Let’s Look Each Other in the Eye: Moving Beyond “Second Chances”

by Community Relations Manager Clinton "CeCe" Bell

For a long time, we’ve used the phrase second chances when talking about men and women returning from incarceration. It sounds compassionate. It feels good to say. But if we pause—if we really sit with those words—we see the quiet distance they can create.

Because what is a second chance if not the suggestion that someone stands at a deficit? That they’ve fallen while the rest of us have stood. That they’re lucky we’re willing to offer them another shot.

But isn’t life more complicated than that?

The truth is: we have all been prisoners. Of bad decisions, pride, addiction, ego, selfishness, anger, or fear. We’ve all taken turns we shouldn’t have—some of us behind closed doors, some of us simply not caught, some of us given grace before the gavel ever slammed down.

The man who served time is not so different from the man who self-sabotaged his family. The woman returning from prison is not so different from the woman living with the quiet consequences of private mistakes. Different chapters—same book.

To call it a second chance can suggest there’s a separate class of people—those below, reaching up for approval or mercy. But that’s not the Dismas way. That’s not restoration.

At Dismas, we meet eye to eye. Shoulder to shoulder. We walk alongside each other as we untangle what life has handed us. This work isn’t about charity. It’s about community, partnership, and seeing the full humanness in each of us.

The courtroom may have separated us, but life has always bound us together. The bars may have closed behind some, but regret locks doors in every heart. The sentence may have been served, but the struggle for wholeness belongs to us all.

Every person who walks through our doors has something to give—wisdom born of hardship, perspective born of pain, strength born of survival. We are not rescuing them; we’re inviting them to share their gifts with a world that needs them.

So let’s use second chances thoughtfully. It’s a phrase we’ll continue to share because it’s widely understood, but we should remember that every one of us is living out some version of one. Let’s stop measuring people by the worst chapter of their story. Let’s step down from the platform of pity and sit at the table of partnership.

Because restoration doesn’t happen when we reach down.

It happens when we stand together.