A young man growing up in Alabama. At school a bully picked a fight, and knocked him out. When the boy regained consciousness, he vowed to get revenge and kill the bully. He went home, grabbed his mother’s .22 and set out to find his adversary. For a moment, his destiny hung in the balance.

    With the bully in his gun sight, he could simply pull the trigger and his classmate would be history. But at that very instant, he asked himself a question: What will happen to me if I pull the trigger? And another image came into focus - a picture as painful as any imaginable. In the split second which would take a boy’s life in one of two very different directions, he visualized, with chilling clarity, what it would be like to go to jail. That potential pain was greater than the anticipated satisfaction of revenge. He re-aimed his gun and shot a tree.

    This boy was Bo Jackson, describing the scene in his auto-biography. There’s no question that at that pivotal point in his life, the pain associated with prison was a force more powerful than the pleasure he thought killing the other boy would bring.