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unusually kind to me. I was surprised at how gratifying I found their enthusiasm for our
work. Most everyone I met offered support and encouragement. A couple of years earlier, I
had been invited to Brazil to talk about punishment and the unjust treatment of disfavored
people. I had spent a lot of time in local communities, mostly in the favelas outside São Paulo,
where I met hundreds of desperately poor people who were intensely interested in talking. I
spent hours in conversation with all sorts of people, from struggling mothers to impoverished
children who sniffed glue to help them cope with hunger and police brutality. The cross-
cultural conversations with those people, who had shared a lot of the same history and
struggle as my clients in America, had a huge impact on me. In Sweden, the people I met
were equally interested and responsive, even though they hadn’t experienced profound need
or shared struggle with an abusive justice system. People all over the country seemed
motivated to connect from a common place of tremendous compassion.
The organizers asked me to speak at a high school on the outskirts of Stockholm.
Kungsholmens Gymnasium is in an extraordinarily beautiful section of Stockholm, an island
surrounded by seventeenth-century architecture. As an American with limited experience
outside the United States, I was dazzled by the age of the buildings and marveled at their
ornate architecture. The school itself was nearly a hundred years old. I was escorted through
the school to a narrow, winding staircase with handcrafted railings that led up to a cavernous
auditorium. Several hundred high school students packed the room, waiting for my
presentation. The domed ceiling of the enormous hall was covered with delicate hand
paintings and Latin phrases written in decorative script. Floating angels and trumpet-wielding
infants danced all over the walls and ceiling. A large balcony packed with more students
seemed to ascend elegantly into the drawings.
While the room was very old, the acoustics were perfect, and there was a balance and
precision to the space that seemed almost magical. I studied the hundreds of Scandinavian
teenagers seated in the hall while I was being introduced. I was impressed by how eager they
appeared. I spoke for forty-five minutes to the strangely silent and attentive group of teens. I
knew English wasn’t their first language and had real doubts about how much they were even
following what I said, but when I finished, they erupted into vigorous applause. Their
response actually startled me. They were so young but so interested in the plight of my
condemned clients thousands of miles away. The headmaster joined me onstage to thank me
and suggested to the students that they offer their own thanks with a song. The school had an
internationally famous music program and student choir. The headmaster asked the choir
students to stand wherever they were in the auditorium and briefly sing something. About
fifty giggling kids stood up and looked around at each other.
After a minute of uncertainty, a seventeen-year-old boy with strawberry blond hair stood
on his chair and said something to his choir-mates in Swedish. The students laughed, but they
became more sober. As they became still and perfectly quiet, the boy hummed a note in a
beautiful tenor voice. His pitch was perfect. Then he slowly waved his arms to prompt these
extraordinary children to sing. Their voices bounced off the walls and ceiling of this ancient
hall and fell into a glorious harmony the likes of which I’d never heard. After starting his
classmates in song, the young man stepped off his chair and joined them in performing a
heartbreaking melody with tremendous care and precision. I could not understand a word of
the Swedish lyrics, but it sounded angelic. Dissonance and harmonic tension slowly resolved