By David Palmer

In early January, the first of sixty paroled inmates — both men and women — will begin moving into Hidden Creek, a new Little Rock transition facility and former home for seniors now owned by Under Grace Ministries.

Licensed by the Department of Community Corrections (DCC), the new faith-based facility could help launch a fundamental change in the sometimes deplorable and relatively unsupervised way many independent transitional houses have treated paroled inmates, and serve as a model for other facilities.

Bill and Pat Carlton of Little Rock have donated $50,000 to One Day at a Time (ODAT), a Little Rock based non-profit company, to help further its mission of reducing substance abuse locally and eventually in other communities.

Now in its sixth year of operation, ODAT publishes a quarterly newspaper, operates a website and develops projects with special emphasis on substance abuse in the adolescent/college, prison inmate and military populations.

By David Palmer

Shortly before noon on a sunlit day in May, men and women began gathering at the “Recovery in the Daylight” Narcotics Anonymous (NA) 12-Step meeting at Recovery Central, a new Little Rock facility mainly for NA meetings.

More about the “Recovery in the Daylight” meeting in a minute. First, some background on Narcotics Anonymous and on Recovery Central.

NA meetings came along about 18 years after AA’s founding in 1935 and are similar to AA’s 12-Step meetings in almost every respect. There is one important difference, and that is that AA focuses strictly on alcohol addiction while NA is open to all drug addictions including alcohol.

David Palmer

Sports fans were shocked when news broke in September 2007 that Corey Beck had been shot. Beck, who played guard on the national champion Arkansas Razorback basketball team in 1994 and later for the Detroit Pistons and other professional teams, was finished with basketball in 2002 at age 31, and the fans had moved on.

The shooting took place in Memphis in the early morning when two masked gunmen stopped Beck and his friend, Timothy Wilkins, intending to rob them and take their car. When Beck resisted, one of the gunmen raised his shotgun and fired point blank at the side of his face.