M. Gessen

If I were Priscilla, I'm sure I would want Alan to be locked up forever.

If I were Priscilla, that would feel like justice.

But I'm not Priscilla.

I should be able to see the bigger picture.

And in this bigger picture, things had shifted.

It was Alan who was alone now, fighting for his life.

Yes, I thought that his soft voice and his tears might be an act, and his long beard and stooped posture at least in part a costume.

But I also knew that he had been in jail for almost a year, that he had lost his adored son and his nifty life full of gadgets and Tinder matches, his businesses, his ambitions, and would surely lose his law license.

I knew that the American prison system is inhumane, that it doesn't help people become better, and that in the end it offers victims almost nothing too.

I wasn't even a victim in this case.

And yet, I wanted vengeance.

Was it time to admit that I was a hypocrite?

Who opposed carceral justice only when it was about strangers?

Not when it was about my own family?

As a journalist, I try to exercise what's called strategic empathy.

to understand why people do what they do, even if what they do is ultimately unjustifiable.

And maybe I had to admit now that this approach was always more about being strategic than about feeling empathy.

But when it came to my cousin Alan, I couldn't even find my way to strategic empathy.

I couldn't even imagine what he was thinking, much less what he was feeling when he did all the horrible things he did.

But then that changed.