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Sheriff Michael Hennessey, San Francisco
The problem: Each year, more than 100,000 offenders are released from New York’s state prisons and local jails, yet two thirds are rearrested within three years.[1]
The recidivism rate suggests that New York’s criminal justice system is failing to effectively deter crime and rehabilitate criminals, yet this failure does not come cheaply: the cost to incarcerate an offender in state prison tops $32,000 a year. More significantly, offenders who are released only to commit additional violent crimes do incalculable damage to the lives of their victims and the community as a whole. New Yorkers thus have a tremendous stake in reducing the rate of violent recidivism. Resolve to Stop the Violence, a decade-old program of the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, has demonstrated success: the rate of re-arrest for a violent offense was reduced by more than 82 percent for those who spent 16 weeks or more in the program.
The San Francisco Solution: Resolve to Stop the Violence Project (RSVP)
RSVP, operated by the San Francisco County Sherriff’s Department, has the following features:
∑ Participants are all violent male offenders who will eventually be released back into the community. Their crimes include domestic violence, armed robbery, assault, battery and rape;
∑ Participants are housed within the jail in a 62-bed open dormitory with no cells;
∑ Participants are required to take part in the program for fourteen hours a day, six days a week, for a minimum of 30 days;
∑ Participation in the program is mandatory for the men assigned to it, who are selected on the basis of their criminal histories and current charges;
∑ The program is supervised by counselors who are mostly ex-offenders or survivors of violent crime themselves;
∑ The curriculum is based on the “Man Alive” violence prevention program, which emphasizes:
∑ Raising awareness of the belief systems that promote violence;
∑ Teaching that violence is learned behavior which can be unlearned. Offenders can choose alternatives to violence;
∑ Improving communication skills;
∑ Empathy for victims and their families – each week offenders and survivors of violent crime participate in Victim Impact sessions, frank discussions about the consequences of violence for victims;
∑ Accountability and the need to make positive contributions to the community upon release: understanding, taking responsibility for, and working to repair the harm done;
∑ Participants receive drug and alcohol treatment and job training, as well as the opportunity to earn a high school diploma through an in-jail charter high school;
∑ After completing their jail term, RSVP graduates on parole continue mandatory participation in violence-prevention and job placement programs. They must also work with victims’ organizations, speaking out on violence prevention in the community;
∑ In addition to working with offenders and ex-offenders, RSVP includes a Victim Services program that provides monetary reimbursement through a special crime victims’ compensation fund, and referrals to counseling, support groups, job training and legal services.
How San Francisco Started the Policy
San Francisco Sherriff Michael Hennessey describes how his staff first came to him in 1996 “ask[ing] if they could put sixty violent men in a dormitory with no jail cells to run an antiviolence counseling program;"[2]
At the time, he says, he thought they were crazy. But he realized that RSVP was a logical extension of the drug treatment programs the sheriff’s department was already operating within its jails. These drug treatment programs, based on the “therapeutic community” model frequently used in half-way houses, had worked successfully in San Francisco jails since 1993. Sheriff Hennessey agreed to investigate applying the same approach to violent offenders.
Over the course of the next year, the Sheriff met with victims’ rights advocates, religious leaders, police and corrections officials, violence counselors and ex-offenders to develop the program. Funded by a grant from the Open Society Institute, RSVP was launched in September 1997.
The Results So Far
A study by James Gilligan and Bandy Lee of Harvard University compared inmates who participated in RSVP for eight weeks or more to a control group of violent offenders would have been eligible from the program but did not participate due to lack of space. Offenders who participated in RSVP for sixteen weeks or longer were 82.6 percent less likely to be rearrested for a violent offense within a year than those in the non-participant control group. Those who participated for twelve weeks were half as likely to be rearrested as the other inmates, while those participating for just eight weeks still had a violent recidivism rate 46.3percent lower than the control group. Even among the RSVP participants who were eventually re-arrested, they remained in the community longer before their re-arrest and spent less time in custody during follow-up than the comparison group of inmates who did not participate in the program.
The study concluded that, at an average cost of $21 per participant per day for all of RSVP’s offender, victim, and community services, the program more than paid for itself by reducing the rate of repeat violent arrests and incarceration. The researchers’ conservative estimate, leaving out the non-monetary losses from incarceration such as the disruption of families, was that every dollar invested in RSVP saved four dollars in the cost of re-arrest and incarceration.
Sheriff Hennessey also noted an unanticipated benefit of the program: according to his assessment, the RSVP housing unit had become the lowest-conflict dorm in the county jail system. “During the program’s first year,” he explained, “there was one fight between participants, and no assaults on staff—compared to the rest of the system, where during the same period, there were 300 prisoner-on-prisoner assaults and 68 assaults on staff.”
RSVP won the 2004 Innovations in Government award from the Ash Institute at Harvard University and the Council for Excellence in Government.
Beyond San Francisco
Since 2005, Resolve to Abolish Violence Everywhere, a program based on RSVP, has flourished in Travis County, Texas, illustrating how the RSVP model can be successfully replicated. The main shortcoming of both programs, however, is their small size. Restorative justice initiatives operating on a larger scale have the potential to have a real impact on the rate of violent crime, the lives of victims, offenders and their families, and the cost of the criminal justice system. In the meantime, a pilot program could be used to test the applicability to New York.
Additional Resources
DMI’s May 2005 Marketplace of Ideas event: Watch, listen, or read a transcript of San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey discussing the implications of his Resolve to Stop the Violence Project with Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes; NYC Corrections Commissioner Martin Horn; and Rev. Dr. James Forbes Jr. of Riverside Church .
For more on San Francisco’s RSVP program see:
The San Francisco Sheriff’s Department
James Gilligan and Bandy Lee, “The Resolve to Stop the Violence Project: reducing violence in the community through a jail-based initiative,” Journal of Public Health, vol. 27, no. 2 (2005)
Sunny Schwartz, Michael Hennessey, and Leslie Levitas, “Restorative Justice and the Transformation of Jails: An urban sheriff’s case study in reducing violence,” Police Practice and Research, vol. 4, no. 4 (2003)
The Man Alive curriculum used in RSVP
Prison Fellowship International’s Restorative Justice resource center
New York State organizations working on prisoner reentry and restorative justice issues include:
The Center for Court Innovation
The Finger Lakes Restorative Justice Center
Fifth Avenue Committee Developing Justice program
New York State Community Justice Forum
For more on the work done by DMI’s Marketplace of Ideas panelists, see:
Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes
NYC Corrections Commissioner Martin Horn
Rev. Dr. James Forbes Jr. of Riverside Church
[1]“Report and Recommendations to
[2] DMI’s Marketplace of Ideas, May 16, 2005.