Watching Violence in a Fishbowl

The woman speaking today is named Victoria.1 She is fifty years old and in the past five years has finally stopped picturing her father’s gun pointed at her head. She used to hear her mother’s body as it slammed against the wall, but thought her mother was weak and boring. Her father was charismatic, charming. Once, when she rode her bike to a boy’s house, Victoria’s father followed her in his car, brought her home, and held a gun to her mother’s head, saying, “If you ever allow her to do that again I’ll kill you.” Sometimes, Victoria says, if she or her brother did something wrong, their father would threaten to kill their pets.

I’m in the San Bruno jail today, my first time here, sitting with dozens of men in blue plastic chairs, lined up as they listen to Victoria’s story. The men wear matching orange jumpsuits, laceless white shoes. Some have long sleeves under their jumpsuits. Some have tattoos on nearly every visible inch of skin: fingers, necks, faces. For most of them, it’s the first time they’ve ever sat, quietly, and listened for several hours as someone talked about domestic violence in her life.

One day, when she was sixteen, Victoria says, she heard her mother’s body once again, thump, thump, thumping against the wall. By now she had stopped calling the police. (“Oh, that little lady is tough,” she remembers hearing during one of her many 911 calls.) And then her mother escaped the bedroom and ran to the car. Victoria dashed outside behind her. “He tried to kill me,” her mother said, breathlessly. “You have two seconds. You can get in the car or not.”

Victoria froze. Stay. Go. Stay.

Her mother started the engine.

Victoria stayed.

“For years I carried the guilt of being the one who stayed,” she tells the men. “I became anorexic.”

For many of the men here, it’s not merely the first time they’ve ever really listened to a survivor of domestic violence tell her story, it’s the first time they ever considered how trauma and violence can have a long-term impact on someone. Many of them wipe away tears. “My dad used to write men in prison who’d killed their whole families and tell them they were brave,” Victoria says. “I always had the sense that something bad was going to happen.” She says that eventually, as an adult, she realized how bad he was and she cut him out of her life. She found her mother and they reconciled. She had always remembered her mother as loud, as screaming and yelling, but she says she has learned that her mother is actually quiet and keeps to herself. Victoria lives near her now. One Father’s Day she decided she’d see her dad at Denny’s. It had been years, but she immediately recognized his glassy-eyed look. When she, her brother, and their father walked out of the restaurant after an uncomfortable breakfast, her father put his arm around her and whispered, “I have a gun in my sock. I was going to kill the family, but I took one look at you and I could not.”

It was the last time she ever saw him. She keeps her daughter away from him now. “You’ve heard the saying ‘hurt people hurt people,’ ” she says to the men gathered. “Well, I also think healed people heal people.”

The men are allowed to ask questions afterward. They are sheepish, almost reverent when they stand to speak. Some are trembling as they raise their hands. She is asked how her relationship with her daughter is compared to that of her own mother. (“Completely different”; she won’t even raise her voice.) She is asked if she forgives her father. (“No.”) She is asked where her father is now. (“No idea. Southern California, maybe.”) She is asked if she dated men like her dad. (“Narcissists, yes. And players.”) And then one guy gets up, a young guy in his early twenties, his hands visibly shaking, holding a ratty notebook, and he half raps/half recites a poem he wrote, just then, for her, about her victimhood, and then her survival, about how brave she was.2 By the time he’s done, Victoria is crying, and a good number of the men have tears in their eyes.

In the afternoon, the men talk through her story in small groups, contextualizing what they recognize from the curriculum and attaching it to their own incidents of violence—Victoria was verbally threatened; her father blamed her and denied wrongdoing thereby refusing to take responsibility for his violence, and he was physically violent toward her mother; Victoria was emotionally violated; she was manipulated by her father; her experience was trivialized by her father, and one guy with short braids in his hair points out that when her mother left it was a resource taken from her. By “resource” he means something that might have kept her safe. The talk about their own incidents of violence, times they also denied any wrongdoing, moments they manipulated or verbally threatened partners, instances of trivializing their own violent events. They begin to see, some of them for the first time ever, the effect their violence may have had on their victims. That is to say, they begin to see the world through someone else’s eyes.

“Now imagine,” a facilitator named Reggie says to them, “if that was your child up there where Victoria was standing. What would your kid say about you?”

The San Bruno program is called Resolve to Stop the Violence (RSVP). Sunny Schwartz convinced the former San Francisco sheriff, Michael Hennessey, to fund her vision, and it began in the late ’90s.3 ManAlive and Survivor Impact (or restorative justice) are the pillars of this antiviolence experiment, where Jimmy Espinoza’s violence would stop and his life would begin again. The program began in the San Bruno jail, just south of San Francisco, and surprisingly, despite its relative success, has not spread much beyond San Bruno. San Quentin had a version of it for a while, but then Sinclair said it lost funding. There was talk of creating a similar program in Westchester, New York. At its inception, RSVP was a year-long program, a six-day-a-week, twelve-hour-a-day immersion aimed at restoring violent men to contributory, nonviolent members of society. Where most batterer intervention programs are once a week for twenty, forty, maybe fifty weeks, RSVP was total immersion, a multimodal approach. The core goal was making them take responsibility for their violent behavior and learn alternatives, but Schwartz’s program also addressed substance abuse, child abuse, mental health. It began each day with meditation and ended each day with yoga. Challenging gender norms, specifically how men and women are conditioned by social and cultural standards, and how men are taught violence to solve their problems and women are supposed to be subservient to their men, was at the core of the curriculum. For many of the men, it flipped everything they thought they knew about their world.

Schwartz didn’t want to just hope RSVP worked. She wanted to know, unequivocally. So she called in two of the country’s foremost violence researchers to study her program, James Gilligan and Bandy Lee. Another wing of the prison was their control group. They tracked multiple data, including violent incidents in both the RSVP and the control wings (or pods), recidivism rates, and violence within communities after offenders were released. The results, by almost any calculation, were stunning: the recidivism rates dropped by 80% and those who did wind up back in jail tended to be for nonviolent misdemeanors, like drugs or motor vehicle offenses. In the year prior to the program’s implementation, Gilligan and Lee noted twenty-four violent incidents that could have been charged as felonies had they happened outside of the context of incarceration. Once the RSVP program began, there was a violent incident in the first quarter of the year, and none thereafter in the program wing; the control group, however, cataloged twenty-eight such incidents.4 And researchers found that once offenders were released back into their communities, if they’d gone through the program in its entirety, they often became voices of nonviolence. People, they mean, like Jimmy Espinoza.

It also saved money. Gilligan and Lee found that although RSVP increased the cost per inmate by $21 a day, for every dollar spent in this kind of violence-reduction program, the community gained four extra dollars.5

It’s been twenty years now since RSVP began, and despite the success of the program, it’s been replicated in fewer than half a dozen jails, most of them overseas. While it retains its basic organization, rather than six days a week, twelve hours a day, RSVP is now more like five days a week, six hours a day. This is partly because funding programs for incarcerated people is often a challenge depending upon who’s been elected and what priorities exist inside a world of limited resources, and partly because San Bruno now offers so many different programs to offenders, including GED and community college classes, art therapy, theater, and substance abuse and twelve-step programs. (San Bruno is colloquially referred to as an “all program jail” for this reason.) The current director of programs at San Bruno talked to me informally one evening, and when I asked her why RSVP hadn’t migrated to other prisons, she told me that unlike a lot of other prison populations, violent men just don’t have their own “champion.”6 A parallel might be incarcerated veterans who have a lot of outside support, and a consensus that we as a country need to be doing more to address their needs, particularly in light of post-traumatic stress. But the most prominent voices around domestic violence are the survivors who, naturally, prioritize their own needs over abusers’.

Sunny Schwartz, who has retired, is happy to see RSVP still ongoing, but disappointed at the lack of replication. “Why isn’t [RSVP] the rule rather than the exception?” she asks. “What pisses me off so much is the lack of imagination we tend to have for people who haven’t had the same experience we have. As if lives are synonymous.” We’re sitting in a diner in Noe Valley, Schwartz in jeans and a T-shirt, her dark brown hair threaded with gray. She is a commanding presence in person, tall and powerful.

It frustrates Schwartz that there are so few resources available to those coming out of the RSVP program and back into civil society. Things like job training, meditation, parenting classes, alcoholics and narcotics anonymous, housing support, twelve-step programs, art and humanities therapies, and educational opportunities. These guys go through RSVP, she told me, and they learn all this stuff about gender, about themselves, about culture and society and violence and communication, and then they walk back into a world in which all of that theory is real again, and all of those challenges are real again, plus all of those threats and all of that pain, and they’re just more or less on their own.

The United States spends as much as twenty-five times more on researching cancer or heart disease than it does on violence prevention, despite the enormous costs of violence to our communities.7 A 2018 study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine put the cost of intimate partner violence at nearly $3.6 trillion (the study examined forty-three million U.S. adults, so it doesn’t count costs associated with, for example, dating violence); this equates to $2 trillion in medical costs and $73 billion in criminal justice expenses, among other costs, like lost productivity or property damage. Intimate partner violence costs women $103K and men $23K over the course of a single lifetime.8 These figures are a steep climb from a 2003 Centers for Disease Control report that put the cost of domestic violence at nearly $6 billion a year to American taxpayers.9 That report did not include criminal justice costs, incarceration expenses, or anyone under the age of eighteen.

Prison creates more violence in our communities, not less. And so, Schwartz asked me, “What is our alternative?” She told me an anecdote that had stayed with her for years, a story that was equal parts call to action and reason to hope. It was about a Holocaust survivor who, in the midst of being beaten by a guard, never stopped smiling. It infuriated the guard. The guard hit him harder and harder, until finally, he stopped and asked the prisoner why he was smiling. He said, “I am grateful, because I am not like you.”

Schwartz and I began our discussion that day not with the advent of RSVP, but instead with a man named Tari Ramirez. Ramirez’s tale is the kind of story that derails the work of RSVP, that makes anyone who’s involved question whether any of this, all the hours they pour into these men, all the chances they give and then give again, is worth it. Can a violent man learn to be nonviolent?

In his RSVP classes, Ramirez appeared by all accounts to be an active participant. He was quiet, reserved, but he contributed to the class and seemed to take the material seriously. It had taken four separate incidents of violence against his girlfriend, Claire Joyce Tempongko, four different calls to the police, four different attempts at restraining orders (that were issued and then vacated and issued and then vacated) just to finally get a judge to send Ramirez to jail, and even then, he received only a six-month sentence. He had gone through the first stage of RSVP and had just begun the second stage when he was released from San Bruno.

Shortly after his release, Ramirez stabbed Tempongko to death in front of her two young children. Ramirez had had a significant history of violence against Tempongko, who was only twenty-eight when she was killed. An investigation by the deputy city attorney after the murder showed that Ramirez had dragged Tempongko by her hair out of the apartment multiple times, he’d threatened her with a broken beer bottle, told her he’d burn her house down and hurt her children, punched her more than eighteen times, strangled her and shoved his fingers down her throat, and kidnapped her on several occasions.10 And again, for all this, he was given six months. When the average person who knows little about domestic violence believes a misdemeanor is no big deal, one need only point out the Ramirez case. Misdemeanors, in the world of domestic violence, are like warning shots. And all too often they go unheeded.

Schwartz knew that ignoring what Ramirez did would be intellectually and emotionally disingenuous. More to the point she knew that while the devastation Ramirez’s act wrought on the victim and her immediate family and across the entire RSVP program was enormous and profound, to her it wasn’t entirely a surprise. “We’re dealing with really badly behaving men,” she said.

Since Ramirez did not finish out the program in its entirety, as a case study in efficacy, it’s not particularly useful. Nevertheless, the murder devastated those in the program, the facilitators and the jail personnel, and even the guys who’d sat in that circle with Ramirez, sharing their worst moments and their deepest vulnerabilities. The day they learned of the murder, Schwartz told me she walked into the jail and everyone was “crying hysterically, uncontrollably.” It was a moment of crisis for the entire program, but it didn’t shake her belief in the work and in its urgency. “This stuff is too delicate and compelling to pretend that any one thing is the answer,” she said. “I think of the cancer analogy. You have people going through chemotherapy and then someone dies. Does that mean you stop your clinical trial?” You keep at it, keep tweaking, keep developing, keep trying new combinations. “That’s what this is,” she said. “It’s a clinical trial.”

To see more of RSVP in action, I meet Jimmy Espinoza on a breezy January morning at the entrance to San Bruno nearly a year after my first visit, when Victoria told her story. South of San Francisco, San Bruno sits atop a hill in the suburbs, surrounded by single-family pastel houses. The thick metal doors open for him freely now. He jokes with guards and inmates alike. One guard with a chest the size of a smart car, who happens to be gay, recounts a story from the weekend that involves a recent vacation and an unwanted advance and a self-deprecating joke about being a “flyin’ Hawaiian,” which has Jimmy crying with laughter. (San Bruno is the only jail I’ve ever been in with openly gay guards. Prison guards can be stoic, tough, even violent; I just hadn’t ever thought of them as also possibly gay, and my surprise was yet another reminder of how deep stereotypes can run, even in someone like me who was actively in that exact moment trying to upend such stereotypes.) Jimmy wears a beige Dickies button-down shirt and matching cargo pants; his clothes are so oversized he could fit both himself and the flyin’ Hawaiian in there. Reading glasses are perched on his forehead.

The RSVP wing of the jail maintains a waiting list that sometimes has a dozen men or more on it. The reputation throughout San Bruno is that no one fucks with you in the RSVP pod. So guys want in. Guards, too. It also looks good in court if you can show a judge you’re trying to change. But it’s also this other thing, so obvious it rarely gets mentioned: people don’t want to be in violent situations. When I’m told, as I often am, that violence is simply human nature, I think of San Bruno and wonder, if that is true, then why, given the choice, do people deemed so violent they must be locked away from civil society, try to put themselves first and foremost in a section known for its lack of violence?

The pod is a carpeted fishbowl, with a semicircular guard’s desk in the middle. The desk is slightly higher than ground level so that he can see into every cell and every corner of the entire pod at once. There are two floors. A large staircase dominates the middle of the space. In another setting it might be the kind of grand staircase from which royalty descend. Twenty-four cells with glass fronts hold forty-eight guys who range in age from eighteen to seventy. They are white, Black, Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern, all in orange scrubs with laceless white shoes. A bank of pay phones lines one wall. The ceiling soars and it’s quiet as a library when we enter. Some of the men are murderers. Some are dealers. Some are burglars. But all of them have domestic violence histories. All of them also have yet to be sentenced, which means they’re on their best behavior; the newest guy has been here three days. The longest, two hundred and ten weeks. The length is a signal of the seriousness of his crime. Felonies, unlike misdemeanors, can take years and years to go through the court system. Each of them, though, knows he is lucky to be here. One of the founding tenets of this program is a zero tolerance for violence.

