Dreams from the Monster Factory: A Tale of Prison, Redemption and One Woman's Fight to Restore Justice to All

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More About This Book

Overview

Powerful, captivating, and hopeful, Dreams from the Monster Factory goes beyond statistics and sensational portrayals of prison life and reveals the troubling realities of U.S. jails, and an astonishing alternative. .

Sunny Schwartz founded the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project (RSVP), a restorative justice program based in a San Francisco jail that has cut recidivism for violent rearrests by up to 80 percent. Schwartz makes no excuses for the rapists, gangbangers and murderers she works with, nor will she excuse a prison system that churns out criminals who are more dangerous when they leave prison than when they arrived. Instead, she’s created a correctional program that is designed to empower victims and require offenders to take true responsibility for their actions and eliminate their violent behavior. .

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

The thorny topic of rehabilitating offenders in the American penal system remains front and center in this book by Schwartz, an expert in criminal justice reform in the San Francisco area, with an able assist from TV writer and producer Boodell. Schwartz asks a central question: "What do we do with the people who get out of jail and come back to communities?" Using real stories of former convicts and their victims, Schwartz concludes that the horrible conditions in prisons, the "monster factories" of the title, create people incapable of empathy or compassion who return to society and commit more crimes. A series of family concerns thrust Schwartz into helping spearhead the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project (RSVP) in San Francisco to create a prison that doesn't reinforce violence and that joins offenders and victims in a union of empowerment and accountability. Lucid, gritty and penetrating, this book is perhaps one of the most effective testaments available in the campaign to rehabilitate those we lock up and sometimes abandon. (Jan.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Library Journal

Schwartz here recalls 27 years of working in California's prison system as a legal aide to the inmates and her creation of the San Francisco Sheriff's Department Resolve To Stop the Violence Project (RSVP). Schwartz's upbringing in a dysfunctional family on Chicago's South Side and her general abhorrence for school gave her much in common with people she met in the "Monster Factory" (her name for a prison). Using her own experience of earning a law degree and dealing with the demons around her, she worked with those behind bars, feeling certain that many of them could be redeemed. After a bouncy prolog, Schwartz continues with uneven writing; some incidents are effectively told, while others do not come across clearly. The value of the book, however, is that it offers many suggestions to people who work with a similar population. Other readers who do not know what prisons are like will certainly find Schwartz's experiences eye-opening. Although not an essential purchase, this would be a good addition to a crime collection in any library. [See Prepub Alert, LJ9/1/08.]
—Frances Sandiford

More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
Intimate memoir and impassioned call to arms for prison reform from a respected criminal-justice advocate. As a rebellious kid growing up in a Jewish family on Chicago's South Side, Schwartz was toughened by her older brothers' roughhousing, her father's temper and her mother's lack of control. Barely graduating high school and avoiding arrest, she had already made it further than many of her friends. She followed her brother to Tucson, where he spiraled into depressive schizophrenia that eventually led to his suicide. Aided by co-author Boodell, Schwartz recounts these painful personal events carefully and honestly, underlining their relevance to her work with emotionally battered-and battering-criminals. She came into her own out West, where she dated women, took drama classes and in San Francisco applied to a law school that did not require a college degree. When her professor repeatedly berated a student in the front row for no good reason, Schwartz yelled out, "What the fuck is going on up there, man?" Her classmates were horrified, but the professor congratulated her; she was the first student ever to challenge his demonstration of "the power of authority, and people's willingness to suffer injustice in silence." Schwartz displayed the same fearless concern as a lawyer defending criminals' right to counsel and as a program administrator at County Jail 7 in San Francisco. She and her colleagues built a jail culture based on restorative justice, which challenged inmates to take responsibility for their acts and recognized victims' and communities' stakes in that process. Their Resolve to Stop the Violence (RSVP) program reduced violent recidivism by 80 percent and won an Innovationsin Government Award. Schwartz admits that some criminals cannot be helped, but asserts that jail time spent learning remorse makes the world safer than years of incarceration passed by stewing in anger. Inspiring idealism refreshingly free of jargon or fluff.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781416569824
  • Publisher: Scribner
  • Publication date: 2/23/2010
  • Pages: 204
  • Sales rank: 1,168,817
  • Product dimensions: 5.90 (w) x 8.90 (h) x 0.90 (d)

Meet the Author

Sunny Schwartz is a twenty-seven-year veteran of the criminal justice system who speaks nationally about the sheriff's innovative in-jail programs, the establishment of the first charter high school in the nation for incarcerated adults, and the successes of restorative justice through the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project (RSVP). Her program was the recipient of the prestigious Innovations in Government Award, sponsored by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She lives in San Francisco with her partner, Lauren, and their daughter, Ella. Visit her Web site at www.sunnyschwartz.com.

