The Resolve to Stop Violence Program in Dreams From the Monster Factory Essay

Sunny Schwartz grew up very charismatic and deeply compassionate on the South side of Chicago during 1960s. She wanted a different life from the normal one that her family had. Therefore, she struggled through school to be somebody of status in the society (Boodell, and Schwartz 13). After school, Sunny applied for law school which did not require any college degree. She passed the bar and started working at the department of the criminal justice system. Suddenly Sunny started to get discouraged by the broken, and fixed system. However, instead of resigning from her job, she decided to reinvent it. This essay discusses the resolve to stop violence, basing its arguments, observations, and examples on Dreams from the Monster Factory, a storybook written by Sunny Schwartz.

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Through reinventing her job, Sunny started to make the jail a place where criminals could change their character and become better people. In the year 1997, Sunny launched RSVP (Resolve to stop the Violence Project) the project was a groundbreaking program that was meant for the San Francisco Sheriff's Department. Resolve to Stop the Violence Project, which has cut the habit of violence rearrests by up to eighty percent, brings together the offenders and the victims in a unique way (Boodell, and Schwartz 96). The offenders and the victims are introduced to a correctional program that requires the offenders to take true responsibilities for the actions, and through accepting their offenses, they should work on how to eliminate their violent behavior. The program, on the other hand, helped the victims by empowering them and teaching them on how they can forget the loss and move on. Sunny Schwartz had faith in her humanity. Therefore her compassion and her mission kept on inspiring her. Apart from the statistics and sensational portrayals of the prison, Sunny offered intimate, revelatory chronicle of crime, punishment, and ultimately, harrowing and redemption.

The San Francisco Sheriff's Department Resolve to Stop Violence Project expresses the principles and idea in many ways. The program dealt with both the offenders and their victims and at the same time to bring healing to both parties involved in the violence. People who were targeted in this program were violent men who were imprisoned and released from the jail of San Francisco County, victims of these men and finally members of the communities affected by this violence (Boodell, and Schwartz 189). The ideas used in the program focuses on the re-education of the violent men, testimony from the violent men and personal accountability. Since the program was initiated by Sunny Schwartz, two hundred and fifty to three hundred violent offenders willingly participated in an intensive jail curriculum which was made to support them in correcting their behaviors that led to violence and also to be able to develop empathy for the victims. The learning was programmed to take up to twelve hours in a day and six days in a week. Another idea that the program used was to provide direct services to the survivors of the violent offenders by participating in the offender restoration program. Sunny Schwartz believed that by using the survivor empowerment curriculum, the clients or the offenders could restore themselves, their families and the entire communities involved (253). The survivors were taught on how to forgive, forget and move on and once this was achieved the offenders could be accepted even by the entire community as they make a new transition from being offenders or criminals to becoming survivors and advocates. The community restoration activities were put in place to help in repairing the harm that the offenders have caused and support the offenders in giving back to the community. As offenders kept on continuing in violence prevention groups and educating, many became mentors of other offenders. Some ways in which the community and the survivors performed in violence prevention education is through public information campaigns, use of the annual strikeout violence day and billboards.

A group of anti-violent individuals met to form a community with the aim of making the plan of RSVP a success - the curriculum that was scheduled for more than one year incorporated people of various professional, history and cultural backgrounds. For instance, ex-offenders, those who had survived murder, gay rights activists, law enforcers such as deputy sheriff, and battered women shelter social workers were involved in the course. According to Schwartz, "62 of the most violent prisoners in the San Francisco County jail system: gangbangers, wife beaters, pimps, and murderers" were present during the opening of the RSVP opening in the year 1997 (145). The successes and failures of the inmates were vital to the program as it was based on peer support. That is to mean, inmates who had been there for a longer time were the ones to guide the others (Schwartz 148). Schwartz expresses in the storybook that, besides peer education, the program also used a victim-impact strategies; there was the creation of "an environment that requires men to confront the results of their violence through victim impact classes" (146). One of the inmate successes that is cited in the story is about Ben, a nineteen-year-old drug addict who beat a homosexual started by denial but later became one of the beneficiaries, in fact, his confessions helped change many convicts and ex-convicts (Schwartz 188). He even took to the synagogue and apologized to the people he hurt before.

Sunny Schwartz was faced with many challenges during the period that she was heading the program of Resolving to Stop the Violence. The challenges include inmates refusing to participate in the program. Not all inmates were willing to participate maybe because many of them felt that they have served their sentenced and have no reason to participate in the program (Boodell, and Schwartz 179). Again, the torture that the offenders went through in jail made them not to participate in the program. Many of the offenders were not ready to change from being what they are therefore Sunny was left with a task of convincing them on the benefits of changing to be better people in the society. Another challenge that Sunny faced was the refusal of participation by the community. Not all of the people from the community were able to see the reason from the perspectives of Sunny Schwartz. Many of the people found it difficult to accept the offenders back to society as one of them. On such cases, sunny Schwartz would look for a way to talk to the community on how to accept such offenders back (Boodell, and Schwartz 188). Many of the offenders, for example, might have caused a lot of harm to the community that accepting them back becomes difficult. Lastly, the cooperation of the staff was not sufficient as required. Sunny's colleagues were afraid of chaos and riots, therefore; they decided to stay away from the program. This made Sunny almost to handle everything that was happening in the program.

Conclusion

In summary, the Storybook Dreams from the Monster Factory helps the reader to understand the extraordinary commitment of some individuals in making the criminal justice system more successful by engaging some of the inmates, law enforcers and victims in a curriculum that would make them view the aspect of crime differently. This followed the notion that jail made many people become more violent and never feel the crimes they engaged in were bad.

Bibliography

Boodell, David, and Sunny Schwartz. Dreams from the Monster Factory. Scribner, 2014.