Jimmy is here today with two other facilitators: Reggie Daniels and Leo Bruenn. Some of the men come up and greet Jimmy with a kind of tough-guy handshake, a slap on the back and a half hug, or just simply a nod. They steal glances at me and one or two come and introduce themselves, call me ma’am. Reggie’s group goes into a classroom, and Leo’s takes up the area in front of the stairs. Jimmy and the fourteen men in his group today (and me) carry blue plastic chairs and form a small circle more or less underneath the arching staircase. The guys sit in a prescribed order: those who are newest to the pod sit to Jimmy’s left and they wrap around the circle in order of seniority so that the guy who’s been in the group the longest winds up on his immediate right. The order matters because the curriculum is peer-led—one of the elements here that differs from most other batterer intervention programs. Sinclair insists on the peer-led curriculum, pulling from his years in the Dalton system, where students participate in their own advancement, carve out their own education within the framework of the curriculum. I can feel myself being watched with curiosity. One of the agreements I made to be able to be here was that I be part of the process as much as I can and not simply an outsider combing these men for stories of the worst moments of their lives. This contradicts the role of most journalists, but part of the point of the course for these men is that we are all from the same community, and we share the same burdens: the need to be loved, the fear of vulnerability, the suffocating weight of shame. To make myself a viewer is, in some ways, to create the very kind of hierarchy that this program is trying to dismantle. In other batterer intervention groups, I am a silent viewer in the corner, but here I am somewhere between participant and viewer. So when we sit down, Jimmy asks me to start off the group by talking about myself.

I begin with my name and where I live, and tell them about this book and the university at which I am a professor. I tell them that we don’t spend nearly as much time talking to offenders as we do their victims. And then I tell them the more important story, the story that probably leads me to write what I write in the first place: that I am a high school dropout, like many of them, and that sometimes violence swirled around me. The particulars of our lives differ in scope and detail, but every one of us in that room knows what a second (or a third, or a fourth) chance means, and the gripping fear of failure that accompanies it. Many of them later thank me for sharing a little of my life, and it leaves me feeling a sense of vulnerability that, despite being a woman in relative touch with her feelings, is unnerving and uncomfortable. Even here, writing it, I feel shame.

I wonder at how difficult public vulnerability must be for these guys. I didn’t grow up being told not to cry, being told not to be a sissy, being told that I had to win, and if I didn’t win, I had to fight to become the winner. I was told other things, yes. Certainly. Many of the same kinds of things that Michelle Monson Mosure was told. About what girls should be and do, and how girls should act. I was told that men were the head of the house and women subordinate. But sharing some of the most shameful moments? The most embarrassing moments? James Gilligan, the violence researcher who’d evaluated the RSVP program initially, told me that for many of these guys it’s not becoming nonviolent that blows their minds about themselves; it’s learning that they’ve been fed a line about what they’re supposed to act like and who they’re supposed to be, a line about what masculinity means and what being a man means. How as men they can acknowledge anger, rage, and authority. But not empathy, kindness, love, fear, pain, sadness, care, nurture or any of those other “traits” that are deemed feminine. And that they’ve been manipulated by forces larger than themselves, shaped by a world they had never thought about in this way, which is shocking to them. What a relief to learn they’ve been coerced into their violence, not born into it.

This morning’s group is a kind of check-in for the guys. Later, the entire pod will have a community meeting led by Leo, and Jimmy will lead an addiction group in the afternoon. Jimmy starts off by asking them about emotional abuse. Do they understand what it means? How it’s perpetrated? So much of the class is simply helping men identify and experience their feelings: fear, sadness, empathy, shame, even anger. It’s not wrong to feel things; it’s wrong to feel things and then purposely avoid them, is the point. Jimmy asks them, “Why will drug addiction affect your family?”

“Because we’re not there even when we’re there,” one man says. He’s in his midfifties, African American, hair gone gray. “We’re manipulating their time and energy. They call us and we don’t answer … We manipulate the space in their hearts.”

The man beside him nods, his braided hair tied up in a massive knot. “I snapped on this bitch, but I came on drugs.” What he means is that his loyalty was to drugs and not his partner. He sought out a high before he bothered paying any kind of attention to her. He’s giving an example of how he used to think, before he knew what he knows now.

