Tell Me, What’s The Worst Thing You’ve Ever Done?
A broader interpretation of Justice may help us to rescue dreams from the place we send them to die.
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The title of this piece was once the opening question I used when interviewing prospective employees, usually sales and marketing professionals, in what now seems like a previous life.
It was meant to offset their equilibrium, a way to break the ice for some and evaluate integrity in others. A method of measurement to evaluate the individual seated before me, which, ironically, was never meant to solicit a sincere answer. My aim was to see how they would respond.
Some would make a joke of it, saying something off-the-wall like serial killer or bank robber. While others would stammer in search of an answer that wouldn't dissuade me from hiring them. But there was one woman, in particular, who responded after a slight hesitation that she had slept with her sister's husband, wrecked their marriage, and had been a anathema in her family ever since.
Her name was Catherine and I hired her on the spot. Without a doubt she was qualified, but the reason I made her an offer had everything to do with her sincerity and less to do with her qualifications. I didn't entirely understand my own reasoning at the time, but later I realized that her sincerity was an elixir to my otherwise dwindling outlook on the human condition.
Little did I know that I wouldn't be confronted again with that kind of sincerity until stepping into the New Mexico DOC in 2006, following my wrongful conviction.
Source: Investors.com
As I shuffled my shackled feet into this world, I thought about Catherine, the interview, her sincere answer, and the ease with which a single decision, with or without intention, could dismantle or outright eradicate a life.
Prison is a place that can’t be window dressed because it's a place where dreams come to die. I was about as out of place as sea water on the moon but I couldn't stop the curiosity that occupied my thoughts as I tried to understand why people would consciously choose this for themselves.
It didn't make any sense, and in an attempt to make sense of it I began interviewing everyone that I came across with absurd sentences hanging over their heads: triple life; double life, plus 54 years; 116 years; LWOP; quadruple life, plus 26 years; and the list goes on.
Many were prisoners from other states, serving time in New Mexico as part of an interstate compact. And most channeled the same directness as Catherine as they shared how they had come to be here.
What I learned from those interviews forever changed how I looked at justice, of what it is and what it's meant to be.
To begin with, there was William, a man convicted of double homicide in which he killed both the babysitter and her husband when he learned that his daughter was part of a group of little girls being sexually assaulted by the couple.
I wanted to know if he regretted it now that he was living the consequences of his actions. He reflected on what I was asking as though it were the first time someone had asked him this question. And what he said has never left me: