Sunny Schwartz

I was raised on the south side of Chicago and so should have been a White Sox fan, but my heart gravitated to the loveable losers of the north side, the Cubs. Later, when I moved to San Francisco, I gave myself with equal passion to the Giants. Like the Cubbies, they have failed to win the big one year after year and yet I stay devoted. I am like this in the rest of my life, too: I root for underdogs.

I have worked in the jails of San Francisco County for the last 29 years and have seen the underbelly of our society that includes thieves and wife beaters, drug dealers, gangbangers and murderers--underdogs, every one of them. They are a group of Americans, we've all recently learned, whose numbers have been growing by leaps and bounds.

But there is reason for hope and the evidence is in San Francisco, in the programs Sheriff Michael Hennessey and I have helped set up which invest in a prisoner's success rather than his or her failure. One program is called RSVP, or Resolve to Stop the Violence. I started it because so few prisons addressed why so many of the men had gone to prison in the first place--their violence. In RSVP, we educate prisoners about the roots of their violence, get them to take responsibility for their actions, and give them tools to change. Ben Matthews is but one example of our success. He was a meth addict and a skinhead who came into our jail wanting to start a race war. He left a counselor and leader of his peers who still wrestled with his demons, but has stayed out of jail, paid taxes, and helped other criminals to reform. Every extra dollar we've spent on programs has been paid back into government's coffers with seven dollars in savings from the crimes we've prevented.

Programs are just part of the solution. You also need people to implement them, people who see a benefit to prisoners who get out and don't come back. We've been blessed in San Francisco with men and women of good faith starting with our Sheriff, but you don't need to rely on this. The right incentives will do the trick. Rewarding institutions and individuals when they lower recidivism rates is one particularly revolutionary idea.

Everyone has a stake in this, Republican or Democrat, big tent liberal or small-government conservative; this isn't a partisan issue, it is a human one. I know that we can actually use the prisons to make us safer, and shrink the ever expanding and unsustainable prison budgets at the same time. 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. When that happens, for me, it's like the Cubs have won the World Series, which every fan knows would be a miracle. 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 have. That's what has sustained me in the monster factory, and it's the way out of our current mess.

Sunny Schwartz is a nationally recognized expert in Criminal Justice reform and has worked in the field for 29 years.

Ms. Schwartz is the author of the best selling, Dreams From The Monster Factory, a personal memoir that includes the creation of RSVP a program that works with violent offenders and their victims.

Ms. Schwartz has been featured on Larry King Live, Oprah and was the recipient of the prestigious "Innovations in Government Award", sponsored by the Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University.