Mark Geralds was a pretty good running back at Sikeston High School in the late '80s, and he dreamed of going to college on a football scholarship. But he got no offers, and things slipped away. He dropped out of school the second semester of his senior year.

He was a smart kid, but not above trouble. He had two juvenile convictions — first-degree tampering for stealing a motorcycle and forgery involving two checks for a total of $225. He was given probation for each offense.

He got his GED. He moved to St. Louis. He got married. In 1995, when he was 24, he was again a small blip on the criminal justice system radar when he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for passing a bad check worth $125.

He was more than a blip the next year. Federal agents set up a sting in a Budgetel Inn in Maryland Heights. An informer was selling cocaine. Geralds arrived with $12,500 and bought 500 grams of powder cocaine. That's a little more than a pound. He was busted as he left the informer's room.

He pleaded guilty. Federal guidelines for that amount of powder cocaine called for a sentence of between 110 and 137 months.

But between the arrest and his sentencing in August 1996, the feds developed information that he had sold crack cocaine. So he was sentenced under the guidelines for crack cocaine. Those guidelines called for a sentence of between 292 and 365 months.

He was sentenced to 330 months. That's three months shy of 30 years.

It is interesting to note, I think, that this kind of draconian sentence was so common that his sentencing did not make the newspaper. Nor had his arrest, for that matter.

In December 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that in crack cocaine cases, federal judges could impose sentences below the guidelines. The U.S. Sentencing Commission then declared that inmates could apply for sentence reductions. In 2008, Geralds went to court, and his sentence was reduced to 260 months.

Two years later, Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. That act reduced — but did not eliminate — the disparity between sentences for crack and powder cocaine. The law also eliminated the mandatory minimum sentence of five years for possession of crack cocaine.

The law was to become retroactive as of November 2011.

Hundreds of inmates were about to be freed.

Lisa White is a probation officer in the U.S. Probation Office in the Eastern District of Missouri. She wondered how the people released would do.

Many had been locked up for years. Few had much education. Many had little or no experience in the working world. Many had histories of drug abuse. Few had been enrolled in the programs offered by the Bureau of Prisons for inmates approaching release.

Because they had done their time, they weren't being sent to halfway houses and the structure they provide. Instead, they were just going to be let go.

It seemed a formula for disaster.

Last summer, she talked to her colleague, Clark Porter, a community resources specialist in the office. Could he help her devise a program for the releasees who would be under the supervision of their office? Sure, he said.

They checked with their boss, Chief Probation Officer Douglas Burris. He thought it was a great idea.

Geralds was released in early November.

The week after he arrived in St. Louis, he joined 17 others — 15 other men and two women — in the program set up by White and Porter. They met twice a week. It was a crash course in how to make it on the outside, how to find work, what resources were available.

They had a graduation ceremony Thursday at the federal courthouse. White and Porter talked about how impressed they had been with the releasees' determination.

"You even made it in during a snowstorm that kept most of our colleagues home," joked Porter.

Geralds addressed his fellow releasees. Hold it in the middle of the road, he said. Don't let it go off the road, he said.

His wife was in the audience. "It's a love story," she told me.

Geralds has been accepted into a pre-apprentice program with an ironworkers union. Several of the releasees have already found work. Two have enrolled in community college.

Chief Judge Catherine Perry spoke. We want you to succeed, she said. Everybody in this building is pulling for you, she said.

It was a turnaround of sorts for Geralds. Perry was the judge who sentenced him in 1996.