This week in Justice Notes, I’m pleased to feature an essay by my friend Jeff Grant, founder of the White Collar Support Group®. Jeff examines an overlooked cost of seeking a presidential pardon: the emotional burden of reopening the worst chapter of one’s life and asking the government for forgiveness. His central argument—that accountability must have an endpoint, and that restoration cannot depend on a presidential signature—is both timely and deeply humane.
The Trauma of Asking for Forgiveness: Pardons, Clemency and Reliving the Worst Chapter of Your Life
By Jeff Grant, Esq.
For years, I have believed that pardons and clemency should play an important role in the American criminal justice system. I still do. A society serious about rehabilitation, reentry and second chances has to create meaningful ways for people who have completed their sentences, accepted responsibility, made amends and demonstrated years of constructive citizenship to receive some measure of formal restoration. But after more than a decade of working closely with people and families navigating the white collar criminal justice system, my thinking about pardons has evolved. A pardon should not become the plan for rebuilding a life. It certainly should not become a short-term strategy around which a person organizes recovery, relationships, finances and hopes for the future. Increasingly, through our work at the White Collar Support Group®, the Federal Expungement Initiative, my law practice, conferences, podcasts, articles and hundreds of private conversations with justiceimpacted people and their families, I have become concerned about something the clemency discussion rarely addresses: the psychological and emotional cost of asking the government to forgive you. That is why one of the panels at White Collar Conference 2026, on October 10th, is titled “The Trauma of Asking for Forgiveness: Pardons, Clemency and Reliving the Worst Chapter of Your Life.”
Applying for a presidential pardon is conventionally understood as a legal and political process. But for the applicant—and often for a spouse, children and others who lived through the original prosecution—it can also be a profound psychological event. It requires a person who may have spent ten, fifteen or twenty years constructing a stable post-conviction identity to return to the indictment, sentencing memorandum, newspaper articles, financial losses, damaged relationships and painful memories of a period that he or she has worked very hard to integrate into a larger life. Our clemency system asks whether the applicant has been rehabilitated. We should also begin asking what the process of proving that rehabilitation does to the applicant.
From a “Culture of Pardons” to a Culture of Restoration
Several years ago, Chloe Coppola and I wrote an article for the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Magazine entitled “A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats: Progressive Diversion & Reentry.” In it, we coined two phrases that have stayed with me: “Problem-to-Pardon” case management and a “Culture of Pardons.”
[Read “A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats: Progressive Diversion & Reentry” Link
Our argument was broader than simply encouraging people to file clemency petitions. We envisioned a continuum beginning when a person first enters the criminal justice system and continuing through prosecution, sentencing, incarceration, treatment, reentry, employment, family reintegration, community service and ultimately the possibility of formal restoration.
The “Culture of Pardons” we imagined was never supposed to become a lottery in which thousands of applicants competed for presidential attention. It was meant to describe a culture in which redemption and restoration were institutionally possible. Today, I would refine the phrase. What we need is not a culture of pardon chasing. We need a culture of restoration. That distinction has become more important as clemency has become highly visible and, at times, deeply politicized. Every administration produces speculation about who might receive relief and what kinds of applicants may be favored. Consultants emerge. Political relationships are examined. Lists circulate. Applicants are encouraged to strengthen packages, obtain letters, find advocates and somehow get their stories before the right people. For someone carrying a federal felony conviction, the possibility can become consuming: perhaps this administration, this connection, this application or this political moment will finally remove the mark. Hope is not the problem. Dependency on hope is. A person who has already surrendered years of life to a criminal case should not surrender additional years waiting for a president to validate his or her redemption.
The Trauma of Having to Go Back
A serious clemency petition may require an applicant to reconstruct events from decades earlier, acknowledge the offense in detail, explain his or her thinking at the time, demonstrate remorse, discuss victims, gather old court records and ask friends and family to write letters about one of the most humiliating periods of the applicant’s life. That may be entirely appropriate as part of evaluating clemency. Accountability matters. I believe strongly in it. But accountability is not the same as perpetual self-condemnation. Trauma-informed practice has taught institutions in medicine, education, social services and increasingly the law to recognize that procedures themselves can reactivate traumatic experiences. The criminal justice system should take that insight seriously. A person preparing a pardon application is not merely assembling evidence. He or she may be reentering the emotional environment of arrest, prosecution, public humiliation, family disruption, incarceration and loss. Recovery often depends upon developing an identity that incorporates—but is not permanently defined by—the worst conduct of one’s life. A healthy person ought eventually to be able to say: I did this. I accept responsibility. I understand the harm I caused. I have tried to repair what I can. I have changed. And I am entitled to live in the present rather than stand forever in the dock of my past. That is not denial. It is reintegration.
