecting anything in return, which taught Marc something important about how some people navigate prison.

Finding Purpose Behind Bars

At Texarkana, Marc got his GED and took vocational classes in culinary arts and electrical theory. “I gained more to make my life more beneficial for my family, my kids and myself in prison than I ever did as an adult before that on the streets,” he told me.

After three years, Marc transferred to Leavenworth camp. The Bureau of Prisons actually gave him a bus ticket and dropped him at a Greyhound station to travel there himself, even though he still had almost nine years left to serve. He stopped in Joplin where his family met him at the bus station, but he wouldn’t even step outside. He didn’t want any temptation to not get back on that bus.

Marc’s story shows how authority issues and addiction can spiral into consequences nobody sees coming. A first-time non-violent drug offender getting 14 years taught him hard lessons about the federal system. But it also taught him that even in the worst circumstances, you can still choose to better yourself.