Tikkun Magazine, September/October 2009

by Dave Belden

Imagine an America in which crime victims thank the prisons for the chance to express their devastation to violent criminals, and the criminals thank the prisons for teaching them how to own up to and control their own violent behavior so they can leave and become valued members of their community. Think it's a fairy tale? It already happens in one big American city jail, which has reduced re-arrests for violent crime by full graduates of its program by 82 percent.

Flash back to 1994. A woman creates a program that reduces violent incidents in her jail. Skeptics object that the reason is her jail only gets the less violent criminals. She spends two days going through hundreds of records. Her research proves that her prisoners are the same as those at other jails. Her program works. But she only feels depressed. She knows it's not enough.

The program involves learning all day long, the first ever Sheriff's Department charter school in jail, classes for addicts (who make up 90 percent of the inmates), and only approved TV shows. No one has time to be bored. Some amazing turnarounds have happened in prisoners' lives. Her boss the jail director had told her, "I want to pull the jail culture down, down to the studs, and rebuild so it might actually help prisoners and make it a better place to work." And, with the help of many, she has done it. Prisoners have been helped. It is a better place for prison staff to work. But she only feels depressed. So many violent men, and most of their victims are women. She turns to her boss:

"How are they going to stop being violent?"

We both sat there. Neither of us had the answer.

Sunny Schwartz's depression at that moment of apparent success explains much about what happens next. Though she is an attorney, for her there is hardly any sense of "us and them" between herself and the women victimized, or their victimizers. In her new book, Dreams From The Monster Factory, co-written with David Boodell, she writes:

I'd met thousands of these men, and no addiction prevention class or English class in any jail or prison I'd ever seen addressed the issue of a man's violence.

I was frustrated. I was frustrated at work, and also frustrated at home. Becky [her partner] and I argued nonstop, and it felt connected. The violence I despaired over in the prisoners resonated with me. I wasn't physically violent, but I was an emotional bully just like my dad. When Becky didn't agree with me I could be brutal, screaming and yelling, stomping out of rooms, going completely out of control."

Sunny Schwartz is not going to be happy with efforts to manage violence. She wants to go deep and end it, in herself as well as in the physically violent.

Finding the Key to the Criminal Justice Universe

At a conference shortly after, Schwartz, who by this time has worked fourteen years in the jails, first encounters the concept of restorative justice. It lights her up. She doesn't hear the speaker, long-time restorative justice promoter Kay Pranis, but reads this in her information packet:

Restorative justice recognizes that crimes hurt everyone: victim, offender, and the community, and it creates an obligation to make things right. The three principles of restorative justice are offender accountability, victim restoration, and community involvement to heal the harm caused by the crime.

She flies back early to her job at San Francisco's County Jail 7 in San Bruno with a new purpose: to run programs that deal head-on with male violence. "Listen to me, this is it," she tells her boss. "This is the Kabbalah, the key to the criminal justice universe."

With the approval of two courageous men, San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey and jail director Michael Marcum, she creates the Resolve to Stop the Violence Program. At first she thinks "RSVP," coined by Hennessey, sounds corny, as if they were inviting people to a tea party, but then she thinks the civility of it sounds right. She persuades her boss to do the unthinkable: put sixty-two of the most violent men together, in one dorm. She promises there will be no riot. The planning takes more than a year, and brings in religious leaders, victims, victims' rights groups, probation officers, business leaders, the DA's office, police, politicians, and everyone she can think of.

She researches existing programs and finds one that seems by far the best: Manalive, created by community organizer Hamish Sinclair. The program teaches men that they have been raised with a "male role belief system" that sets them up. They have been taught to shun their own feelings of weakness and shame, and to reassert control by any means necessary. It chimes with the work of Harvard psychiatrist James Gilligan, whose decades of work with criminals have led him to identify shame as the principal cause of male violence.

Violent Criminals Owning Their Responsibility?

A major goal of RSVP is to bring violent offenders to a sense of empathy for their victims and of personal responsibility for their own actions. Schwartz describes how "everything about the system of prosecution and defense is set up so that criminals get into the habit of denying their responsibility." A whole team of victims is recruited to come in and tell their stories to the men. Not one of them regrets the experience, and most return to do it again. In other sessions the men themselves learn to take newcomers through their last violent incident moment by moment, analyzing what they felt, what he or she said, where the triggers were, when the moments of "fatal peril" arose, how the male role belief system operated minute by minute.

In a recent article written as a letter to President Obama, Sunny Schwartz says:

There are over 2 million men and women in our nation's jails and prisons. Most of these men and women are housed in what I call monster factories. The prisoners have nothing to do other than to stew and rage and whine until they are released. The vast majority sleep all day, play cards and dominos, and watch slasher movies. For years, this has been called "getting tough on crime." I call it coddling prisoners. Why? In this environment, these men and women will never learn introspection, will never experience remorse, and will not learn how to stop their violence and their criminal ways. They will be a bane on our system, and our communities.

Roughly 650,000 people are released from prison every year, and 70 percent return. James Gilligan and another independent academic studied RSVP in 2004. They concluded that among those who took the full sixteen-week course, 82 percent fewer ended up back in jail a year later for violent offenses, compared to a control group of men who had not been through the program. Schwartz says, "Every extra dollar we've spent on programs has been paid back into government's coffers with seven dollars in savings from the crimes we've prevented."

Concepts Embodied in Stories

Schwartz's book presents detailed stories of men getting tough on crime in the only way that really matters. Like this one:

Ben Matthews is but one example of our success. He was a meth addict and a skinhead who came into our jail wanting to start a race war. He left a counselor and leader of his peers who still wrestled with his demons, but has stayed out of jail, paid taxes, and helped other criminals to reform.

The tale of how Ben apologized at a synagogue for his beating up of Jews, blacks, and gays and for his own attack on another synagogue, and of how warmly-after a rocky start-the congregation received him is astonishing, a classic. By the time we get to it in the book we have some understanding of how it happened, because we have read reports, with much verbatim dialogue, of the sessions that turned Ben around.

But at the heart of all these stories is Schwartz's own. Her decision to tell her own life story-of truancy and failure at school, family anguish, tough relationships, her fighting spirit, eventually passing the bar, and life with a new partner and their daughter-alongside that of the creation and success of RSVP is brave. It is of a piece with the bravery of every victim who has told her story in jail, of every violent man who has relearned his belief system, and of the sheriff and jail director who decided to back her in turning around the definition of "coddling prisoners." It exemplifies her understanding that it is through sharing our own stories and analyzing them that all of us broken people can be bound back together.

After reading this book and even more after she took a group of us to the jail, I am in awe of Sunny Schwartz. This woman is more real, has more heart, is more of a creative fighter, and loves the unloveable more than almost anyone I have ever met.

Every sheriff and prison director in America should pick up this program. Buy the book and give copies to your local cops, prison staff, attorneys, and politicians. Make it a bestseller. Pass the bar. Run an RSVP program. Shout about it.

The horror of America's prison system can be turned around. And that's just the start of what happens when we learn to deal with the male role belief system.

David Belden, D. Phil, is the managing editor of Tikkun.