THE STORY

“No sane person wakes up in the morning and says, I want to work in a jail."

So says Sunny Schwartz, one of the most powerful voices in the restorative justice movement in America today.

And yet that’s exactly what she did, along with a like-minded “cadre of crazies”, led by San Francisco Sheriff Mike Hennessey, who decided to turn the standard model of incarceration on its head.

They put the most violent prisoners in the system together in an open dormitory, with full-time classes and peer-to-peer mentoring. They started the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project (RSVP) and Five Keys, the first-ever charter high school inside a jail. Most radical of all, prisoners learned to listen, to take responsibility for their actions, to give back to their communities, and to renounce violence.

RSVP and Five Keys became the twin foundations of the most successful restorative justice program in the country, with re-arrests for violent crimes dropping by 80%. The vast majority of graduates got out of jail, stayed out of jail, and most importantly, stopped hurting people.

You Gotta Be Crazy is their story.