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

admin — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 16:41:00 +0000

I have been in a fairly low-key battle with my landlord over him not fixing the gutter that fell of the house in a windstorm a month ago. Before that, I was engaged in a fight against the post office for delivering our mail to the apartment below us. I’ve realized that I have a hair trigger for injustice; though, up until now, my causes have been a bit, shall we say, unimportant. When I read Dreams from the Monster Factory: A Tale of Prison, Redemption, and One Woman's Fight to Restore Justice to All, by Sunny Schwartz with David Boodell, I discovered someone who had found a fight worth fighting.

Schwartz worked in the prison system as a legal intern in San Francisco in the 1980s. A man approached her, asking her to help him; he was in prison for child molestation and confessed that he was planning on doing it again after he was released in two weeks. He wanted her to stop him, but there was no legal way to keep him in custody. After his release, he molested a six-year old girl.

Fed up with the cycle of repeat offenders, Schwartz struggled with what to do. Not only was her professional life full of stress, her family life was tense. She grew up on the south side of Chicago in a Jewish family. She didn’t do well in school, and she was continually struggling with finding a place in the world as a woman, a lesbian, a lawyer, a sister, and a daughter.

Despite her struggles growing up, her brother’s suicide, a leak in an artery in her brain, and the bureaucracy and stress in the prison system, she begins developing a program called the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project (RSVP). This program was designed to stop the cycle of the “monster factories”—a jail system that kept releasing still violent individuals into the community.

RSVP teaches inmates compassion and holds them truly and emotionally accountable for their actions. The goal is to “reprogram” the inmates into healthier and non-violent additions to society. It also provides a voice to victims; an extraordinarily touching scene in the book is the story of Jean. Jean’s daughter, daughter’s boyfriend, and grandchild were all murdered in cold blood. She told this story, and the impacts that the event continued to have on her life, to an audience of violent criminals, many of whom were moved to tears.

Dreams from the Monster Factory is a direct and impassioned look at the prison systems and the possibilities for change. Schwartz is also at times brutally honest with herself and her actions. It is an intense look at a part of society many of us tend to overlook. It will put your life into perspective, and give you a new way to look at issues of justice and forgiveness.

Written by: Kristin Conard, April 19th 2009

When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: A True Story in the Movement for Prison Abolition

admin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 23:55:00 +0000

By Jamie Bissonette

South End Press

Those of us who spend a lot of time lollygagging in the distant pass frequently encounter scenes of horror — people being tortured for their religious beliefs or identities, for example - and find ample evidence of our capacity for cruelty and inhumanity littering the landscape of human history. The game many of us play to ameliorate whatever righteous indignation we feel as members of the superior present is to imagine what horrors future historians will find in our own generation.

The current administration has single-handedly ushered in a whole host of candidates, beyond the many obvious ones - such as our confidence in the rightful supremacy of our species, which may well turn out to destroy us. Another obvious example is provided by this book and what its authors ominously refer to as the “prison industrial complex.” We can only hope that our enlightened progeny will be able to look back on our penal practices with the same sort of abhorrence with which we now view human slavery. In fact, the authors argue in stark terms, human slavery continues in the United States: prisoners, stripped of their rights and status as citizens, have become the property of the state. The system, they believe, is beyond reform and needs, literally, to be abolished.

Bisonette focuses on an all-too-brief episode of dramatic rebellion and radical change, and she enlists participants in the Walpole Prison rebellion, which began in 1972 and for a brief time transformed a draconian institution in Massachusetts. This historical moment was the result of a confluence of several extraordinary factors; one was the emergence of a strong, idealistic, African American criminologist named John O. Boone, who, remarkably, was given the responsibility (or at least the opportunity), as Massachusetts Commissioner of Corrections, to reinvent a failed penal system - one that was racist, violent, and the worst imaginable environment for human rehabilitation.

Another factor was the creation of the National Prisoners Reform Association by the prisoners themselves, a group that gained negotiating authority in times of conflict, developed programs such as education in Black History that confronted institutional racism and, to a remarkable extent, became self-governing. For a short time, it appeared that incarceration could, at least, be made more humane with work-release programs, education, and inmate participation in institutional governance. The furlough program was another of their innovations. Under Boone, 97 % of the furlough participants followed the rules and were able to make a contribution to their families and their communities. Of course among the 3% was the infamous Willie Horton, made a symbol of racial dread by Lee Atwater and his fellow hatemongers in the 1988 elections.

When the Prisoners Ran Walpole is a sad and exciting book: a very brief moment when some people in positions of power felt that prison reform — or even abolition — was possible and necessary. The book is short of practical specifics in laying out the road to prison abolition, and the polyvocality of the narrative sometimes interferes with the clarity and organization of the book. Still, for those looking for evidence that radical change is possible, the book is an encouraging beginning.

Written by: Rick Taylor, July 30th 2008