Brad Vest

  Travis Simmons has recently been released from prison onto home confinement where he has taken residence in a camper next door to his parents’ alongside the Ohio River in Jackson County, West Virginia. Simmons wears a ankle bracelet twenty-four hours a day that monitors his location and confines him to staying within a hundred foot radius around the camper which he has made his home.

   Simmons is also struggling to stay off of drugs, work with the courts and his home confinement officer to stay out of prison, and keep away from old influences and friends whom he feels are too big of a temptation to his ‘old ways’. With all of these restrictions Simmons is learning to be a single dad while sharing custody with his ex-wife Diane Redman-Simmons of his two young daughters, Patience, three years old, and Journey, nine months old, and preparing for the arrival of his third child, a boy, from his old high school girlfriend, Jessica Ingram. Raising the two growing children in a very confined space without the freedoms to just pick up and take them to the park or away from home is an expanding conflict within the family. Simmons has attempted to create a sort of escape around his home with children’s toys, a swing set, a fire pit, and other objects that add normalcy to their situation so that much of the families time can be spent outside of the camper instead of sitting with in the approximately ten by twenty foot trailer.

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