The kinds of girls Jimmy Espinoza hunted were weak. Vulnerability clung to their skin like powder. It was in their eyes and the way they moved, and Jimmy could spot them. If they met his gaze with that searching, hungry look he knew he could get them. They were mostly young, though not always. They were lost. They were controllable. “If a girl didn’t have a father,” he says, “I knew I could get her.” He treated his partners the same way he treated his working girls: as items he owned or discarded at will. He hit them or he didn’t. He fucked them or he didn’t. It was up to him where and when and how. Their role was in service to him.
Whether what he was doing was right or wrong didn’t factor into his thinking. Morality had no part in his internal conversation. Money followed its own cannibalistic logic on the streets. The more you got, the more you had to lose. The more you had to lose, the more you needed. The more you needed, the more you hustled, and on and on. There was a time in the ’90s when Jimmy Espinoza was one of the most notorious pimps in San Francisco. He estimated on his best days he’d pull down fifteen grand. It was back when the Mission wasn’t a place you went for lattes and designer jeans. It was a place you went when you wanted trouble.
This marked history makes Jimmy an unlikely figure to lead an anti–domestic violence program inside the very jail that once held him captive. His violence—they own it with a possessive pronoun in the world in which he lives now—was against the women who worked for him and the women who had relationships with him, against rival gang members, against just about anyone who looked at him in a way he didn’t like. Rape was a weapon in his arsenal; in his own estimation he was a “low-life motherfucker.” Where to put his hordes of cash was his biggest worry in those days. Stuffing it in mattresses, in car seats, anywhere he could. You don’t put that shit in a bank. Hundred-dollar bills crammed in Nike shoeboxes. He had a BMW, a Mercedes, a crotch rocket. “I want everyone to know what a scavenger I am,” he says, speaking always in the present tense. “I’m a bottom-feeder, man.”
Jimmy’s bald head is covered in tattoos of San Francisco’s great sites: the Transamerica building, the Golden Gate Bridge, a streetcar. Chart your tourist journey across his scalp and the back of his head. Tattoos on his knuckles say tuff enuf and one on his neck bears the sign Est. 1969.
Not long ago, he gave five hundred dollars—an utter fortune to him now—to the Huckleberry House, which serves at-risk youth from the area. Jimmy describes it as a place for “runaway girls who are usually into prostitution.” It’s penance for him, a way to address the vast numbers of women he once terrorized. Women lost in the wider world, women he wishes he could find again to say he’s sorry. He didn’t know, he says. He didn’t know. He fears that some, maybe even many, are dead.
There are three stories that make up the emotional axis of Jimmy’s life. A play in three acts, so powerful to him that they are somatic as much as psychic. They can be summed up in three questions: what is the worst thing that ever happened to you? What is the worst thing you ever did? What is the worst thing to happen to someone you love? Anyone who’s lived a life in which these three questions are immediately answerable may have some kind of understanding of what drives Jimmy today. In the first story he’s a kid, maybe eight or nine years old. In the second, he’s a young adult, midtwenties. In the third, he is all grown up. He tells these three stories again and again, not because the telling is cathartic but because the stories hold so much power among the population he works with. The world blasts you with some unpredictable horror and then what? No one escapes the blast. If you’re someone like Jimmy, you get mean. And the meanness means you get blasted again, because you’re daring the forces around you to do it again. Go ahead. I can take it. I’m tough. I’m a fucking man. And it works. The angrier you get, the more things happen to you. The more things happen to you, the angrier you get. A real-life infinity symbol.
You keep at it until one day you wind up dead or some miracle intervenes to wake you the fuck up. Jimmy got the miracle. If he’d have been born in some other state, spent time in some other jail after what he did, maybe he’d have been the “wound up dead” guy and not just the guy with these three stories. Plenty of guys he’s known ended this way. He’s still burying some of them today. But he was born in San Francisco’s Excelsior district where the “gangster” shit he pulled landed him in a jail called San Bruno at the exact same time that San Bruno became the site of an unusual and audacious experiment.
Before the story of the San Bruno laboratory, and before Jimmy’s three defining episodes can be told, I have to go to another story first. It begins more than sixty years ago in a working class village in Scotland with a curious kid named Hamish Sinclair.
