The Inmate Isn’t Their Crime. (3 min 39 sec)

We’ve all seen it: the polished reporter walking into a state prison, microphone in hand, ready to sit across from a convicted inmate. The camera pans over barbed wire fences and concrete walls, a visual cue that we’re about to descend into the depths of human depravity. The interviewer leans in, their voice low and calculated, asking the convicted murderer or rapist: Why did you do it? How do you live with yourself? The subtext, of course, is unmistakable: You are not like me. I am not like you. You are a monster.

The goal of these interviews is rarely understanding. The reporter isn’t there to connect; they’re there to highlight the “otherness” of the inmate. By exposing the horrors of someone else’s actions, they unintentionally (or intentionally) elevate themselves. They sit as judge, jury, and angel. The message is clear: Look how different we are from the people who commit these atrocities.

But are we really so different?

The ego thrives on separation. It loves to assign roles: angel versus devil, right versus wrong, savior versus sinner. In the ego’s world, there must always be someone to blame — and someone to exalt. Highlighting someone else’s failures is one of the ego’s favorite tricks because it absolves us of looking at our own flaws. I could never do that, we say, as if murderous thoughts and dark impulses don’t also visit our minds. The difference? We suppress them, deny them, or dress them up in more socially acceptable packaging.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: the same thought system that drives a person to commit a heinous crime is alive and well in all of us. The inmate isn’t their crime, just as you aren’t your harshest judgments. Both are temporary constructs, creations of a fractured mind.

This is where the world gets stuck. The idea that beneath the inmate’s crime and the reporter’s judgment lies something identical is a truth most people refuse to confront. Why? Because it means we have to acknowledge that we are not better. It means we have to let go of the illusion of superiority. And the ego cannot handle that.

The inmate’s crime is not their essence. It’s not who they are. Just as your judgments, fears, and shame are not who you are. These are surface-level distractions, masks we wear in the game of life. Beneath them lies the eternal self — unchanging, untainted, whole.

Yet, when we look at an inmate, we don’t see that. Reporters don’t go into prisons to meet the eternal self. They go in to meet the damned soul, to hold it up as an example of what not to be. They want the audience to gasp, to feel outrage, to say: Thank God I’m nothing like them.

But the inmate isn’t a damned soul. The inmate is no more damned than you or me. What’s damned is the thought system that convinced us to turn against one another in the first place.

Imagine this: you’re sitting across from someone on death row. You look them in the eye — not to judge, not to condemn, but to see. Can you find yourself in them? Could you recognize that, beneath all the stories, you are the same?

This isn’t about condoning actions or excusing harm. It’s about seeing past the labels. Because when you strip away the labels — murderer, victim, reporter, viewer — what’s left is connection. And connection terrifies us because it tears down the walls we’ve built to separate ourselves from one another.

If the world is a mirror, then the inmate is your reflection. Their thoughts, their actions, their pain — it all exists in some form within you. The difference is that you’ve convinced yourself otherwise. You’ve projected your shadow outward, labeled it a monster, and distanced yourself from it. But what if the only thing separating you from the inmate is the story you’ve told yourself?

So, what do we do with this uncomfortable realization? We stop playing the ego’s game. We stop pretending that someone else’s darkness absolves us of facing our own. We stop defining people by their worst actions and start looking for the self beneath it all — the self that no act, no thought, no story can taint.

Because in the end, the question isn’t, How could they do that? The real question is, Can you see yourself in them?

If you can’t, you might want to ask yourself: What story am I still holding onto to keep us apart?

#thinkgod
I am sorry.
Please forgive me.
Thank you.
I love you.