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The Criminal Justice Conversations Podcast with David Onek

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The Criminal Justice Conversations Podcast with David Onek The Criminal Justice Conversations Podcast with David Onek Episode #5: Sunny Schwartz, Author, “Dreams From the Monster Factory, (March 3, 2010) Listen at www.law.berkeley.edu/cjconversations DAVID ONEK: Welcome to the Criminal Justice Conversations podcast, a coproduction of the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice and the Berkeley School of Journalism. I’m your host, David Onek. The podcast, recorded weekly in the Berkeley School of Journalism studios, features in-depth interviews with a wide range of criminal justice leaders: law enforcement officials, policymakers, advocates, service providers, academics, and others. The podcast gets behind the sound bites that far too often dominate the public dialogue about criminal justice to have detailed, nuanced conversations about criminal justice policy. Today’s guest is Sunny Schwartz, author of Dreams from the Monster Factory: A Tale of Prison, Redemption, and One Woman’s Fight to Restore Justice for All. Schwartz is a nationally recognized expert on criminal justice reform with over 25 1 years of hands-on experience in the San Francisco criminal justice system. Schwartz and her colleagues created the Resolve to Stop the Violence project, or RSVP, an internationally recognized, award-winning restorative justice program that brings together traditionally opposing groups in order to comprehensively confront the costs of violence. An evaluation of RSVP determined that participants who were in the program for four months had a violent crime re-arrest rate 80% lower than those in a control group. RSVP earned a prestigious Innovations in American Government Award from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Larry King Live, and PBS. Schwartz also helped establish the first charter high school in the nation for incarcerated adults. She joins me today in the studio. Sunny Schwartz, welcome to the program. SUNNY SCHWARTZ: Hi, David. I’m delighted to be here. ONEK: Sunny, you’ve established some of the most innovative jail programming in the country. Before we discuss that, I want to understand what the San Francisco jails were like prior to the establishment of these programs. What did the inmates do 2 all day? SCHWARTZ: Good question. What the inmates did all day then, and what many, if not the vast majority of inmates, do all across our country is they sleep all day, play cards and dominoes, and watch terrible TV, like Jerry Springer or cartoons, and at that time, lifting weights or watered-down bleach bottles and making homemade weapons or homemade brew called “pruno,” and they basically rotted away daily, never taking the time to look in the mirror and try to figure out how they can stop their painful behavior to themselves and others. So, really, hence the name of my book is Monster Factory. You put like-minded people together in an open dormitory or a long, traditional tier that there are 80, 90, 100 people on that cell block, and you know, we scratch our heads wondering why people keep getting arrested over and over again. They sit and rot and stew all day long. So, under the leadership of Michael Hennessey, we started to really look at how we can use our jails as a place of change and reform and invest in people’s success. ONEK: So, where did you start in that process, and what did you feel was missing from the original programming that you started? 3 SCHWARTZ: OK. Good question. Well, I started just from, some context here is I started as a law student in 1980. I wanted to be a criminal defense attorney, possibly. Many reasons. As a youth in Chicago, I saw too many kids in my class being plucked out for status offenses or more egregious offenses, so my roots really were in criminal justice, and I needed to put myself through law school, and I also needed, I went to a public interest law school that I needed 900-plus hours of internship. So, the county jail prisoner legal service program was available to me, and when I walk the tiers, David, as I do today even, I saw the most paradoxical situation, the despair of the human spirit as well as the tremendous potential. So, my career completely changed, as I write about painfully in the book, when I met a child molester. And he was about to get released, and I won’t go through that painful story, but the basic essence of that was he was about to get released. He was screaming for help in his very damaged way and promised that he was going to re-offend, and in fact he did. And that really changed the whole trajectory of my career. I went out and practiced law. Mike Hennessey asked me if I would come back and be his program administrator about 1990, because we were opening up yet another 4 jail, and he wanted to do things different. He didn’t want to just warehouse people. He wanted it to turn into a program facility. Well, frankly, I never had any experience in administration. I was trained as a lawyer, as an advocate, but I was very intrigued by it. And the first thing we did was hire a learning specialist, and we had 360 prisoners at that time. We had education testing. We had one-on-one interviews. And the demographics were, although we expected, it was still very shocking. 80% disclosed that they had a drug or alcohol problem. 75% tested between a fourth- and a seventh-grade reading level. 90% were parents, whether they were custodial or noncustodial parents. 90% disclosed that they were victims of violence, perpetrators of violence, or both. And the majority of women, more than a majority, I would say close to 100% were victims of child sexual trauma. When I was a law student, David, in 1980, today I’m seeing the grandchildren. We’re talking about third generations just in my tenure. Actually, I’m close to 30 years in the business. So, this was a call to action. So, we provided classes. Skyline College at that time, our next-door neighbors at the San Bruno complex, provided about 12 classes. We provided parenting. Oh, 90% never held a legal job for more than a year. So, we provided all that, and it was 5 really very heartening. For the first time, people were passing tests. The pride and the dignity were rising. However people kept coming back over and over and over again, sometimes five, six, 10 times, as shocking as it is, within a year. So, it was fortuitous the timing. And I’m going to get to the answer of your question. The timing was fortuitous in that I was at a conference in Minnesota, and I heard about this concept called restorative justice. See, what we were doing before was rehabilitation, which is so important not to minimize that, but they were missing the links. Where was the voice of those who had been hurt? Where was the voice of the community who’s been traumatized? Where was the accountability of those who hurt people? This conference in Minnesota was about a variety of things. I heard about this concept from a colleague who went to a workshop by a woman by the name of Kay Pranis, who was known as the godmother of restorative justice. I looked at this pamphlet and went good and crazy, and it simply said that restorative justice recognizes that crime hurts everyone, victim, offender, community, and it creates an obligation to make things right. So, that’s, so to answer your question, the programs that we started were really important, but they were missing links, as I just said. 6 ONEK: Well, you not only answered my first question, you anticipated my next question about restorative justice, so I appreciate you going there. So, you decided to start a program based on restorative justice principles, and that’s what became the RSVP program. One of the things you did from the beginning was invite all of the key stakeholders to the table to plan for the program. You planned for over a year, and as you put it, I wanted everyone I could think of who had a stake in violence in our communities to be on board. So, that included victims, sheriff’s deputies, probation officers, district attorneys, police, business leaders, and former offenders. Some of your colleagues thought you were crazy to try to bring all of these people together. Why was it so important to you to have such a diverse range of stakeholders involved in the planning? SCHWARTZ: Really important. I’m glad you brought this up. I want to underscore that. As in any community, there’s the us/ them. There are, and in criminal justice, it’s the victims, the offenders. It’s the correctional officers and deputy sheriffs against the civilians. Restorative justice really brings it all together and does a magical and important job of 7 including everyone, and that is, I think, the key, you should pardon the expression, the key to the universe. Everyone has a stake in this. Everyone who’s listening to this podcast, everyone walking on the campus, everyone in any synagogue or temple or mosque or up in Pleasanton. There’s virtually no degree of separation when it comes to crime, whether we know it or not. The Pew study comes out. One in three people have some criminal justice contact, whether it is parole, probation, incarceration, that’s not even including victims. Whether your car was ripped off or your bike was ripped off to something much more egregious.
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