David Boodell is a writer, television producer and director who has worked with A&E, the History Channel, Discovery, and other networks. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Liesl, and their dog, Murphy.

Read an Excerpt

PROLOGUE

I don't think my truant officer ever knew where I went. I'd ditch class and ride the El to Chicago's north side, jump off at Belmont and plant myself in the Wrigley Field bleachers. I'd soak up the squawk of the beer man, the steam coming from the bins of the Vienna Beef hot dog vendors, the gentle slapping sound of a ball dropping into a mitt in the outfield and the emerald green expanse of the diamond. Wrigley was my sanctuary when I was a gawky teenager stumbling through adolescence. Even if school gave me palpitations and my family drove me nuts, I still had the ballpark and the dream that bound all of us fans together: the dream that this year the Cubs would go all the way.

I was raised on the south side and by rights should have pledged allegiance to the White Sox, but my heart has always been with the underdogs and so it was the Cubs for me. Later, when I moved to San Francisco, I gave myself with equal passion to the Giants, who have validated my devotion by failing to win the big one year after year. I am like this in the rest of my life, too: I root for underdogs.

I work in the jails of San Francisco County, and my clients are thieves and wife beaters, gangbangers and murderers — underdogs, every one of them. They have hurt their victims, their families and their communities and are now paying the price, abandoned to society's scrap heap. There are lots of names for this scrap heap: the big house, the slammer, the joint, lockup. I think the best name is monster factory. In these factories, men exist in cells on long tiers, where they have nothing to do. They sleep in their bunks, play dominoes and cards, watch the Jerry Springer show on TV and scheme. They scheme about how to steal someone's lunch, how to pull one over on the DA, how to score black market cigarettes for five bucks a smoke and how to get even with whoever crossed them. They make shanks out of mops, pens and metal shards broken off their bunks. These are places where the strongest thugs are allowed to terrorize the weakest. In most of our nation's jails and prisons, violence in the form of beatings, racial threats and rapes is normal. The most predictable product of this system is rage, which builds and builds in each prisoner until he is set free — and about 90 percent are set free someday, released back into our communities.

It's no news flash to say that traditional criminal justice is in chaos. One out of every hundred adults in the United States is behind bars. This is the highest incarceration rate in the world. Recidivism rates — which are difficult to track since no one keeps comprehensive statistics — hover somewhere around 70 percent, despite state budgets for corrections that have been climbing for years now. "There is no other business in the world," one coporate attorney told me, "that gets an increase in their budget when they have a seventy percent failure rate."

I was trained as an attorney, and always thought I'd spend my life as a defense attorney, but have instead worked on what I call "true defense." True defense is working for the good of all: the victims of crime and the perpetrators as well as the community. It has been my life's work to fight the monster factories, to reject the presumption people make that nothing can ever change. It hasn't been a simple fight. The question I get most often is "Why should I care?" I've found there is no more persuasive way to answer this question than by taking people to see the monsters. I first show people the traditional jail. Then I take them to the jails I've helped set up. I take them to RSVP (Resolve to Stop the Violence Program), the program I'm most proud of, where we work with violent men to make them less violent. I tell people about the evaluation of our program, done by psychiatrist James Gilligan, who directed the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School and now works at NYU. He is one of the country's leading experts on violence. His study showed an 80 percent drop in violent recidivism for inmates who had spent more than four months in our program. I take people to see the charter high school (the first charter school for incarcerated adults in this country) and the college classes, and show them what a jail can be like in a place where there are high standards, and where the presumption exists that despicable men and women can change for the better and rejoin the human race. One venture capitalist I took around with me came away thunderstruck. "Sunny," he exclaimed, "those programs for violent men. They could help me! They could help any man." The stories I tell in this book will take you on the same journey, to see both the worst the system has to offer, and the best.

Everyone has a stake in this, Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative; this isn't a partisan issue, it is a human one. What do we do with the people who get out of jail and come back to our communities? I know that we can actually use the prisons to make us safer and our communities better. I know it because I've seen it happen. I've seen men who have committed horrible crimes defy all predictions, take responsibility for their lives and begin to make amends. Every time that happens, for me, it's like the Cubs have won the World Series. If RSVP stops just one person from committing a murder, that's an entire community of family and friends saved from devastation. Now imagine if across the country, every jail and prison challenged criminals to stop their violence, to stop using drugs, to get a job, to become responsible citizens, to become, as one friend described it, "taxpayers instead of tax drainers." If that happened, we wouldn't just change the prisons and jails; we would remake the face of American society. That's the dream I've had. That's what has sustained me in the monster factory.

Copyright © 2009 by Sunny Schwartz and David Boodell

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