Evil Cannot Develop into Good

This morning as I was exercising, I was also listening to a talk by Elder Holland entitled, "Borne Upon Eagle's Wings."  It was a talk given at BYU.  A week prior to this address he gave a commencement address at the Utah State Penitentary, the talk is basically what he learned from that experience.  The entire thing was fascinating.  However, I would like to share one portion that served as a great enlightenment to me:

Then I had a third thought. How grateful I was that, in addition to just being just, God decided, because he is who he is, that he had to be a merciful God also. We don't need to take the time to read all of Alma 42, but you ought to sometime. After Alma had established with Corianton that God had to be just, it was then determined that that same God would have to be merciful as well and that mercy would claim the penitent. Now, the reason that thought was different to me was that I'd just been where they had added i-a-r-y to that word. That thought gave me encouragement. Mercy could claim the penitent. I decided that if those men had to go to the penitentiary to take advantage of the gift of mercy, if somehow by going there they found the gospel of Jesus Christ or the scriptures or the Atonement or any of those things that might lead to the others, then their imprisonment was worth it. Let's go to the penitentiary, or let's go to the bishop, or let's go to the Lord or to those that we've offended or to those that have offended us. Our own little penitentiaries, I suppose, are all around us. If that's what it takes to make us truly penitent, to enable us to lay claim to the gift of mercy, then we have to do it.
I know it isn't easy to go back and to undo and to start again and to make a new beginning, but I believe with all my heart that it is easier and surely more satisfying to begin anew than to go on and try to believe that justice will not take its toll. As Richard L. Evans was fond of saying, "What's the use of running if you're on the wrong road?" A favorite British scholar said, using the same metaphor:
I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A [mathematical] sum [incorrectly worked] can be put right; but only by going back till you find the error and then working it fresh from that point. [It will] never [be corrected] by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot "develop" into good, [worlds without end]. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound. [C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Macmillan Co., 1973), p. 6]
So God is just, but mercy claimeth the penitent and the evil can be undone.