The most inspiring book on personal change I have read in years is Sunny Schwartz’s Dreams from the Monster Factory: A Tale of Prison, Redemption and One Woman’s Fight to Restore Justice to All (co-author, David Boodell): because it is about the hardest most violent prisoners figuring out how to change their lives.

We will write about it in Tikkun but I was thrilled this week that the New York Review of Books has a long and enthusiastic review. About one child abuser in the program who was afraid of what he would do when released, the reviewer writes:

She [Schwartz] knew that some men, perhaps including this one, were beyond rehabilitation, but she also knew instinctively–and correctly, it turned out–that most could change if they were given the chance, but they would need powerful emotional assistance to do it. What this assistance would consist of was not obvious at first.

But she worked out how to do it so well that,

In 2004, the psychiatrists James Gilligan and Bandy Lee of New York University and Yale, respectively, evaluated RSVP [Schwartz's program] and found that it sharply reduced recidivism rates. The longer the men stayed in the program, the better it seemed to work. Among those who took the full sixteen-week course, 82 percent fewer ended up back in jail a year later, compared to a control group of men who had not been through the program.

I had just read a submission to Tikkun in which a long term committed activist writes of the extent to which leaders and led in every Left organization he has participated in lost public effectiveness because they had first lost connection with solidarity and love, and had reverted to cultural norms of competitive self-seeking. I thought, what Left organizations need is some of Schwartz’s “powerful emotional assistance.” We need to make personal transformation an expected part of every organization that’s trying to change the world, because we all sure need that powerful assistance. If it’s strong enough for murderers maybe it’s strong enough for politicos. Many long term activists have turned to therapy, drugs or spiritual disciplines to deal with their own burnout, but these remain personal fixes, not expectations that political movements build into their norms and for which they develop practices that can sustain and heal the activists and build their solidarity. Then I came to this point in the review:

Perhaps surprisingly, the greatest resistance to programs like RSVP comes from some well-intentioned but doctrinaire leftists who maintain that it is absurd to expect people to change their behavior when they continue to be subject to racism, unemployment, bad schools, and the long legacy of inequality in America. The circumstances in which many African-Americans grow up are indeed traumatic. But the idea that violent crime, drug abuse, AIDS, and other health problems that disproportionately affect blacks can’t be addressed until these schematic leftists are satisfied that we are all living in an age of equality is itself a form of racism, based upon the patronizing assumption that people are powerless to bring about personal and collective change in their own communities.

At dinner on Tuesday I read this out to a group of activists who had got together to talk about how to build powerful social change movements that embody love in their practice as well as in their principles. An African American woman who leads a community regeneration program focused on young people said “Yes!” when I got to “a form of racism.” Working with kids on the street, she knows that personal change has to be part of systemic change. We should all understand that: neither can be done well without the other.

So why are the two seen so often as opposites? And why is it not understood that programs to provide everyone with “powerful emotional assistance” to become the people we would like to be have to be undertaken consciously: designed, developed, evolved. Of course “What this assistance would consist of was not obvious at first.” Sunny Schwartz worked it out for some of the most violent people in America. I hope this NYRB review helps spread her program to every prison in America. But an even bigger hope is that we work it out for every organization in America, and especially every social change organization.

Am I talking religion? Not in the sense of creedal belief. Schwartz’s program is not evangelical or based on any other creed. It does not invoke a “higher power” even as vaguely as AA does. But it is based on empathy, on offenders helping each other to understand the impact of their violence on others, to work out in detail where that violence came from in their lives. It promotes a person’s sense of responsibility, respect for self and others, and it does so in a group setting, where people help each other. It nurtures and celebrates the good in people. When people change dramatically, there is often a sense of mystery about it, for the person and the onlookers: it may well be the power of the group, of deeper regenerative powers in human psychology than we expect, or it may be something more, which people label in different ways, from the “collective subconscious” to the divine. But whatever the labels, promoting empathy, regeneration, and social responsibility are among the functions of a good religion. And religion is way more than belief and may not even involve belief as an atheist understands it. As pastor Lynice Pinkard said in church on Sunday (remarkably for a Christian!) “I don’t care what you believe, I care what you experience.”

Activist movements need to take regeneration seriously, for us activists and for society. We won’t get over Left enervation or the narcotic depression of consumerism until we do. This will be the hardest and most creative work for the social change activists in the next decades. “What this assistance would consist of was not obvious at first.” So let’s get to it. Let’s collect all the examples we have of activists who are already doing it. Please send them to me! dave@tikkun.org.

Here’s Sunny Schwartz in person: