Solveig's useful question falls at a most relevant time for me. I have been discussing something similar with a very close relative. This relative was once a lawyer. He was found to be taking large sums of money from deceased clients estates and spending in on luxury goods. £1m went missing but only some of that could be traced back to him. This was a big deal - it made the centre spread of one of the UK's main tabloid newspapers. He was sent to prison, his wife left him and his children disowned him as did just about 99.9% of his friends because this was a guy who had been a pillar of the local community and what is more he denied the crime, enlisting equally respectable (if not more so) friends and associates as character witnesses. He didn't steal from any blood relatives but none had really settled to trust him since. So, he left behind him a trail of damaged people who supported him.
During the time inside, he received a lot of support from his blood relatives and when he came out he was given home with his mother. She was in need of support because she had just lost her husband after an extremely difficult illness - cerebral vascular disease, which had him behaving in a dangerous and threating way. (She feared for her life and slept maybe less than 5 hours a night over at least a year in case he crept into her room.) His previous inlaws refused to have any contact with her because they felt that he was her responsibility and that she should have apologised for what he had done, and they left her to pick up the debts he had left and those his wife picked up while he was inside, to the tune of close on £35k !!!) However, he eventually left her because she was a constant reminder of what he had done, and he wanted to forget.
Not just that, he and all the other felons in prison were told they should forget what they had done to enable them to "move on."
His first "job" when he came out was to train as a "life coach" with some US-based outfit. The business didn't work, I imagine because such things are not taken terribly seriously in the UK - at least, that seems to be the case. (Motivational speakers are one thing as are "counsellors" but "life coaches", quite another. One step up from snake oil salesmen.) Meanwhile, his Mum was under increasing pressure because theirs was a small town and while he seemed to ignore all the stares and gossip, she couldn't. Indeed, she knew there was a lot of animosity towards him and she feared there would be trouble, that he would be attacked. It didn't help when a main TV company made a documentary in which he featured in a most negative light driving her car (which they made out to have been his car ...) She decided to flee the area and live near me, about 300 miles away, and he was meant to go with her, to give her support and start a new life. At the last moment he decided to leave her and live in church accommodation still in the town, all part of his "forget" strategy.
So, while she was still struggling with what he had done, he was comfortably forgetting about it and dismissing everyone else's psychological issues with his crime as "their problem", which he could not do anything about. He finally re-married and came to live in visiting distance of his Mum ... but he kept mostly well out of the way as her mental health continued to deteriorate. She is now in a nursing home and she's lucky if she gets a visit once a month - I think she got maybe 6 last year, and four of them were over two week periods.
His blood relatives tend to think he owes her more support. He says it isn't that he doesn't appreciate what she did for him but that he wants to avoid anything and anyone who remind him of his previous life because it is too distressing. So, he moves on and leaves many others affected by what he did languishing behind .... following the advice he got in prison, to forget and move on.
I tell you all this as an example of how his crime has affected just one of those it touched deeply. And then, there were his children ... Just some of the people he damaged that this ex-felon is forgetting. The fall-out went much further and continues to this day.
Now, his was just a "white collar crime". Many other felons do worse. Some of them do less but repeat their crimes. However, everyone one of them will have received the same counselling as him: If you want to to start a new life, forget your old one and "move on". However, statistics collected a few years back in the UK suggest that an increasing number of felons sent to prison re-offend when they are released. The last count is that 65% of them re-offend. Did they forget to forget, or did they conveniently forget the damage they did?
I counselled that one cannot "move on" until one is reconciled with the past, otherwise the "sins" of the past will weigh heavy on one';s shoulders, dragging behind like the chains of Marley's ghost. He says all that is necessary to "move on" is to get his God's forgiveness and then use a psychological technique he learnt as a life coach, and it's easy to forget ... as long as you don't go near people who remind you of the past.
My idea - which he rejects - is that one should not forget anything we have done wrong to others until they have forgotten. (If that is a "life sentence", so be it because theirs is a life sentence as a consequence of that the other did to them.)
What do you think? Who is right, who is wrong, and why? Should felons be encouraged to forget their crimes or to remember them, even to be reminded of them?
