- We help people understand how they ended up in
prison and how to get out.
- How you doing, man?
- Good, yourself?
- I'm good.
- It's good to see you, man.
- Good to see you. Good to be back.
Samuel, how you doing, man?
- All right, yourself?
- I'm good, I'm good.
Morning, everybody.
- Morning.
- I'm Keith Wattley from UnCommon Law, and
it's a pleasure to be here.
I don't usually think I'm gonna say that
when I walk into a prison.
But then I get to connect with people like you.
It all sort of transforms my life as much as it does yours.
The focus is not so much on the crime anymore.
The focus is on how well you understand who you were
at the time of the crime,
how you came to be that person, be that way,
and how you've used your time in prison to change.
And then how well you can describe what your life
looks like going forward.
The problem is, in order to do that, people need
to be able to understand and explain
their own personal journey.
Everything with the board process, it's really about
connectingso this is the incident.
The crime is never gonna change.
You did what you did.
How do I now connect these things
that happened when I was 6,
being homeless, bounced around in
foster care, to this?
How do I connect Mom's being a crackhead
and a prostitute, connect back to this?
How do I connect bouncing around foster cares
and group homes and eating out of trash cans back to this?
How do I connect these significant events in my life?
How did they shape my thinking
to where I can go in somebody house,
kick the door in, tie 'em up, and take they sh*t?
How did that all play a factor?
Because you didn't just get there.
You didn't just wake up one day and be like,
eh, it's a good day to go justnah.
There's a backstory.
So you know the what.
You're trying to answer the why.
- If someone has difficulty explaining themselves,
then the commissioners will say,
well, you lack insight. And that lack of insight
can be enough reason to deny parole.
- Insight.
We've probably all heard that word by now, right?
What do you think we mean by that?
What do they mean by that?
- The core of it, uh-huh. Good, good.
- Of what made you commit the crime?
- Ok, so he's getting to another piece of it.
There's the understanding of why it happened,
but he's talking about also understanding the impact
your actions had on other people.
- You're speaking about living amends.
- How do I make a living amends?
You need to start thinking about my victim and then,
who was this person connected to?
And how did me taking this life impact those other lives
that are connected to this one person?
Because you have to own that, too.
The secondary and tertiary harm caused by youthat's,
that's on you, too.
You was the one that knocked that first domino over,
and as a result, all of these other ones went tumbling down
because you first knocked the first one.
And so those, those are things that, when we talk about accountability,
you have to own.
- Thanks for sharing, bro.
Thank you for that. Over here.
- The challenge of this process is that people have to
allow themselves to be
to be seen, to be vulnerable.
And not everybody is,
is up for that
because it's painful stuff,
it's shameful stuff that keeps people stuck.
- I wanna go home.
I want to go home!
- I want to go home.
- No, I wasn't asking y'all to repeat it.
[laughter]
I'm just telling you this is what was inside my heart
and inside my mind. I've been denied three times.
So this accountability workshop is big for me.
I don't know how big it is for y'all, but it's
gigantic for me. 'Cause I didn't tell anybody
that I was putting on a ski mask and went and shot this man,
and I wanted to kill him,
but I did.
And I feel so much better
about myself being able to say it 'cause I know how wrong
I was then, and I'm really apologetic and remorseful
for the way that I once lived.
What I've learned here today is to speak my truth,
own my truth, and that if I go into the board and I'm not
truthful, they'll see it.
They'll ding me on it.
That shame that I held onto, like Brené Brown, 'The Power
of Vulnerability,' it unraveled the connection.
I couldn't connect with them commisioners.
No matter how much I was in there crying and
if you said Frosted Flakes, I'm boo-hoo, you know what I'm saying?
Domino's pizza, boo-hoo.
I'm crying, but they don't care about that.
They ain't trying to hear none of that.
They just wanted me to really dig deep and admit the truth
to myself and to them.
And the fact of the matter is I'm accountable and I'm
responsible, so that denial served as a real wake-up call
for me, and it could cost me another three to five years.
So it took for me to go through this, from holding on to all
of that anger, to actually tap into my heart and be able
to share what I shared with y'all today.
So, thank you.
[applause]
Thank you, man.
- Too few people are granted parole each year.
The system is created
in a way that it allows the parole
commissioners to deny parole based on
almost anything that
makes them uncomfortable. And as long as we have a system
that gives them so much discretion based on a suspicion
about a lack of insight,
we will continue to get this. And especially if we continue
with the broader social narrative about people who
commit violencethey, they should always be feared.
- The narrative about us that's out in the world says that
we don't matter.
And that's bullsh*t, because everybody in this space
you do matter.
And so I'm asking, even challenging y'all now to do the work.
To do the work so y'all can come home and help us with
the heavy lifting that we need to do together on
that side of the wall.
- Keith, bro. Thank you, brother.
- Well, I'm free, and I'm out.
- There's this commonality among people
that we respond to trauma.
That people can say, yeah, I guess, ok, I can get it.
Well, if I had that experience
whenthat that kid had,
I might have made some of those decisions.
Or what if I had interpreted this that way instead of this way?
It allows people to see the person involved.
- You were super nice to me and everything. And I was like, wow,
you know,
I'm not used to people caring about me.
And by giving me that little hope
that's all it takes is a little
then it just explodes from there, you know.
Changed me right there, you know.