Must Love Dogs: Michael Vick Deserves His Second Chance

I'm guilty of a lot of things in my life.

Chief among them is probably taking for granted the freedoms I'm lucky enough to enjoy as a citizen of the United States. 

I'm not rich.  I'm not famous.  I'm not politically connected.  I don't live in Michael Vick's world.  I can at best glimpse its hazy outline through the constant media coverage his life has become.

But what we both do share is a citizenship that affords us a second chance.

The term "debt to society" is thrown around mostly as a weak synonym for a prison sentence in our world.  We take it as a nothing term, a filler, a daytime Law & Order buzzword.

But what it means, and why it's such a fundamental principle to any functioning society, is that as an individual you've done something for which you owe your fellow man.

Paying that debt means more than being deprived of a luxury; it's not a time-out.  It's, at least in this system, a time period by which you sacrifice your freedoms because you've done wrong.  You have a debt that needs to be settled.

Michael Vick settled that debt in the eyes of the court system.  While most of us don't really think of it in such a way, the court system is a representative of our rights as a society.  Its word is our word, its decision is our decision.

Vick committed a horrible act upon defenseless animals.  As an avid dog lover, I can't simply dismiss that fact.  For the rest of my life I will associate Vick's name with whatever evil allows people to hurt dogs.

But I've never been locked up.  I've never been imprisoned.  I've never had my freedoms taken from me.  Michael Vick has.  That's what our society deemed appropriate for what he did.

Was it enough?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  That's a matter of opinion.

But if you have a problem with his sentence you should bring those concerns to the people who handed it out, not the man to whom it was given.

What should Vick have done?  What could Vick have done?  Ask for more prison time? Walk back to the judge at the end of his sentence like some perverted Oliver Twist?

"Please, sir, can I have another six months?"

Michael Vick has had his livelihood stripped from him.  He's gone bankrupt.  He's lost two of the most valuable years of his life and greatly cheapened whatever value his remaining years may have.

A football career is among the most ephemeral commodities any young man can possess, and he's had the prime years of it taken from him because of his actions.

Now people are out for blood as well?  They want to take it all from him?  Where does it end?

What if Michael Vick's talent was that he was a brilliant business mind?  That he could detect minute patterns in the stock market and was a savvy investor?  What if his crime were murdering another man?  Or raping a woman?

I don't think Vick's crime—as heinous as it was—deserves a life sentence, where his prison isn't a federal facility with concrete and bars, but a world where he is not allowed to bring the talents he was given and has cultivated to bear, with whatever success they may bring him.

Should we not allow murderers, once they've served their time, to make above a certain wage?  Should society hang over them, waiting to strip any comfort they might find?

Isn't their crime just as heinous?  I love dogs, but there's no path by which a right-thinking person can say murdering a person is not the greater crime.

Michael Vick, like the millions of other ex-convicts in this country who are now free, has paid his debt to society.

He is bankrupt, his talents are likely fading, most of his friends either ratted him out or no longer find it profitable to call him a friend, and it's unlikely any team will ever commit a large contract to him again.

Has he learned his lesson?  I don't know, but that's not the way our prison system works.  It may be the way Roger Goodell's NFL works, but Michael Vick is owed a second chance to prove he can be a good person.

Our prison system provides benefits to those who show progress in reshaping their lives (even as many of those facilities strip away the programs that best help those convicts accomplish that), but it does not require of them anything but time.

Perhaps Michael Vick hasn't learned any lesson other than acting on his baser impulses will have consequences he can't afford.  Perhaps the only reason he'll stop the behavior that landed him in jail is because it may land him there again.

But if, as a society, our concern is only that he's "learned his lesson," then maybe our concern shouldn't begin and end with how many football games Michael Vick must miss this fall.

Maybe our concern should be with a prison system that seems to think keeping men and women unable to function in society in a box with other men and women unable to function in society will magically turn out productive, healthy people.

Maybe Michael Vick isn't the problem here at all.

This country is a lot of things, but I'm glad to know at the very least it's a place where a man can be guilty of many things and still be allowed the opportunity to make up for them.

T.J. Donegan is a B/R featured columnist for the New England Patriots. Track him on Twitter here. He can also be reached at [e-mail].