Translator: Timokleia Kousi Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
Let's jump right in and get a little personal.
Please raise your hand if you have ever, at any point in your life,
done anything, for which you wish that you could be forgiven.
Big or small, it doesn't matter.
Thank you very much.
It is not always easy to admit, but unless you happen to be perfect,
chances are you have done something in your life
for which you'd like to be forgiven.
So what is forgiveness?
Forgiveness does not mean forgetting the past.
It doesn't mean approving of or even accepting the wrongs
that have been done to us.
Forgiveness simply means
acknowledging the thing that was done and releasing the person that did it.
It has nothing to do with what they might deserve.
Forgiveness is an act of mercy and of compassion.
I believe that forgiveness is in the best interest,
not only of the person whom we might forgive
but that it is also in our best interest.
Because when we forgive,
we are also letting go of thoughts and emotions
that can hold us down, poison our bodies,
and actually shorten our lives.
Forgiveness has the power to transform,
both on a personal and on a cultural level.
I don't know about know about you,
but I've had a lot to forgive in my life and even more to be forgiven for.
When I was three and a half years old,
my father was sentenced to 64 years in federal prison for selling marijuana;
hundreds and hundreds of tons of marijuana.
They ended up charging my mom as well, ,
and she spent a little more than three years in federal prison.
So I spent a lot of my childhood in prison visiting rooms,
and waiting at home for letters from my father
that he would just never write.
That took a very long time to get over and even longer to forgive,
but I can tell you that it was at least as much a release for me,
as it was for them.
More than anything though, I have a lot to be forgiven for.
When I was 35 years old, I became a convicted felon myself.
It started in 1988.
At the age of 13, I thought I had discovered a whole new world,
when I found out about the Internet.
I became one of the earliest software pirates.
I set up a free and open file server
where anybody could share whatever they wanted with whoever they wanted.
I thought I was creating some sort of stupid nerd utopia,
when what I was actually doing
was creating a platform for stealing other people's property.
Worse than that though, as I got older and became distracted by real life,
a career in social services, getting married, raising a family.
I paid less and less attention,
and I turned a blind eye to what was on my server,
what was being done with it, and what was being distributed from it.
And in the end, that's what led to my own incarceration.
As a father, this is one of the hardest things that I ever have to talk about
because it was some of the most disgusting stuff that you can imagine,
including child pornography.
Now, you will not find me on any public list of sex offenders.
I didn't watch those movies, and I never made any money from it.
But that didn't make it any less my responsibility.
I spent a little more than two years in prison to pay for it,
and I am still deeply ashamed of what I did.
And that's why you will find me working hard every day, to turn my mistakes
and the experiences that followed into something positive for others.
Everything that I have been through in my life, as a child of two prisoners,
as a professional, working in social services,
and as somebody who has put himself and his family through hell
and come out the other side,
this is a gift, that I want to pass on to others, to learn from.
I am speaking about the power and the profit of forgiveness,
because I have lived it from both sides.
I have had to forgive, and I have been forgiven by God,
by my family, my friends, by my children.
Even by my ex-wife, whom I am so proud and so grateful to tell you,
not only forgave me, but in June of this year, became my wife again.
(Applause)
So you can see the role that forgiveness has played in my life.
And I have talked about what forgiveness is,
but what I haven't told you is that for the last nine months,
I have been quite literally in the business of forgiveness.
In the midst of everything that I have been through,
and everything that I have done both personally and professionally,
I have been led to a profoundly simple solution,
for the crisis of repeat incarceration in our country.
I am the founder and the executive director of The Prison Recovery Network;
a non-profit social start-up with a national scope,
and the unique mission
to provide the support necessary for every family to heal,
and every former prisoner to successfully rejoin society.
You see, we believe that the most important factor
in success after prison is relationships:
positive, healthy, meaningful relationships
with people in the community who lead stable lives.
And that requires forgiveness
on both a personal and a cultural level.
For our institution that means that we provide long term case management,
for both the prisoner and their family,
from the time of conviction until five years after their release.
It means listening without judgment,
providing parenting and relationship tools,
pre-release planning, resource development services, and more;
all at no cost.
