By Kellie Walenciak | Thoughts on Innovation
I know a woman who made one bad decision on one bad night. She got behind the wheel after drinking and lost eight years of her life because of it. She’s thoughtful, educated, and from a good family — the kind of person you’d recognize in your own circle. Maybe in your mirror.
I think about her every time I remember my father.
He was driving home from a bar one night, swerving enough that a police officer pulled him over. The officer recognized him, knew he’d been drinking, and made a choice. He followed my father home instead of arresting him and watched him pull into the driveway. That’s it. That’s the whole story.
I’ve thought about that night a lot over the years, and about my own version of it. I remember one night in particular, driving home later than I should have, telling myself I was fine, watching the road a little too carefully the way you do when you’re not entirely sure you should be on it. I made it home and went to bed. I never thought about it again until I started doing the work I do now. The moments that could have gone differently but just didn’t. Not because I was careful. Because I was lucky.
April is Second Chance Month, a nationwide effort encouraging employers and communities to give people with records a fair shot at rebuilding their lives. If you’ve heard of it at all, you might have rolled your eyes a little. Second chances for people who broke the law?
But here’s what I’ve learned: roughly one in three American adults has some form of criminal history — a number comparable to that of those who hold four-year college degrees. And for most of them, the sentence doesn’t end when they leave prison. It follows them into HR offices and onto rental applications, demanding that the worst moment of their life define the rest of it. Indefinitely.
Most of us already believe in second chances. We just call them something else.
We call it parenting when our kids break curfew and we ground them for a week instead of writing them off. We call it mentorship when an employee makes a costly mistake and we sit down with them instead of letting them go. We call it grace when someone we love lets us down and we decide the relationship is worth more than what happened. We extend it instinctively to the people we care about because we understand, without having to think about it, that a human life is too big to be defined by its worst moment. We just forget that when the person in front of us is a stranger with a record instead of someone we love with a story.
The woman I know who lost eight years has rebuilt her life. She works now. She shows up early, stays late, and does the kind of job most of us take for granted. She’s deliberate in a way that’s almost hard to watch. She’s grateful for things the rest of us consider unremarkable and careful in ways the rest of us have never had to be. She didn’t get a quiet second chance like my father did… like I did. She had to fight for hers, and she’s still fighting, because the doors that closed when she was sentenced didn’t all reopen when she was released.
The difference between her life and mine came down to the outcome of a single moment. Same decision. Different night. Different everything after.
I think about that more than I probably should. And not nearly enough.
Editor’s Note: Kellie Walenciak is head of global communications for Phoenix-based Televerde,
