Aug 16, 2026
The Other Side of the Front Row
In earlier essays, I wrote about the moral work of being seen clearly—and about the institutions that too often fail that work. In the first essay, I wrote about the person in the front row: the enlightened witness who sees without reducing, names without destroying, and remains without rescuing. In the second, I asked what institutions would look like if they were held to the same standard. This essay asks what happens when the person who once needed a witness becomes responsible for witnessing someone else.
For a long time, I thought rehabilitation was something I had to prove.
The evidence seemed obvious enough. I had committed a crime. I had gone to prison. I had caused irreversible harm. If I wanted a life afterward, the burden was mine to demonstrate that I had changed.
So I worked.
I examined what I had done. I learned to recognize shame before it disguised itself as something more respectable. I studied my own explanations with suspicion. I learned the difference between understanding conduct and excusing it. I tried to become a better father. After prison, I worked, wrote, mentored, and became involved with organizations serving people affected by the criminal justice system.
I thought rehabilitation meant constructing enough evidence that the person who entered prison was no longer the person standing before you.
I no longer believe that.
Rehabilitation is not a verdict other people eventually deliver. Nor is it a certificate of moral completion we award ourselves.
It is a practice.
I now think of rehabilitation as response capacity: the growing ability to respond differently when shame, fear, harm, disappointment, or power return to the room.
I learned this because eventually I found myself sitting on the other side of the front row.
I had spent years needing people who could see what I had done without deciding that what I had done was all there was to see. Teresa had done that for me. Others had done versions of it. They did not erase responsibility. They kept possibility alive beside it.
Then I began working with men coming home from prison and young people already encountering the criminal justice system.
The roles had reversed.
Now someone else was sitting across from me with the bad decision, the explanation, the anger, the impossible family, the missed appointment, the job that had disappeared, the parole condition, the child who no longer trusted him.
I remember sitting across from a man who had missed a job interview because his ride fell through. At first, he talked as if the whole thing had happened to him. The employer was unfair. The program was useless. His parole officer did not understand. Some of that was true. But not all of it. My task was not to crush the explanation or accept it whole. It was to stay close enough to ask the next question: what part of this belongs to you, and what will you do differently tomorrow?
And I discovered something uncomfortable.
It is much easier to believe in the enlightened witness when you are the person who needs one.
Being one is harder.
The man sitting across from you does not arrive as a philosophical proposition. He may be late. He may lie to you. He may blame everyone except himself. He may ignore advice you spent an hour giving him and return two weeks later with precisely the problem you warned him about.
He may remind you of yourself.
That last part can be the hardest.
We like to imagine that our suffering makes us naturally compassionate toward people who suffer as we did. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it makes us impatient.