The Case for a Second Look

“The only place we can ensure that society is safe […] from the destruction and violence that Devin Giordano is clearly capable of is for him to remain in a prison cell for the rest of his natural life.”

Those words were spoken by the prosecutor at my sentencing, delivered as though they described a logistical necessity rather than a moral judgment.

I was nineteen years old—addicted to drugs, disconnected from myself, and incapable of articulating who I was or who I might become. I stood there listening as my future was condensed into a single assertion: that safety required my permanent removal, and that whatever else I might one day be was irrelevant.

At the time, I did not argue with that version of myself. How could I? I had caused harm. I had made choices that could not be undone. The idea that I was irredeemable did not feel like an insult; it felt like a sentence layered on top of the one already being imposed.

Those words did more than describe risk. They proclaimed that change, even if it occurred, would not matter—that no future version of me would ever be worth reconsidering.

That is one of the reasons I struggle with the word redemption. I do not believe it is mine to claim. I can describe how I have changed. I can speak to the discipline I have developed around accountability, the slow dismantling of habits that once governed me, and my daily effort to live differently. But redemption, in my view, cannot be self-issued.

Over the years, I have watched men who were not expected to live past eighteen earn college degrees. I have watched men who once lived entirely in reaction speak openly about accountability and change. I have been part of rooms where incarcerated men built mentorship programs and nonprofits, not because they were required to, but because they had learned to care deeply about who they were striving to become. Transformation inside prison is not rare. What is rare is its recognition.

The system I live under has no built-in moment for reassessment. There is no automatic question that asks whether the person standing years later is the same one who was sentenced. In 2017, I was given a sentence longer than the number of years I had been alive when my crime occurred.

Second chances are not being argued for only by people like me, speaking from inside prison. They are also being named by those who sit at the top of the system that put us here. Earlier this year, Rowan Wilson, the chief judge of New York State’s highest court, urged lawmakers to pass the Second Look Act—legislation that would allow people serving long sentences to return to court and ask whether the punishment imposed years ago still makes sense.

Judge Wilson was not calling for leniency. He was acknowledging something the law rarely admits: that sentences are often imposed long before anyone can know who a person will become. Versions of this law already exist elsewhere. They have been tested. People granted second looks return to their communities at low rates of re-offense. The world does not come apart.

I remain incarcerated, living under a sentence that treats my worst moment as my final one. But the fact that the state’s top judge is now saying that people are not fixed in time matters. It means the door I was told was sealed was never as closed as it seemed.

I know brothers who embody that truth daily—men who have endured decades under sentences that presume they are finished, even as they continue to show up for others.

One of them is Mujahideen Muhammad, who lived under these same conditions for more than twenty-four years and devoted himself to mentoring men the system had already written off. Knowing him and witnessing his work makes it impossible for me to accept the idea that people cannot change—not because change is easy, but because I have watched it happen in a place with no cameras, no awards, and no recognition.

None of this erases the harm that brought us here. It does not undo what was lost. I do not ask to be forgiven. I do not ask to be declared redeemed. I ask a narrower, harder question: what does justice require when a person has truly changed, when accountability has taken root, and when that work continues without recognition?

Though the system may still be deciding whether it will ever look again, the answer to that question will say less about who I was at nineteen than about what we believe people are capable of becoming.

---

Devin A. Giordano is an incarcerated freelance writer and college student in the Bard Prison Initiative. His writing examines prison policy and its failures, the lived realities of felony murder convictions, and the intersections of mental health and diagnosis inside the carceral system. His work has appeared in Inquest, The Progressive, Truthout, and other outlets.