“Unredeemable?”

There are moments that sneak up on you and refuse to let go. Yesterday was one of those for me. I spent the day at the Gaithersburg Book Festival, one of those rare spaces that feels equal parts celebration and sanctuary. Everywhere you turn, there’s a reminder of what learning can do. Books stacked like possibility. Conversations that stretch your thinking. People who still believe, deeply, in ideas.

And then there are the author talks. So fun! This year, I had the privilege of watching my friend, Dr. Stanley Andrisse, take the stage to talk about his book, Breaking Chains, Building Futures. I’ve heard parts of his story before, but something about hearing it in that setting, surrounded by readers, writers, and people who’d never met Stan and weren’t involved in CJ reform, just interested in Stan’s story, hit differently. He shared that when he was a young man, the prosecutor in his case pushed relentlessly for a 20-to-life sentence. Not just punishment…erasure. At one point, he heard himself described as unredeemable. Not worth the effort. Not capable of change. Not someone the system needed to invest in.

Let that sit for a second.

A human being, written off entirely.

The judge ultimately gave him the mandatory minimum of ten years. And today? Dr. Andrisse is a leading endocrinologist, a scientist, an author, a mentor, by any reasonable measure, someone who is, as I like to say, knocking life outta the park.

So I found myself stuck on that word: unredeemable, because I’ve heard it before. Maybe not always out loud, but embedded in policies, in practices, in the quiet assumptions that shape how systems operate. Oddly enough (or maybe not oddly given that I DO have a degree in theater), my brain made a quick detour to Spirited. Stay with me here.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s a clever twist on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Will Ferrell plays the Ghost of Christmas Present, and Ryan Reynolds plays a modern-day Scrooge, a guy the system has labeled, quite literally, as “unredeemable.” The entire premise hinges on whether someone who has been written off can still change.

Spoiler alert: the answer is yes.

But here’s the thing: that idea feels revolutionary in a movie, and almost radical in real life, because our current legal system, in many ways, still operates as if the answer is no. We don’t always say “unredeemable” out loud anymore. We’ve gotten more sophisticated than that, but we build policies that assume permanence. Sentencing structures that prioritize punishment over possibility. Systems that measure success by how long someone is removed from society, rather than how well they are prepared to return to it. We see it in mandatory minimums, in limited access to education behind the fence, in the quiet skepticism that follows someone long after they’ve served their time. And we see it in who gets invested in…and who doesn’t.

When you design a system around the belief that people cannot change, you stop building pathways for them to do so. You stop funding education, workforce development, mental health supports, and all the other things we know are correlated with positive outcomes. You stop asking, “What could this person become?” and start asking only, “What did they do?”

That shift matters, because belief isn’t just philosophical, it’s operational. If we believe people can change, we build systems that make change possible. If we don’t, we build systems that prove ourselves right. I’ve spent my career inside correctional systems, classrooms behind the fence, and reentry programs on the outside. I’ve sat across from people who, at one point or another, were written off. People who made serious mistakes. People who caused harm.

And also, people who are deeply compassionate, wildly intelligent, and extraordinarily talented. People who, given the opportunity, became peer mentors, college students, small business owners, fathers and mothers reconnecting with their families, leaders in their communities. People who changed. Not in a movie-script, everything-is-perfect kind of way, but in real, gritty, incremental, hard-earned ways that matter. Dr. Andrisse is an extraordinary example, but he isn’t an anomaly. He’s what becomes visible when belief meets opportunity.

So I keep coming back to that question: How many more brilliant minds like his are we missing? How many scientists, educators, entrepreneurs, artists, how many problem-solvers are sitting in cells right now, not because they are incapable of change, but because we’ve decided, somewhere along the line, not to invest in it? What if we got this one thing right? What if we stopped using past behavior as a permanent definition, and instead saw it as a point in time, one that could be learned from, built upon, and moved beyond?

What if “unredeemable” wasn’t a label we assigned, but a concept we rejected altogether? Because here’s what I know, not from theory but from experience: When you give people access to education, to purpose, to relationships that hold both accountability and belief, they rise more often than not.

Not perfectly. Not instantly. But meaningfully.

And meaningfully is enough to change lives. It’s enough to change families. It’s enough to change communities.

Yesterday, at a book festival filled with stories, one stood out because it wasn’t just a story, it was evidence. Evidence that the system got it wrong, and evidence that, even when it does, people can still get it right.

The question isn’t whether change is possible.

The question is whether we’re willing to build a world that believes it is.

Cheers, friends.