Sinclair’s grandfather was a stonemason who died young of silicosis. His father was a furnaceman, an authoritarian, who also died young, when Sinclair was just thirteen. All his life he was aware of the struggles of the working class. He lived inside it, where every family in his village of Kinlochleven depended on work at the local aluminum factory. Kinlochleven was surrounded on three sides by mountains. The village had no other industry, no other options for anyone back when he was growing up, apart from that factory. “The whole thing in that village was to get the hell out of there,” Sinclair told me. “If you had one guy working in the plant with four kids, only one kid could take his place. The other three had to go somewhere else.”
So Sinclair was an escapee. He’d planned to be a painter, an artist. He attended the Bryanston School in England, which taught the Dalton system, similar to Montessori in its holistic approach to education. Dalton rejected the rote memorization taught in most schools in the early twentieth century and instead advocated that students become their own teachers. Curriculum plans were individualized, and students were tasked with learning to study, learning to learn by themselves. In Sinclair’s school, there was always a teacher to ask, to offer some guidance, and tutors were available, but the whole idea was to be an active participant in one’s own educational formation. It is a philosophy that threads itself into his life and work still today. As I sat with him one night at a restaurant in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco and he told me about his life, it became clear that his career was made up of projects and that he had created the methodology for each project, whether it was documenting marches against the Vietnam War in New York City or diving into the River Thames to film protests against the nuclear submarines. We talked for hours that night, moving to the bar when the restaurant closed, moving by a fireplace in a nearby lobby hotel when the bar closed, until long after midnight, and long after the rest of the city was fast asleep. And in every new story, in every decade, this fact of creation was central.
Sinclair, who is eighty-five now, has a mop of gray curls and speaks as if he’s just walked off the Haight set and it’s 1968. He wears Crocs and reminds me of someone’s charmingly disheveled eccentric uncle. For years I couldn’t place his ever-so-slight accent. Canadian? Irish? Minnesotan? Scottish.
After he graduated from Bryanston, his story is long and convoluted and fascinating, and perhaps it will be fully told by another author in another book someday. It involves a bed and breakfast on the Irish coast, an actual dark and stormy night when he gave up his proprietor’s bedroom to an American filmmaker who would eventually bring him to New York as a cameraman and activist, where he would accidentally assault an FBI officer during the Vietnam War protests, leave New York briefly for London, and then return to the United States and become a key figure in the drive for unionization, first among Kentucky coal miners and then later among Michigan auto workers. “I was in a tidal wave of social unrest, and I was right on the cusp of it,” he says of his arrival in America, those early years of activism and civil disobedience. He was watching the Black Power movement of Detroit, the burgeoning of 1970s feminism, and as he traveled and organized and learned from Americans all over the country, a single question began to form in Sinclair’s mind:
Why did so many of the men he knew beat each other up?
Not all men, of course. But those he’d worked with, those he’d organized, befriended, so often. Working-class men in New York, in Kentucky, in Michigan. Even back home in the UK. Domestic violence wasn’t on his radar. He was thinking of radical action. Class politics and labor rights. He was thinking of what the Detroit Black Power movement had in common with those Kentucky miners. He was a social activist, trying to organize them into a unified movement, but he kept butting up against the patriarchy, macho attitudes about who should lead and why and how. After the 1968 riots in Chicago, he headed to Detroit to organize guys in the auto industry. He’d been focused, at least in part, on race relations, on getting more whites to work with their Black brothers. Gender wasn’t anywhere in his purview.
After a few years in Detroit, a group of women came to him and said they, too, wanted to organize. Some of them were the wives of men he’d organized in the past. The way he saw it, he’d help anyone who wanted to be helped. If you were ready to fight systemic prejudice or unfair labor conditions, if you were a justice warrior, he didn’t care who you were. The more bodies, the bigger the impact. The bigger the impact, the bigger the chances of change. But the men he worked with, it turned out, weren’t as egalitarian in their gender views. They were vehemently opposed to women organizing. It was 1975; women’s liberation was still in its infancy. As more women began to attend Sinclair’s community organizing events, some of the men Sinclair had already helped organize would complain about the women, and say women can’t be organized. Organization was for men. “Five years I’d been doing this city-wide organization,” Sinclair told me of his time in Detroit, “and that was all destroyed when these men said, ‘You can’t organize girls.’ ” It shocked Sinclair.
