The De-Stigmatization of Criminal History

This morning I had just finished my 7:30a workout when my trainer's next appointment arrived. He was not the normal 8:00a person but a substitute for a cancelled appointment. I have been working out here for 3 years and had never seen him before.

He saw me and questioned the meaning of my t-shirt (which I had acquired from the YMCA several years ago), which says:

I can go anywhere.
I can do anything.

Actually, that is what it used to say.

At some point during my prosecution, I thought a little editing was appropriate, given my new reality. I grabbed a magic market and scratched out the letters "any" from "anywhere" and "anything" and enscribed the word "no" next to them:

I can go any nowhere.
I can do any nothing.




This is the t-shirt I usually where when I work out.

As you can imagine, it invites questions, which is what happened this morning.

My trainer smiled when his new client asked what the meaning of my edits were.

I told him that last year I spent 3 months in federal prison. He asked what for. Then he asked where. "Was it a 'country club'"? Etc. Etc. Etc.

Then he talked about a friend who had spent 7 years in a federal prison in Pennsylvania for bank fraud and another friend who spent 3 days in a local county jail (much scarier!).

But what struck me most about the whole conversation was how utterly indifferent and casual he was about the whole thing as if what I had just told him about myself was a perfectly normal human experience. If anything, he was a little intrigued.

I get this a lot. There seems to be a lot of people out there who have had indirect (if not immediate) experiences with the criminal justice system and meeting someone else with a similar experience actually becomes a point of connection, not alienation.

Isn't that funny?

So many convicted criminals spend so much time and energy trying to hide their past, fearing the judgment of other people, when in fact..... NO ONE ELSE CARES!!!!

What alienates people is not another's past failure, but present self-pity and excessive shame. Everyone likes being around a person who has failed but picked himself up and moved on. Indeed many people will even admire such a person.

However, no one wants to be around someone stuck in the past, who can't move beyond their mistakes. Attitude is everything. If you have moved on, then so has everyone else. Most people have enough problems of their own to worry about your mistakes. (There is of course the occasional Pharisee who seems to have nothing better to do than build themselves up by tearing others down, but being a Pharisee takes more psychic time and energy than most can muster.)

Granted, if you keep making those mistakes over and over again, societal sympathy may begin to wear thin (re: John Daly). But for the average guy who got himself caught up in something a little bigger than he bargained for (which is the typical white collar scenario), that is not the issue.

So the moral of the story is that, in most cases, your criminal history is a non-issue for almost everyone else.... it has been de-stigmatized.

So take the scarlet letter off your chest and remember what Andy Dufresne said in Shawshank Redemption:

Get busy living or get busy dying.