Justice Notes: Judgement
A White-Collar Journal forum for criminal justice, lived experience, and the personal search for redemption
Guest Essay by Stuart Anderson
This week’s Justice Notes features a guest essay by Stuart Anderson, a member of our White Collar Support Group whose story echoes a truth many of us come to understand only after our own fall: judgment is everywhere—given, received, internalized—and it shapes us long after the courtroom doors close.
Stuart writes with clarity about a cycle familiar to anyone who has been processed through the system: the quickness with which we judge others, the swiftness with which others judge us, and the long, quiet work of freeing ourselves from both. His essay is less a sermon than a reckoning—an honest account of what judgment does to a life, and what it takes to loosen its grip.
What follows is his reflection on that journey.
Judgment
by Stuart Anderson
“Judge not, that you may not be judged.”
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus doesn’t warn against discernment—knowing right from wrong or making wise choices. He warns against something far more common and corrosive: the impulse to condemn, to deliver a verdict on someone we barely know.
My own history with judgment has been a long, looping ride. I judged, I was judged, I judged again—an unbroken circuit with countless outcomes. I judged quickly and often: drivers, talking heads on TV, shoppers in the checkout line. Each encounter prompted the same irritated refrain: What’s wrong with them?
Self-centered. Clueless. Narcissists. Assholes.
Politics, culture, religion, even the weather—nothing escaped my commentary.
Then came the case. Suddenly the roles reversed.
Federal agents spoke to me as if my fate were already written.
My own lawyer seemed to approach me with suspicion: He’s probably guilty. Pay the retainer.
The District Court’s Chief Judge—known, without irony, as “Hang ’em High Harry”—delivered his sentence with practiced efficiency. A swift reminder that, in his courtroom, mercy was in short supply.
I brought my judgment habits with me to the federal camp. In RDAP, I told myself I wasn’t like the others—street guys, drug dealers, gang members. They, in turn, saw me as a white-collar type who assumed he was above it all.
Staff at the camp and halfway house had their own reading of me: just another inmate, another file number, another man who must have done something wrong. No need to know the story behind the conviction.
Potential employers ran background checks and made their decisions without hesitation. Risk. Liability. Pass.
Friends weighed in through silence. Distance. Some disappeared altogether.
Even parts of my family struggled to trust the version of me standing before them. What did you do?
And beneath all of it was my own verdict—the harshest by far: I’m not worth forgiving. I failed.
The ride felt endless.
But time has sanded down some of my edges. I’ve become slower to judge and less concerned about being judged. I still slip—it’s human—but I catch myself sooner. I’ve learned that everyone carries a story, shaped by circumstances we rarely see. That old refrain—walk a mile in another person’s moccasins—has become less cliché and more compass.
Here is the quiet truth that finally found me:
The less I judge, the less judged I feel.
Maybe Jesus was naming something simple and enduring—judgment has a way of circling back. What we send out tends to return. And the final word, the word that counts, belongs to someone infinitely wiser than any of us.
If you’re drawn to the idea of storytelling as self-reckoning, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Thank you for reading White-Collar Journal. Subscribing is free, and I hope you’ll continue with me as I explore stories of incarceration, justice, and redemption.
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What is fascinating to me is our PERFORMATIVE expression "America is the land of second acts" when we so often judge people so very harshly that we block the opportunity for a second act.