Sinclair and the men held a series of meetings, each one seeming to escalate in emotional intensity and patriarchal entrenchment until one night, after the third meeting, one of the men who’d been pivotal in Sinclair’s organizing of men went home and beat his own wife so badly that several women—“tough as nails women” Sinclair called them—came to him the next day and asked him to call it all off. This guy was serious. A lot of their husbands didn’t want them organizing. It had to stop. At the time, Sinclair said his attitude wasn’t that the husbands should refrain from beating their wives because it was morally reprehensible, but rather because it split up the community. “I was caught in the middle of this thing and the guys put a price on my head,” he said. For six months, he went “underground,” rarely leaving his house, and if he did, he brought bodyguards.
After those six months, they declared a truce. The men came to him and wanted to start up the organizing again. Sinclair said all right and then asked if they were ready now to bring in women. The men were aghast. Hadn’t they been through this already? they asked him. And he told them, “Well, I’m not going to work for someone who wants to divide the community in half by gender.”
His partner convinced him that it was time to leave Detroit. The men and women were at an impossible impasse, and if Sinclair didn’t leave, he’d wind up dead.
So he headed west to Berkeley, where he was introduced to Claude Steiner.
Steiner was a giant in the field of gender theory, the father of the so-called “radical psychiatry” movement in Berkeley in the 1970s; he wrote about men and women’s “internalized oppression” and advocated for social-justice-based therapies; he helped popularize the idea of emotional literacy. Radical psychiatry criticized standard modes of clinical treatment that often ignored the social context in which patients were living—a world in which war, poverty, racism, and inequality were endemic. Radical psychiatry called for systemic upheaval to the social and political order. It was an antiauthoritarian movement born of a counter culture outspoken in its criticisms of standard medical interventions, like drugs, involuntary hospitalization, or electrotherapy. It aspired to a treatment model that purported that mental illness could often be addressed through social theory and personal change, rather than the medical industry.
Sinclair became a devotee and friend of Steiner until his death in 2017.
For five years, under the mentorship of Steiner, Sinclair worked with schizophrenic patients in a psychiatric facility outside of San Francisco and he read Steiner’s works and the works of his contemporaries. He began to understand violence as the result of a belief system men all seemed to share, which told them they were the authority in their lives, that they were to be respected, obeyed. Top of the human hierarchy. It was a belief system that not only distanced them from people around them, but also limited their range, kept them boxed in by their own narrow ideas of what men could be and how men could behave.
But why? Why did men believe this? Sinclair understands, of course, the arguments about human evolution, how we must kill to survive (to eat, he means). He’s willing to believe that maybe at some point, far back in human history, men had some kind of predisposition toward violence in order to feed their families. But no longer, not today, and not for many hundreds of years. Beyond this history, he rejects the notion that violence is inherent to the male species, that men are somehow born to fight. For starters, we no longer need such violence to survive; instead, what we need now is to “intimate,” as he puts it. And in this, men have no belief system, because men are taught violence, but they are not taught intimacy. “Violence is a skill that we all had to learn just to stay with the pack growing up,” he said. “The trouble is, it doesn’t work for intimacy. That’s a whole different set of skills.”1 Read any news story today about domestic violence homicide and you’re likely to see some version of the question why didn’t she leave? What you almost surely won’t see is why was he violent? Or better yet, why couldn’t he stop his violence? Men, Sinclair believes, get one type of training and women get another. In a white paper he sent to me from a conference presentation some years ago, he paraphrased an assistant sheriff from San Francisco who told him, “men learn to be men by defining themselves as superior to each other and to women, and much of the violence in our communities is due to men’s ongoing enforcement of this learned belief in their superiority, be it spousal abuse, gang turf wars, street assaults, armed robbery, and all the other crimes that men in the jails had been charged with. Men … had learned that it was normal to use force and violence in all of the forms above to enforce their social obligation to be superior.”
Sinclair is unapologetically unabashed about the gender specifics here. It is men who are violent. It is men who perpetrate the majority of the world’s violence, whether that violence is domestic abuse or war. Even those relatively few women who are violent, he says, are most often violent in response to men’s violence. Indeed, this is the single most effective argument I know for why it doesn’t make sense to arm women with guns to protect them against men with guns: because arming a woman with a gun is asking her to behave like a man, to embody the somatic and psychological and cultural experience of a man while simultaneously quelling all that women have been taught. It says to women, if you want to protect yourself from violent men, you need to become violent yourself. To Sinclair, this is exactly the wrong way to the solution. It’s not women who need to learn violence; it’s men who need to learn nonviolence.
