Sunny Schwartz, photo by Ruth Morgan

It’s a small beginning, a program for sixty men at a time in one big city jail as against a vast prison-industrial complex. But it works. I saw it yesterday in operation. I was humbled and stunned. I am talking about the work of Sunny Schwartz which I wrote about here before. This program got started because San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey had the vision and guts to promote something that many of his own cops thought would be unworkable.

This is the work of restorative justice. This is about how, when a man (let’s talk about men to begin with) commits a violent crime, we, the whole community, help that man to understand the impact on the victim, from the victim’s point of view; challenge him to take responsibility for the suffering he caused; help him understand how his entire male conditioning fed into his use of violence, the way he learned emotional and sexual violence along with physical violence;help him understand the role of social violence (such as poverty and racism) that he has suffered without using those facts as excuses; help him recognize his triggers and practice alternatives, over and over again; give him the training he needs in work skills and relational skills to earn an honest living (or at least a legal one–how many of us are lucky enough to earn a truly honest one in this commercial civilization?); and then, when he’s done his time, help him integrate back into society and make real contributions as a citizen.

Do that in every jail and prison, and support the victims with the same programs, and now the whole terrible process of imprisoning more citizens than any country has ever done in history starts to go into reverse. Now communities are built up instead of decimated by the prison system. Now people who used violence because of their lack of power to express or negotiate what they needed start to get empowered. Who knows what else will change once our most violent men start to use their energy and power to build the community? Will the George Bushes and Dick Cheneys get in the program.

So we’re in a big dorm and about fifteen men are going through the first stage of what they call the Manalive program, which was founded by Hamish Sinclair, another of the heroes of this story. The men are being taught about the Male Role Belief System. The instructor asks for experiences of being taught how to be a man, how not to cry, how to get respect and be served by women. “How many of you are spiritual?” he asks at one point. Maybe a third raise hands. “Do you believe in Jesus? Have you ever seen Jesus?” Most say no, but one says “I’ve seen the results of Jesus.” “So you’ve seen the results but you haven’t seen Jesus. He did not come to your front door. So it’s the same with the Male Role Belief System: you may not believe in it but you’ve seen the results.”

Most of the men in both groups we are invited to sit in on are African American: just as the statistics say — here or here — but it’s still gutwrenching to witness. The instructor in the second one is also black, a man who has served many years in prison himself. He is amazing in his energy, his ability to connect, his humor, compassion and ability to keep everyone involved. I have taught sociology to middle class kids in a four year college and I never got a quarter of the involvement and learning going that this guy has going. He is teaching advanced college course material–how we are socialized into worldviews and psychological dynamics that oppress us and those around us, along with practical ways to counteract this socialization–to guys most colleges wouldn’t dream of enrolling, and they are learning it. His respect for them and their intelligence is palpable, as is his refusal to put up with their attempts to deny their responsibility and accountability. He talks in their language, as one of them, leading them out of hell.

It’s like religion, like a revival, but it’s not about belief in the supernatural. You may think the recovery of violent men is by definition the work of the forces of healing and transformation that suffuse the universe. The amazement you feel at a program like this may be like the awe you feel at transcendent moments of birth and death. But the language and assumptions of the program are not religious in the common sense of the term, meaning tied to any particular belief about the supernatural. An atheist could get just as much from this program as any believer.

Unlike 12 Step programs, this does not require admitting your powerlessness and depending on a Higher Power. This instead includes a major cognitive learning dimension about the power that the culture you were raised in has over you, and about the specific experiences you had where you felt you had to compel respect for yourself. It gives you specific ways to recognize those moments of “fatal peril,” in the program’s jargon, so you can respond differently. It explains the mystery and empowers you, instead of asserting that only surrender to a mystery can save you. I’m not exactly running down AA: I know it has saved countless people. But it may be better suited to the kind of middle class people who started it, who expected to be able to solve their alcoholism through individual willpower, than it is to people who are disempowered in multiple ways by social forces to begin with: as Charlotte Kasl has argued for many years in developing an empowering, feminist 16-Step program. Having said that, it’s still basically a mystery, a wonder, that people can change, however they do it.

I was part of a small group yesterday who went first to meet with Sunny Schwartz and Delia Ginorio, who works primarily with the crime victims and their communities, at the Sheriff’s dept in San Francisco, and then on to the County Jail in San Bruno, where we were allowed to sit in on a couple of sessions with prisoners. An independent review found that among those who took the full sixteen-week course, 82 percent fewer ended up back in jail for violent offenses a year later, compared to a control group of men who had not been through the program. Delia cautioned, though, that she never says the program works, because it doesn’t work with everyone. She has recruited 125 victims of terrible violence to come in to tell the men their stories, and over the ten years she has been doing it not one of them regretted coming. But two of them were murdered by men who had gone through the program. [Correction to that last sentence: I misunderstood what Delia said. Sunny Schwartz tells me that the reality is that two men out of all those who participated in the program over 12 years later murdered their ex-girlfriends/partners, but neither of these was a victim impact presenter in Delia's program]. It only works if the man chooses to do it and is able to do it. In that, it is no different from AA or any other program. But 82 percent fewer going back to jail within a year: that is big.

Our group of activists saw all this, and we thought about the social violence and the destruction of our planet that our commercial civilization is creating every single day, that we are all implicated in. Manalive works to change men who know, vividly and immediately, that they have to change. But what about the rest of us, who are part of a system that is hugely violent, even as we personally may lead rather peaceful if overstressed lives? By buying the food and clothes we buy, putting our money in banks, and all the many ways we keep the system running just in order to lead our own lives, we are also doing violence. Over 100 million more people just joined the ranks of the hungry because of our financial meltdown, which we allowed to happen because of the culture we were raised in, that allows the financial bottom line to rule. How do we do Humanalive programs that change the Wall Street profit-first mentality of individual men (and women) in numbers enough to create the real revolution? That’s the central question we face in healing and repairing this world. How to combine personal change that is as immediate and powerful as Manalive, with radical visions of political change. Sunny Schwartz says she wants a revolution to grow from her work. She’s made an incredible credible start.

P.S. You can hear BBC Radio’s interview with Sunny Schwartz this week here.