I Understand Something About Reopening the File
My own story has been told publicly many times. Evan Osnos told much of it in his 2021 New Yorker article, “Life After White-Collar Crime.” He wrote about my career as a lawyer, addiction to prescription
opioids, financial crimes, suicide attempt, recovery, federal prison sentence, ministry, the development of our support community and eventually the restoration of my law license.
[Read Evan Osnos, “Life After White-Collar Crime,” The New Yorker — Link
I also spent more than two hours with Rich Roll discussing addiction, incarceration, shame, recovery and rebuilding on Episode 440 of the Rich Roll Podcast, “The Awakening of Jeff Grant: From Addiction & Incarceration to Prison Ministry.”
[Listen to my conversation with Rich Roll — Link
I have told these stories because I decided long ago that my experience could be useful to other people. That choice gives the story purpose. But there is an enormous psychological difference between choosing to revisit your past because it may help somebody else and being required to excavate that past because you desperately want the government to decide that you are finally worthy of forgiveness. Agency matters. Purpose matters. Context matters. That distinction increasingly informs the direction of our work.
September 11th, Twenty-Five Years Later
I expect to confront that distinction in a particularly personal way this September. From September 9 through September 11, I will participate in the American Bar Association Criminal Justice Section’s Southeastern White Collar Institute in Braselton, Georgia, where leading defense lawyers, prosecutors, judges and other practitioners gather to examine developments in white collar criminal law. On the morning of September 11, Nina Marino, Chair of the ABA Criminal Justice Section and partner in the white collar law firm Kaplan Marino in L.A., and Joe Whitley, Chair of the Womble Bond Dickinson white collar practice in Atlanta will interview me before the Institute audience for a live edition of their ABA podcast, White Collar Talks.
The timing is deeply poignant. September 11, 2026, will mark the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, and my own federal crime arose directly out of the aftermath of those attacks. At the time, my law practice was failing, I was deep in prescription-drug addiction and increasingly desperate. In the aftermath of September 11, I obtained an SBA Economic Injury Disaster Loan based upon false representations. That conduct became part of the federal case to which I ultimately pleaded guilty and for which I went to prison. Twenty-five years later, on September 11 itself, I will sit before an audience of white collar criminal lawyers and discuss the trajectory from that crime to addiction recovery, incarceration, ministry, reentry, bar reinstatement, the founding of the White Collar Support Group and my return to practicing law. My past did not disappear. Nor should it. I remain accountable for it. But it is no longer the whole story. The challenge—for justice-impacted people and the institutions judging them—is learning the difference between remembering the past responsibly and requiring someone to inhabit it indefinitely.
Ending the White Collar Life Sentence
That distinction is at the center of White Collar Conference 2026, whose theme is “Ending the White Collar Life Sentence.” A prison sentence has a nominal end date. A criminal record generally does not. Long after incarceration come restrictions on employment, professional licensing, banking, housing and travel. There may be continuing restitution obligations, reputational damage, family estrangement and search-engine results ensuring that an event from decades earlier remains among the first things a stranger learns about you. Lawyers call these collateral consequences. But that clinical phrase can obscure their cumulative human effect. This is one reason Prof. Mark Osler, Prof. Rachel Barkow, Prof. Doug Berman and I co-founded the Federal Expungement Initiative. I strongly support a principled clemency system. But clemency alone is structurally inadequate as America’s principal vehicle for long-term restoration. Millions of people with federal records cannot reasonably depend upon the discretionary grace of one person, the President of the United States. A thoughtful federal expungement system would proceed from a different premise. After defined periods of law-abiding conduct and satisfaction of appropriate statutory criteria, eligible people could petition a federal court and present evidence of rehabilitation, employment, restitution, service and reintegration. That is not forgiveness without accountability. It is accountability with an endpoint. A credible justice system should be capable not only of identifying when punishment begins, but, under appropriate circumstances, when it ends.
From Pardon Chasing to Trauma-Informed Support
This is the direction in which the White Collar Support Group® is now moving. We will continue educating our community about pardons, clemency and expungement. We will continue advocating for deserving applicants and for systemic reform. But we do not want a presidential pardon to become the organizing principle of anybody’s recovery. Instead, we are moving toward long-term, trauma-informed support. That means asking different questions. What happens psychologically while someone prepares a pardon application? What happens if the application disappears into a government process for years? What happens after a denial—or after complete silence? What happens inside a marriage when old records are reopened? What happens when adult children encounter details they were once too young to understand? And perhaps most importantly: who is supporting the person while all of this is happening? Those questions belong in the clemency conversation. So do mental-health professionals, trauma researchers, spouses, children, clergy and people with lived experience. The criminal justice system tends to divide a life into procedural stages: investigation, indictment, plea, sentencing, incarceration, supervision and discharge.
Human beings do not recover according to a docket sheet.
