Justice Notes: Self-Respect
A White-Collar Journal forum for criminal justice, lived experience, and the personal search for redemption
Last week, I wrote about the complicated issue of remorse—both for the offender and the victim. This week, I turn to its close relative: self-respect. For anyone returning from prison, the struggle to respect oneself is often the most enduring punishment of all.
SELF-RESPECT
Last week, I wrote about the complicated issue of remorse. This week, I turn to its close relative: self-respect. Joan Didion, whose essay on the subject remains a classic, wrote that “to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, and that platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception.” Bill Parcells, the legendary football coach, once noted that it’s very hard to fool “the man in the glass.”
For a person released from prison—after years of persistent and systematic humiliation—reentering the world with any measure of self-respect can feel like an impossible goal.
In the early months of freedom, the glow of reentry masks the deeper confrontation with oneself that eventually must be faced if a felon is to rejoin a community already predisposed to reject them. When that glow fades, a deep alienation takes hold. But surprisingly, the alienation from the community is often less severe than the alienation from ourselves.
In prison, among other felons, there’s a strange comfort that allows us to sidestep fully confronting the crimes that brought us there. Inmates—myself included—routinely edit the biographies of their crimes. We smooth the edges, omit the worst details, tell the version we can live with. But upon release, as we reconnect with the larger world, we feel the full weight of our breach of the social contract.
Too often, we fall back on familiar strategies—rationalizations, excuses, even the dangerous reframing of what was, in truth, a failure of character as nothing more than “poor decisions.” Decisions we insist we’ll never make again.
The turning point in this work is the willingness to dismantle that self-deception. To take full responsibility for our failures of character. To accept that the person who committed those acts is not someone we can simply disown, but someone we must understand if we are to move forward. Only then is it possible to inch toward a restored self-respect—one grounded not in denial but in clarity, humility, and real change.
In my own case, I remain a work in progress. The failure of character, the scope of the damage, the financial devastation, and the impact on my family are almost impossible to lay to rest. They remain, as Joan Didion put it, “that most uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves.”
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