If men are taught not to cry, women are taught crying is acceptable. If men are taught anger is their sole allowable emotion, women are taught never to be angry. Men who yell are being men; women who yell are shrill or they’re drama queens or they’re hysterical. (Many before me have pointed out that there is no greater “drama” than a mass shooting, but the term “drama kings” hasn’t yet captured the popular lexicon, however accurate.) Sinclair calls this “the elephant in the room.” That we won’t say, simply, that it is men who are violent. It is men who take their violence out on masses of others. School shootings are carried out by young men. Mass murders. Gang warfare, murder-suicides and familicides and matricides and even genocides: all men. Always men. “Every commonly available domestic violence and official general violence statistic, and every anecdotal account about domestic and all other kinds of violence throughout the United States and around the world, point clearly to the fact that men almost monopolize all sectors of violence perpetration,” Sinclair wrote. “The generic descriptions of violence seem to be a careful attempt not to see this crucial piece of evidence … a careful way of avoiding the gendered source of violence. This error in analysis will mislead us in our attempts to find solutions to the problem.”
In other words, if we can’t honestly name who the perpetrators are, how can we find the solutions?
Sinclair suggests that the fear of naming the real perpetrators is, itself, a sort of meta-violence; by refusing to call out men we are aiding and abetting this belief. But the fear of a backlash is justified. We live in a world in which we have leaders who get away, literally, with bragging about this belief system, where sexual assaults on college campuses are at a crisis point, and where casual violence is an accepted and celebrated form of entertainment, where former attorney general Jeff Sessions deemed intimate partner terrorism not enough of a threat to qualify an immigrant for asylum, and where men with histories of abuse like Rob Porter are given illustrious jobs with the commander in chief of our country, despite those violent histories. Indeed, the commander in chief himself has a history of known violence, at least to his first wife, Ivana, as described in her divorce deposition. David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, in a 2018 op-ed for the Atlantic, wrote that “Violence at home indicates a dangerous temperament for a high official, including vulnerability to blackmail … This president sent a message to the people around him about what is permitted, or at any rate, what is forgivable.”2
I thought of a field trip to see Camelot with my daughter’s school that I chaperoned not long ago. Fourth graders from all over the city attended. After the performance the actors came out on stage for a Q&A and the moderator, who worked at the theater, asked the kids two questions: one, do you think Guenevere was wrong to allow her feelings for Lancelot to lead to a betrayal of her husband, King Arthur? And, two, should King Arthur have forgiven Lancelot or executed him? To the first question, the kids hollered, collectively, that yes, she was wrong. She should have ignored her feelings. To the second, the boys’ voices erupted in in a massive prepubescent holler, “Yes! Kill him! Kill him!” These were children growing up in the liberal enclave of Washington, D.C., children with two working parents in families that often defy gender norms from the day they’re born. And yet, the audience was asked only about the female character’s feelings, not the male’s—as if Lancelot and Arthur were devoid of human emotion. And when the choice to forgive or avenge arose, the answer fell squarely along gendered lines. The boys said kill, unequivocally. Fourth graders had already gotten the message, even in spite of their liberal surroundings. (It was a great disappointment to me that none of the adults—not the teachers, not the actors, not the chaperones—took the opportunity to address this gendered view.3 Indeed, I’m not at all sure that anyone but me noticed it.)
To all of this, Sinclair throws his hands up and says, “No kidding.” He tells me about an antiviolence conference he attended some years ago where a presenter was asked about a family who encouraged their child to go back to his harasser and beat him up. The target of the fight was a boy. The child of the family in question was a boy. The parent offering the advice was the father. (It is the rare mother who would exhort her son to “go back out there and beat him up.”) So here was a father advocating that the solution to his young son’s problem of violence was more violence; his solution reinforced the male-role belief system, recycling it to yet another young man. Violence begetting violence begetting violence. But none of the participants at the conference even mentioned the gender dynamics of this scenario, Sinclair said. Instead, the focus was on the anecdote itself, the possible result of the fight, but not the gendered exhortation in the first place. Sinclair points to this as “part of the problem.” This refusal to see or acknowledge the gendered source of violence. The whos as much as the whys. Violence, he says, is not a “relationship problem. It is a problem of [a woman’s] partner’s commitment to violence.”
