Massive steel doors. Razor wire everywhere. No personal belongings allowed inside. Even my papers were inspected. A near full-body search, including my sleeves and heels. What am I doing here? I kept asking myself. I must be lost.
Throughout my childhood, my mother insisted on three things, especially while raising two Black sons: no drugs, no gangs, and no prison. Even today, when praying for my brother and me, she still asks God to “lock all the prison doors.” Growing up, those warnings reinforced my understanding of prison as a place for people who had done wrong—a place I was supposed to avoid at all costs. Yet here I was, for the first time in my life, walking through the doors of a medium-security prison deep in rural Massachusetts. Not as an inmate, but as a student attorney preparing to meet with my client, who had been incarcerated for nearly fifteen years.
As someone who’s always been fascinated by law enforcement and the criminal justice system, I grew up with a relatively simple understanding of law and order: cops were the good guys, criminals were the bad guys, and the former were responsible for putting the latter behind bars. I first dreamed of becoming a police officer, and when my parents disapproved, I set my sights on becoming a prosecutor instead. I believed strongly in accountability and punishment, and to a large extent, I still do.
But while my views of law enforcement have matured over the years, there was another side to my childhood understanding of good guys vs bad guys that I hadn’t examined quite as closely: the “bad guys” themselves.
For much of my life, I viewed people convicted of serious crimes primarily through the lens of their wrongdoing, allowing their actions to define my perception of them. That’s part of why I intentionally enrolled in the Compassionate Release and Parole Clinic this semester: to challenge that perspective by helping incarcerated individuals prepare for their parole hearings. It made for a striking contrast—someone who had once dreamed of putting people behind bars was now preparing to advocate for their release. I expected the experience to push me out of my comfort zone, but I hadn’t anticipated just how deeply it would challenge my assumptions.
I carried those assumptions with me when I entered prison that day. My client was serving a life sentence following a conviction for second-degree murder. Under my usual way of thinking, that conviction alone would’ve been enough to shape my entire perception of him.
But then I met my client.
We had spoken virtually before, but sitting across from him in that small visitation room was different. For nearly two hours, we spoke about his life, his upbringing, and his hopes for the future. We discussed our shared Haitian background. He talked about his children, now teenagers, who visit him, and his extensive efforts to better himself during his incarceration. He reflected thoughtfully on the events that had brought him here.
At times, it hardly felt like I was sitting inside a prison. Between the Haitian Creole we spoke and the ease of our conversation, it felt more like I was catching up with an uncle or a cousin.
I was struck by how thoughtful he seemed, how openly he expressed remorse, and how seriously he appeared to take his personal growth. We laughed and joked at times. At other moments, the conversation became much more serious. He grew emotional, and I found myself holding back tears of my own. I hadn’t expected to feel so connected to someone I might once have judged almost entirely by his conviction.
Somewhere during that conversation, the label I’d carried into the room began to feel inadequate. What moved me most was realizing that, had I never sat across from him that afternoon, I might never have known this side of him: his thoughtfulness, his remorse, his hopes for a future beyond prison. I likely would’ve continued to see him only through his conviction, allowing the worst thing I knew about him to define everything else I assumed about him.
But sitting across from him, I saw so much more than a conviction or a life sentence. I saw a person whose identity extended far beyond the crime for which he had been incarcerated.
Recognizing someone’s humanity doesn’t erase the harm caused by their actions or the importance of accountability. But that Friday afternoon, I began to understand that holding someone accountable and defining them entirely by their wrongdoing are two very different things.
I’d spent my entire life trying to stay on the right side of those prison doors, believing that the people behind them were simply the bad guys. Yet walking through those doors taught me that the people on the other side were far more than the crimes that brought them there.
Dave Sainte-Luce is a 2L student at BC Law. Contact him at sainteld@bc.edu.