“I did a lot of emotional abuse without putting my hands on [my partner],” a man named Devon says. (I have changed all the men’s names to protect their privacy.) “I used to go drinking and I took myself away from her. I started doing drugs and she’d cry. I’d be gone for days. I minimized her.”

In ManAlive, drugs and alcohol aren’t excuses for violence, Jimmy says. “I’m a drug addict. I’m a batterer. Me not coming home is violence toward the family. I’m not beating them, but I’m still affecting them. You’re self-separating first.” In the background, I can hear the guys from Bruenn’s group talking, but the fourteen in this circle have their eyes trained on Jimmy. It’s calm and quiet; a complete departure from the kind of chaos depicted of most jails in movies.

“We’re all grounded in the unresolved shit, the shame of leaving your kids ’cause you’re out drinking, or ’cause you’re going back to jail,” an inmate named Gary says. He’s in this program for the second time; he never finished the first time around. A few of the guys murmur their agreement. A number of them tell me that being without their kids is the hardest part of being in jail.

And this brings Jimmy to his first story. The worst thing that ever happened to him. In this story, he’s eight, maybe nine. He’s got parents who are still married and who don’t beat the hell out of each other, so that’s something. He’s got family all over the neighborhood. His grandmother lives down the street. Cousins are nearby. And then there’s this guy, the relative of a friend of his. Buys him alcohol one day. He’s this little kid in a neighborhood that’s half Italian and half Irish, half cop and half criminal. He drinks the alcohol. The guy wants something from little Jimmy. He gave him alcohol, didn’t he? A gift. He’s a good guy, right? Little Jimmy can see that, right? Maybe Jimmy could do something for him now. Won’t take long. Maybe Jimmy could just let the guy touch him a little bit? And maybe then little Jimmy could touch this grown man back? And little Jimmy does it even though it about makes him retch, because isn’t it what he’s supposed to do? Obey? Adults make the rules, right? Adults know everything. All the questions you ever have as a kid will have answers when you’re an adult. Right? Like, why is this horrible, disgusting thing happening to me? Or maybe, am I making this horrible, disgusting thing happen to me? And eventually, am I a horrible, disgusting thing now?

It happens two, maybe three times. Little Jimmy tells no one. Holds this horror inside him like a fistful of molten asphalt for decades.

“It’s my shame,” he says when he tells this story today. “Not fighting back.” Roughly 12% of male inmates in jails like San Bruno today were sexually assaulted before the age of eighteen. (In state prisons, the number is higher, and for those boys who grew up in foster care, the numbers are shocking, nearly 50%.11) I once asked Jimmy what he’d do if he saw the guy today.

“I’d kill him,” he says.

And I’m not sure if he means it or not.

Around that same time, first one neighbor girl, and then soon another who took turns babysitting him also began to ask him to touch them. One girl would tell him to use his mouth, which made him want to gag. He was nine, ten years old. Had no earthly idea what he was doing, except that it was sexual. He knew that from movies. In movies people took their clothes off and moved around each other in some way, like snakes. One of the girls was high all the time on something. He was too young to know what it was, but later she became a dusthead. Dustheads are what they called people who were always on PCP. The molestation went on longer with the girls. Two, maybe three years. He didn’t know if what he was doing was wrong or right. All he knew was that he didn’t like it. He thought it was his fault. He thought he’d done something wrong. He thought all the things that any child who’s been violated thinks—boy or girl. When his family found out, they told him there’d been another man they thought had abused him because little Jimmy would cry whenever this guy came around. Jimmy doesn’t remember. Maybe. Who can say. But it’s the moment he points to. “The molestation from the man was worst,” he says. “That right there made me violent. Made me a rageaholic, right? Lying, right? Just all these defects of character started growing at that moment.”

I look around the room, fourteen men in jail staring him down as he tells this story. Half of them are nodding, partly from empathy. Partly from experience.