“Violent men are aware that they are violent and even take pride in the manliness of it to their friends,” he said. “But, they will often deny that their violence is actually violent when questioned. Their denial allows violent men to minimize the impact of their violence on their victims, blame them for it, and ask their families and friends to collude with them by approving it.” What he means is that incidents of violence are downplayed: perpetrators tend to use phrases like “it wasn’t that bad.” They accuse victims of overreacting. They claim they didn’t mean to “hurt” her when they threw that household item in her general direction or slammed that door on her or tossed her against a wall. As if the objects—wall, door—were to blame. These men do everything they can not to own an act as violent.
Five years after he moved to California, Sinclair became restless, yearning to get back to the critical work of organization. One day he was asked by a woman he knew who worked out of the Marin Abused Women’s Services in San Rafael if he would consider doing a men’s department within their shelter. He thought about it but couldn’t quite wrap his mind around the particulars of what it would be. And then he went back to his roots. He wasn’t an administrator; he was an organizer. An activist. He put together Dalton and those Detroit union guys not wanting women around and radical psychiatry, which acknowledged the world we all lived in, and his mind started percolating. He told her he didn’t want to run a men’s department inside a woman’s shelter. Instead, he wanted to create a whole new program, an intervention for violent men. “It was based on women’s urgency,” he said. “The women wanted a program that addressed their experience of our violence. They said your violence.” Men’s violence. It is a thread that you can hear still today, running through Jimmy’s interventions at San Bruno every day with violent men.
Sinclair’s program began in 1980, but wasn’t named until 1984 when it became ManAlive, a fifty-two-week program, divided into three parts. The first twenty-week part tries to get men to be accountable for their violence. The second sixteen-week session gives them a skill set of alternative behaviors to violence. And the third part, also sixteen weeks, teaches them strategies for creating intimacy and fulfillment in their lives. For the first decade, there weren’t many guys flocking to take part in a program that would upend everything they believed about what a man was supposed to be and do. Then the Violence Against Women Act passed, and suddenly courts were referring guys to them—not just to ManAlive, but to batterer intervention programs all over the country, in Massachusetts and Colorado and Minnesota. A law in California passed that made it mandatory for violent men to do the program or go to jail, and the law specifically said that the intervention had to be gender-based, not therapy-based. They couldn’t just be sent to anger management. They couldn’t have a few sessions with a therapist and be done. They had to learn about gender roles and expectations as part of their curriculum; they had to study the role of gender in their own acculturation. (Although, Sinclair is the first to say that a lot of what comprises the ManAlive curriculum does, in fact, borrow from therapy.) The inspiration for his curriculum was gender theory and neuro-linguistic training (NLP).4 In the ManAlive curriculum, it is simply a way of asking men to notice their bodies, their voices, and the responses of those around them during a violent incident in a way that the vast majority of them never have.
The ManAlive program became an area leader among the many batterer intervention programs that arose in the aftermath of VAWA; it emerged at the same time as several other early notable programs: Amend in Denver, Emerge in Boston, and the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in Duluth. And all of these did something that no one, up until that point, had really thought to do: address violence not in its aftermath, with victims, but at its core, with the abusers.
The program’s reputation grew throughout the region. In the late ’90s, it came to the attention of an innovative prison guard named Sunny Schwartz, who had grown frustrated with the system’s inability to address violence in the men she was seeing year after year, decade after decade. Schwartz had witnessed firsthand how violence worked in cycles, both within the lives of the men she guarded and also generationally. Men she met in her daily work life did some violent act to land them in prison, then did their time in the culture of violence that is incarceration in America today, and then brought that heightened level of violence right back into their families and communities. Schwartz began to see the children of the men she knew from her early days in corrections. And then the grandchildren. There had to be a better way, she thought. Violence isn’t supposed to be genetic. She’d seen the levels of incarceration rise year after year, but she knew crime in the United States wasn’t falling accordingly. Locking up men punitively wasn’t doing anything to change the reasons they got locked up in the first place.
After years with these men, she began to think that violence was something that could be reduced if prison became a place not to toss away and forget those who broke the law, but a place to reform them. There were two philosophical pillars to her program. The first was the ManAlive curriculum: an intervention in the cycle of violence passed down from man to man, father to son to son to son. But she wanted more. The second pillar was the concept of restorative justice. Restorative justice insists that the perpetrator acknowledge the pain and suffering he has caused and “restore” his victims and community as much as possible. Reconciliation is the primary goal, through offenders meeting with domestic violence victims. Though restorative justice sometimes means an offender is meeting with his or her specific victim, in the context of San Bruno, general victims of domestic violence are brought in weekly to talk about their experiences and about what it means to live with and beyond trauma.