Bryan Stevenson

When you read the book, I will come and see you to talk about it.

And my clients, who were many of them very reluctant readers, some of them not good readers, started this whole reading thing.

And I would send them harder and harder books, and I would pick the books, and then I started letting them pick the books.

A client who was sentenced to life when he was 14, and I've now represented him for 30 years.

And a couple of years ago, he called me late at night, and I was a little kind of provoked, because he's not supposed to call that late.

But I picked up, and I said, why are you calling so late?

He says, it's an emergency.

I said, what's the emergency?

He said, I finished the book that you sent me, and you have to come and see me.

I said, I don't even remember what book I sent you.

And then he told me that he had just finished reading The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky, my favorite book in college.

It was a book that just changed my thinking.

And when he started talking excitedly about all of the things he wanted to discuss that he read in this book,

It just moved me so much.

And here I was talking to someone who people think is beyond redemption, beyond hope, beyond restoration.

And he's talking about how much he loves the characters in this book who are constantly being compassionate, who are navigating difficulty.

And I think that's the gift of believing that we can become better.

Yeah, I think one of the most tragic things that's happened over the last half century is this false idea that some children aren't children.

And it was spread by criminologists and a lot of policy people in the 1980s who were going around arguing

that some kids look like kids and sound like kids.