Why Did We Stop Believing that People Can Change?
"Belief in the fixity rather than the fluidity of human nature or maybe in guilt without redemption shows up everywhere -- not just in the formal legal system that decides questions of innocence, guilt and responsibility but also in the social sphere, in which we render verdicts replete with both unexamined assumptions about human nature and prejudices for and against particular kinds of people and acts."
Writer Rebecca Solnit shares more in this thoughtful piece about why it matters that society learns to recognize transformation, and create processes for reparation.
Mr. Masters has been in San Quentin for 41 years, most of that time on death row for a crime I and many others believe, based on careful review of the case, that he did not commit. (After his incarceration for armed robbery, he was convicted of conspiring to kill a prison guard and sharpening a weapon that others used to murder him in 1985.) In the years since his metamorphosis, he has often defused potential violence and offered solace and a trustworthy ear to the sorrows of those around him, both guards and fellow inmates.
But the legal system shows little interest in the strong case for his innocence on the charges and seems to see him as only the surly young Black man it locked up all those years ago. Prisons have long used language such as “correctional,” “reformatory” and “penitentiary” that suggest they are committed to changing their inmates, but in the tough-on-crime era, the prison system focused on punishment rather than reform. To this day, it seems poorly equipped to recognize when those transformations have taken place, unless it’s in a parole hearing, and people sentenced to death don’t get that.
It’s not just prisons and the criminal justice system. We as a society seem unequipped to recognize transformations, just as we lack formal processes — other than monetary settlements — for those who have harmed others to make reparations as part of their repentance or transformation.
Most of us have changed with the times, often in increments too slow to recognize until something brings us face-to-face with something we once believed or accepted and now no longer do. But when Mr. Masters’s case came up for review by the California Supreme Court in 2016, the judges seemed disinclined to take seriously the evidence for his exoneration and uninterested in who he had become. Instead, their written decision brought up numerous allegations of things he had done as a child in California’s foster care and juvenile justice systems. The judges seemed to assume that this behavior long ago strengthened the case that he deserved to be put to death by the state and that the verdict in his stunningly shoddy trial should stand.
Whatever Mr. Masters did in his childhood and youth, he’d also, by the time he was 6, experienced chronic hunger, extreme neglect and violence; and seen his mother almost beaten to death. After his first good foster placement, he entered a series of homes and institutions where he was subjected to intense physical and psychological violence. Early on, he seems to have been a product of those circumstances, but then he built better ones. From death row he has created a wide circle of friends outside, published two books, become a beloved protégé of the Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron, read deeply and taken vows from a Tibetan lama.
This dry language hardly conveys who my friend is, and how much we laugh about everything and anything when I manage to schedule an appointment through the labyrinthine prison system or when he calls me collect. He’s a miracle of cheerfulness through discipline, a person who’s found some kind of interior tranquillity and hope in a life locked up among the most violent Californians and amid the constant angry shouting I can hear when we talk on the phone. His tattoos have faded, as has the young man he used to be. But the system seems uninterested in who he has become despite rather than because of it.
This belief in the fixity rather than the fluidity of human nature or maybe in guilt without redemption shows up everywhere — not just in the formal legal system that decides questions of innocence, guilt and responsibility but also in the social sphere, in which we render verdicts replete with both unexamined assumptions about human nature and prejudices for and against particular kinds of people and acts.
Are you who you used to be? Specifically, are you the person who made that mistake, held that view now regarded as reprehensible or ignorant, committed that harm years or decades ago? Most of us who came of age in the last century have changed our worldviews around race, gender, sexuality and other key issues over the decades. The past decade in particular unfolded like an ad hoc seminar on these issues for those who chose to pay attention.
Still, we often speak and treat one another as though each of us is the sum of all our past beliefs and actions, nothing added, subtracted or transformed. Elizabeth Warren, for example, long ago repudiated her Republican origins to become a leading progressive voice in this country. But in the 2020 presidential campaign, her past was thrown at her by people who saw it as a stain that wouldn’t wash out — or at least saw it as data to weaponize because they preferred other candidates.
The left has many prison abolitionists and advocates for readmitting those who’ve committed crimes back into society, but that generosity is not always extended to people who’ve said something that may have been considered acceptable at the time but no longer is.
Conservatives have their own version of this insistence that to fall from grace is to fall forever. When New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan gave a homily last year about Dorothy Day, the social justice activist and Catholic convert who founded the Catholic Worker Movement, he saw fit to declare, “she’d be the first to admit her promiscuity.” “Promiscuous” seems like a harsh and inaccurate word, and one that insists on her early life as a drag on any consideration of her selflessly heroic later life.
Perhaps some of the problem is the passion for categorical thinking or rather for categories as an alternative to thinking. Some people evolve and change as dramatically as caterpillars turning into butterflies. Some might as well be carved from granite, carrying whatever beliefs and values they were launched with throughout their life. Some get better, some worse, some stay the same. Some shift as a result of societal changes, some for individual reasons and through individual effort. Recognizing this means having to think about each case and also means recognizing that sometimes we don’t know enough to render judgment.
Sometimes we do. Take Angela Davis. Her autobiography, written when she was a young woman just out of prison in the 1970s after she’d been acquitted of all charges, has just been reissued. Her description of her time in jail in New York City is harsh about the lesbian relationships she witnessed there. “I was a product of my time,” she said recently. “And it is very, I should say, inspiring to recognize how far we have come, not only in the way we talk about sexuality, but the way we talk about gender and the way we are constantly challenging binary notions of gender. And all of these transformations have happened as a consequence of the fact that people have dedicated themselves to struggle.”
Dr. Davis, who has long had a woman partner, credits a collective process for her individual evolution. It’s a bold admission, and also a rare one, both in acknowledging past shortcomings and in acknowledging that broad social processes changed her mind. Many overlook that they are the beneficiaries of historical processes, assuming that they changed as individuals. That instinct tends to go hand-in-hand with a willingness to condemn people who existed before those processes questioned old assumptions and offered new views and values.
Jewish culture, as my friend Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg points out, has clear processes for redemption and repair, in contrast to the mainstream of our society. Christianity pays more attention to forgiveness from victims, and its traditions of penance and confession tend to focus on making things right with God rather than with those they’ve harmed. There are some new models, restorative justice chief among them, but for any of them to work, we have to believe in the possibility of transformation — and to embrace the uncertainty it brings: People can change; some have; some insincerely profess to have done so; some won’t or can’t or will relapse. Asserting that someone has not changed may be as untrue, but perhaps it feels more like certainty, and it certainly requires less trust.
What I come up against in all these cases is the need for inquiry and flexibility. Surely the first criterion for whether something is forgivable is whether it’s over, because the person has stopped whatever harmful thing he or she was doing, renounced the principles that led to that harm, made reparations or amends, become a different person. The second is whether there’s enough data to decide, and who should. The idea that it’s all up to the people directly harmed seems good on its face but leads to the confusion between justice and revenge in the courtroom. Furthermore, those who are not affected must also decide how to respond to those who have done damage — whether to hire them or vote for them or befriend them or read their books or watch their movies or even just believe them. But beyond the individual cases comes the need for something broader: a recognition that people change, and that most of us have and will, and that much of that is because in this transformative era, we are all being carried along on a river of change.
Rebecca Solnit is the author, most recently, of “Orwell’s Roses.”