I know many of you probably imagine
that this is something that prisons already do,
or that parole officers do it, or that somebody must be doing this.
But the sad fact is that much of the time,
there is little or no help at all for prisoners or their families.
We do a very good job at punishing crime,
but we do precious little as a society
to bring all of these men and women back into the fold.
In the United States, we incarcerate more people, per capita,
than any other nation in the world;
we incarcerate fully 1% of our own population.
Every year, more than 700, 000 men and women are released from our prisons.
That's enough to repopulate the city of Reno three times over.
Do you know the worst part?
More than 76% will be rearrested within five years.
It might surprise you to learn
that most of these people would rather not return to prison.
What surprised me more than anything when I was there
is that some of them do want to return to prison.
And it's not because they love the shiny jewelry
they get to wear all the time.
It's because they have never known a safer, more stable,
or more predictable environment in their lives.
Of those 700,000 men and women,
fewer than 20% are considered to be irredeemable sociopaths.
The other 80%, they are people like you and like me,
but who lack the basic education, the basic experiences,
and most importantly, the relationships that you and I take for granted.
And those 80% are people that we can reach.
In the United States, it costs an average of a little bit more
than 32,000 dollars per year to lock somebody up.
After a certain point, it becomes futile.
It is a waste of time, money, and effort, spent just to throw people away;
people who, in most cases, could be turned into real assets,
for a fraction of the time, a fraction of the money,
and a fraction of the effort.
At the Prison Recovery Network,
we believe we can dramatically reduce recidivism,
for about 1/1,000th that cost,
or just over 30 dollars per person, per year,
to listen, to advise, and to connect people
to resources that largely already exist.
Here is why this matters:
regardless of who you are or what your politics might be,
97% of these men and women are going to be released.
If we continue to isolate them and to punish them
after they have been told they served their time,
guess what is going to happen?
They are going to feel they have to steal something, or rob somebody,
or hurt somebody, just in order to survive.
And it might be in one of our neighborhoods,
and then we are going to have to pay to send them back to prison,
where the whole vicious cycle will start over again.
And if we forgive them, what happens then?
Now, remember, it is not that we forget.
We do not pretend that their crime never happened.
But if we make a choice, to release them from the shame,
and the isolation, and the burden,
that they now continue to carry for years after they have been released,
what happens then?
Men and women reconnect with their families,
they make new friends, they find work, they pay taxes.
And their children?
Who might have followed in their parent's footsteps to prison?
They stay in school instead;
And generational change to crime, and to poverty, are broken forever.
So let me show you just how much of our resources,
your tax dollars might be saved,
if we were to adopt a culture of forgiveness.
If every prisoner and every family were to have a service like ours,
- or at least the 80% that we know that we can reach -
if we could envision a world were no one ever returns to prison
for lack of resources or guidance,
we could save our country 17 billion dollars a year,
for a cost of around 30 million dollars.
We could prevent untold numbers of senseless crimes, heal families,
and reunite hundreds of thousands of lonely and hurting children
with their moms and dads every year.
And best of all, we create a virtuous cycle;
the more people we help this way, the fewer go back to prison next year,
and the fewer that we will have to help down the road.
You know, we are always looking
for more complex and more technical solutions to our problems;
a new app, a more complicated analysis, more intense monitoring of our own people,
But what we are only just starting to realize
is that these are just tools, they are not solutions.
The most human solutions, like learning what it really means to forgive,
these are frequently the most effective and humane solutions available.
The fact that they are also the most efficient and are financially profitable,
that is just the icing on the cake.
So listen: forgiveness is not a panacea; it is not a quick fix.
It requires intent and hard work.
Forgiveness is more like a journey;
one where the obstacles can be unexpected,
But the results, beyond all our expectations.
I won't pretend that I now live a perfect life
But I do have my family back.
I have been able to tell my mom how much I love her, and that I forgive her.
And even though it hasn't been as easy with my dad, I do forgive him,
and I love him more than he has ever given me the chance to say.
Forgiveness can transform lives, like mine, every day.
I think it is time we put those same principles to work
for our community and for our country.
Thank you.