The Message I Finally Received

There is an irony in the work I do today that I am only beginning to fully understand.

I work in corrections and with substance use disorders. I sit with people whose worst decisions have followed them for years-sometimes decades.

My work asks me to believe in rehabilitation, recovery, accountability, and the possibility that a person can become so much more than the worst thing they have ever done.

I advocate for those serving extraordinarily long sentences. I ask questions about 2^nd chances, parole, redemption, and whether our systems leave enough room to recognize true transformation.

And I advocate for Karen Brown.

Some people enter your life quietly and leave a mark that keeps speaking long after the first lesson is learned. Karen Brown has been that kind of person in my journey.

What makes that deeply personal is something that can’t be found in a case file.

I knew Karen before prison.

In fact, I had been hanging around Karen in her apartment about a week before the crime that would ultimately lead to her spending and continuing to spend more than four decades behind the razor wire.

We were young.

Life went in dramatically different directions after that.

Karen went to prison.

I remained free.

But freedom and having your life together are not necessarily the same thing.

Karen got her act together long before I got mine together. There is something humbling about writing those words.

The woman society confined-the woman whose identity could so easily be reduced to a crime, a sentence, an inmate number, or the number of years she has been incarcerated-was learning lessons about responsibility, faith, service, discipline and purpose while I was still trying to find my own way.

Over the years, Karen quietly became part of my journey. At the time, I don’t think I completely understood that. Sometimes people influence our lives long before we have the maturity to recognize their influence. I absorbed lessons from Karen even when I wasn’t necessarily ready to heed them. Seeds were planted. Ideas about responsibility, perseverance, faith, giving back and serving others stayed somewhere inside me. Eventually, life has a way of bringing us back to the lessons we weren’t ready to learn the first time.

It took me decades to finally thank her.

And perhaps that is part of why the work I do today feels so personal.

My professional life eventually took me into addiction treatment, recovery services and corrections. I became a clinician. I studied criminal justice, clinical mental health counseling, rehabilitation & corrections. I have spent years working inside correctional facilities facilitating groups with people serving short sentences and those serving very long and sometimes indefinite sentences.

Every day I cross the razor wire.

I’ve had the privilege of sitting across from people society may know primarily by what they did years ago and getting to know who they are now.

That experience changes you. You begin to understand that accountability and humanity are not opposites.

You can acknowledge huge harm and still acknowledge a huge change.

You can believe consequences matter while also believing redemption matters.

And you begin asking a question that has become central to both my professional work and my advocacy:

If we say rehabilitation is one of the purposes of incarceration, what are we supposed to do when rehabilitation actually happens?

Karen forces me to confront that question in a way that is both professional and deeply personal. She has spent decades incarcerated, yet incarceration has not been the entirety of her life. Not by any stretch.

I know Karen today, as a humble woman of tremendous strength and resilience. Her faith is not something she merely talks about. It is reflected in the way she continues to walk her path, serve others, mentor, encourage, learn and find purpose despite living within circumstances that could easily produce bitterness or hopelessness.

That doesn’t erase the past. It demonstrates what a person can do with the years that follow it. And perhaps that is one of Karen’s greatest lessons to me. We don’t get to rewrite yesterday. We do get to decide what we do with tomorrow. For Karen, many of those tomorrows happened behind the razor wires. Mine happened outside. Yet somehow our paths continued to intersect.

Today, I find myself working with people in recovery, advocating for people serving decades in prison, writing about 2^nd chances, questioning policies that can turn sentences carrying the possibility of parole into death by incarceration, and trying to encourage people to look beyond the razor wire.

Maybe none of that is accidental. The older I get, the more clearly, I see the thread running through it all. Recovery taught me the importance of giving back. My work taught me the importance of seeing the person rather than merely the problem. Corrections has taught me how easily human beings can disappear behind labels and numbers.

And Karen taught me-long before I was ready to fully understand it-that a life can still have purpose after terrible mistakes.

Perhaps the most humbling part is realizing that the person behind the razor wire helped teach the person on the outside something about freedom.

Real freedom involves responsibility. It involves facing ourselves honestly. It involves finding purpose beyond ourselves. And eventually, it involves giving something back. It took me a long time to get there. Karen, in many ways, got there before I did.

So today my advocacy for her isn’t based upon pretending her past didn’t happen. It comes partly from knowing that her past was not the end of her story.

Neither was mine.

That belief influences the clinician I’ve become, the work that I do with people in recovery, the conversations I have with people serving long sentences, and the questions I continue to raise about justice and 2^nd chances.

Maybe that is the message I was being taught all those years ago. Give back. Serve others. Use what you’ve survived and learned to help somebody else. It took me decades to fully receive that message. But I finally did. And maybe one of the best ways I can thank Karen Brown now is to pass it on.

Today I understand gratitude differently. Gratitude isn’t simply remembering who helped shape your life. At some point gratitude has to become action. It becomes showing up. It becomes giving back. It becomes service to others. It becomes using your voice when someone else’s has been confined behind walls and razor wires for decades.

I don’t see myself or anyone else as Karen’s rescuer, Karen possessed strength, discipline and faith long before I learned how to consistently practice those things myself.

My role is much simpler. It is to bear witness. To tell people what I have seen. To ask them to consider not only who Karen Brown was at 21, but who she became through all of the years that followed. And perhaps that is the message I received all along: Use what you have survived. Use what you have learned. Give something back. Serve somebody else.

It took me a long time to fully receive that message but I finally did. And one of the most meaningful ways I know to thank Karen Brown is to live it.