Community Is Part of the Remedy
When we founded the White Collar Support Group® in 2016, our core proposition was simple: people should not have to go through this alone. Osnos observed in The New Yorker that our meetings drew heavily upon the traditions of twelve-step recovery. That was not accidental. Recovery communities understand something the legal system often does not: shame thrives in isolation, while sustainable change requires accountability in community. The White Collar Support Group has now held more than 530 Monday meetings and served over 2000 people and families across the United States and internationally. Again and again, we have seen that some of the hardest work begins after the lawyers, judges and prison officials consider the case finished. The work is rebuilding identity and trust. Earning a living again. Repairing relationships where possible. Living with remorse without being destroyed by shame. Finding purpose. Serving other people. Learning that accountability does not require permanent social exile. And, increasingly, learning that redemption cannot depend upon receiving a document bearing the signature of the President of the United States.
Pardons Should Be a Long-Term Possibility, Not a Short-Term Play
I want deserving people to apply for pardons. I want presidents of both parties to grant more of them. I want the clemency system to become more transparent, humane and accessible. But those of us who advise justice-impacted people also have an obligation not to sell them the idea that redemption is one consultant, one political relationship or one election cycle away. Build the life first. Take responsibility. Make amends. Get treatment where it is needed. Repair relationships where they can be repaired. Establish meaningful employment. Serve your community. Help the person coming behind you. Become useful. Then, when the time is right, if a pardon or another form of legal relief is available, pursue it thoughtfully. But do not postpone your life while waiting for permission to have one. The objective is not simply to become pardonable. The objective is to become whole.
White Collar Conference 2026
On Saturday, October 10, 2026, beginning at 9:00 a.m. Eastern/6:00 a.m. Pacific on Zoom, we will convene the third annual White Collar Conference, under the theme “Ending the White Collar Life Sentence.” Networking begins at 8:30 a.m. Eastern. Our keynote speaker, Josh Smith, Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, who was himself incarcerated in a Federal prison, will bring the perspective of senior BOP leadership to questions of incarceration, programming, reentry and restoration. Any serious effort to end the white collar life sentence has to begin before release. Rehabilitation should not begin when someone reaches the prison gate. We will also feature a fireside conversation between Dickie Scruggs and Brent Cassity, two men who reached extraordinary levels of professional success before federal convictions and prison sentences
forced them to rebuild their identities and lives. Their conversation will explore failure, incarceration, humility, second acts and what it means to move forward when professional standing and reputation have been profoundly altered. Next will be a panel on Careers After Prison, moderated by Drew Chapin, with panelists Emily O’Brien, Desmond Meade and Rashmi Airan. And we will convene the panel that gave this article its title: “The Trauma of Asking for Forgiveness: Pardons, Clemency and Reliving the Worst Chapter of Your Life.” We will discuss presidential pardons and federal clemency, but the deeper subject will be what the process does to people. Prominent clemency scholar Prof. Mark Osler and a panel of Federal pardon applicants will examine hope and disappointment, politics and waiting, shame and family consequences, recovery and retraumatization. We will ask how lawyers, pardon advocates, therapists, families and peersupport communities can help people pursue legal restoration without allowing that pursuit to destabilize the lives they have spent years rebuilding. The broader question is one the criminal justice reform community needs to confront: What would a truly trauma-informed system of second chances look like? Josh Smith can help us consider what restoration should begin to look like while a person is still within the federal prison system. Dickie Scruggs and Brent Cassity can speak from lived experience about what happens after extraordinary falls from professional success and public standing. And Mark Osler and our pardons panel will examine what happens years later, when people who have rebuilt their lives are asked to return emotionally and psychologically to the events that brought them into the system. These are not separate conversations. They are stages of the same human journey. We need a culture of restoration in which accountability has meaning, punishment has limits, trauma is acknowledged, community participates in reintegration and a human being is ultimately permitted to become something more than the worst thing he or she ever did. A pardon can be part of that journey. So can federal expungement, addiction recovery, trauma-informed reentry, employment, family reconciliation, peer support and community service. But no single document can confer redemption, and no presidential signature can substitute for the years of work that genuine restoration requires. The deeper task is to help people take responsibility for their past without requiring them to live there forever. That is the work we are trying to do. And it is the conversation I hope we can advance together on October 10th.
Please join us at White Collar Conference 2026. Saturday, October 10, 2026 9:00 a.m. ET / 6:00 a.m. PT on Zoom Networking: 8:30 a.m. ET / 5:30 a.m. PT Theme: “Ending the White Collar Life Sentence” Information, tickets and sponsorships at White Collar Conference.com.
Following is a link to the original article on Medium.
Justice Notes is an ongoing series examining incarceration, rehabilitation, storytelling, institutional power, and the lives that exist behind prison walls.
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