Judging From a Distance: What Prison Taught Me About People

It’s harder to keep people at a distance once you know their names.

That may sound obvious, but it took me longer than I’d like to admit to learn it. For a long time, I was comfortable holding people at arm’s length—not in cruelty, but in abstraction. Distance makes things simpler. It keeps the possibility of getting hurt at a minimum.  It allows for categories. It lets us decide who belongs where without having to listen too closely.

Before I spent time inside prison, the men there were mostly ideas to me. I knew the language we use—offender, inmate, criminal. I knew the headlines. I knew the worst outcomes. What I didn’t know were the small, ordinary details that complicate clean conclusions.

What unsettled me most wasn’t learning that some men had done terrible things. I already knew that. What unsettled me was discovering how incomplete my picture of them had been.

There is a moment that comes back to me often.

It wasn’t dramatic. No sermon. No testimony.Just a steel table and benches bolted to the floor, men gathering slowly for a time of what we call prayer and share. A man noticed another, a much older man, struggling to rise from the tight quarters of the bench.  He stood and wordlessly, gently helped him up.

Nothing about the moment would make the news. And yet, it undid me.

Because none of it fit the story I had been telling myself.

We like our categories clean. Us and them. Good and bad. Safe and dangerous. Those divisions make the world feel manageable. They also protect us from uncomfortable self-examination.

When I started spending time with incarcerated men—not visiting once, not observing from a distance, but returning week after week—those categories began to erode. Slowly. Uncomfortably.

I met men who listened well. Men who apologized when they spoke too sharply. Men who prayed for one another with sincerity and consistency. Men who had learned humility the hard way. Men who carried regret without turning it into performance.

I also met men who were angry. Men who were manipulative. Men who were deeply broken.

Both things were true.

But what I hadn’t expected was how familiar so much of it felt.

It forced me to confront a question I hadn’t been asking: Why do I need them to be so different from me?

Distance had allowed me to believe that character is proven by circumstances—that if I had lived their life, I would have made different choices. That if I had faced their pressures, I would have emerged cleaner. That the line separating incarcerated from free was thick and obvious.

Proximity dismantled that illusion.

Listening to men tell their stories—not in dramatic arcs, but in fragments—I began to see patterns that felt uncomfortably close to home: absent fathers, untreated anger, learned survival, pride hardened into habit. Different outcomes, yes. But not different raw material.

That realization didn’t erase responsibility. It didn’t excuse harm. Justice still matters. Victims still matter. Consequences still matter.

But it did collapse something in me.

I could no longer pretend that prison held a different species of human being.

What I found instead were men who had been forced to sit with the full weight of their choices—without distraction, without escape. Some hardened under that weight. Others softened. Some learned to tell the truth for the first time. Some discovered faith not as an accessory, but as oxygen.

And slowly, the question shifted.

Not “How did they end up here?”But “What keeps me from here?”

That is a far more unsettling question, because it doesn’t allow for easy answers. It doesn’t let me stand apart. It requires humility.

Distance had made judgment easy. Proximity made it costly.

Once you’ve shared a meal, even a poor one. Once you’ve prayed beside someone whose life you would have dismissed from afar. Once you’ve seen kindness practiced where it gains nothing—distance stops working the way it used to.

The men inside prison are not saints. Neither am I. They are not monsters. Neither am I.

They are men—capable of harm, capable of growth, capable of faith, capable of kindness. Just like the rest of us.

The more time I spend with them, the harder it becomes to speak in absolutes. The easier it becomes to listen. And the more convinced I am that our greatest errors often come not from malice, but from the comfort of standing far enough away to never have to look too closely.

Once you step inside, once you stay long enough, once stories replace stereotypes—us and them stop being useful categories.

And maybe that’s the point.

Stephen Jernigan - December 23, 2025