Reid went to the prisons to help, to offer support, to give a lifeline to Garrett and Britt, who were in jail on drug-related offenses. It did not scar him, but it did leave calluses.
"It was a good experience," the 52-year old Reid said. "But not one I'd like to do again."
It changed the coach, made him stronger and more real - to his players, to his bosses and to his family. Andy Reid, the man who controls all football decisions by the Eagles, who gets the credit when things go well and the blame when they don't, was now sympathetic to the way of the world, a world he'd lived beyond football.
Just another visitor
The Montgomery County Correctional Facility sits on 175 acres on a hill far from view from the road below. Since 1986, it has housed the county's criminals, but it has become overcrowded.
Past the brown metal-and-glass doors, the prison lobby has shoebox-size lockers against a wall where visitors can stow their belongings - cell phones, car keys, purses and wallets - and kiosks where they can deposit money into a prisoner's account for use at the commissary.
Beyond a thick, sliding metal door that harshly locks behind each visitor is the main prison command center, where armed guards keep watch over the facility, its 536 cells, and its approximately 1,730 inmates, who live a floor below, sometimes four to a cell.
The walls are cinderblock - cold and confining. Here, men and women are doing time for screwing up their lives. They're living, but it's a life of bars and barbed wires, and just a few comforts, like the sparse weight room, the library with nine electric typewriters, and the dark chapel with five rows of pews where the prisoners can pray to whichever deity they feel can best help them out.
