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In today’s episode, the first of a two-parter, Bill and Megan are joined by Doug Noll who will talk about the transformative Prison of Peace program.
Hosted by Bill Eddy, LCSW, Esq. and Megan Hunter, MBA, It’s All Your Fault! High Conflict People explores the five types of people who can ruin your life—people with high conflict personalities and how they weave themselves into our lives in romance, at work, next door, at school, places of worship, and just about everywhere, causing chaos, exhaustion, and dread for everyone else.
They are the most difficult of difficult people — some would say they’re toxic. Without them, tv shows, movies, and the news would be boring, but who wants to live that way in your own life!
Have you ever wanted to know what drives them to act this way?
In the It’s All Your Fault podcast, we’ll take you behind the scenes to understand what’s happening in the brain and illuminates why we pick HCPs as life partners, why we hire them, and how we can handle interactions and relationships with them. We break down everything you ever wanted to know about people with the 5 high conflict personality types: narcissistic, borderline, histrionic, antisocial/sociopath, and paranoid.
And we’ll give you tips on how to spot them and how to deal with them.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to, It's All Your Fault On True Story fm, the one and only podcast dedicated to helping you understand and increase your effectiveness with someone who may have a high conflict personality. I'm Megan Hunter and I'm here with my co-host Bill Eddie, along with our special guest today, Doug Nole, who I'll be introducing in a moment. Bill and I are the co-founders of the High Conflict Institute in San Diego, California. At hci, we provide training, consultation, and educational programs to professionals and individuals, uh, all across the world. In today's episode, we're focusing on what might turn out to be one of my personal favorite topics, personal transformation in inmate populations. We have with us today, Doug Nole, who together with Laurel Coffer, created a program called Prison of Peace to help inmates develop skills to reduce violence and promote peace within their prison community. Uh, Prison of Peace is successfully teaching murderers and other felons imprisoned for life.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Uh, see why I said it might be one of my favorite topics. , uh, this is obviously right up our alley and I know we have a lot in common with Doug, so stay tuned for a very stimulating conversation that will probably also warn your heart a bit too. But first, a couple of notes. If you have a question about a high conflict situation, send it to podcast high conflict institute.com or on our website@highconflictinstitute.com slash podcast, where you'll find the show notes and links as well. And please give us a rate to review and tell your friends, colleagues, or family about us, especially if they're dealing with a high conflict situation. We're very grateful. Now let's talk with Doug. Doug, welcome to Its All Your Fault Podcast.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Well, thanks Megan, and Bill, as always, great to see you again. We're
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Really pleased to have you with us today. And, and you know, we thank you for your time, for making time for us. I know you're, you're a busy, busy guy, so, um, we're, we're grateful. And now, uh, for our listeners, I'd like to introduce you before we delve into the discussion. So Doug speaks about and teaches people how to solve difficult, intractable, and highly emotional problems. He was a business and commercial trial lawyer for 22 years before turning to leadership development, problem solving and peace making, obviously one of our favorite topics. He is a senior consultant with Mobius Executive Leadership and maintains a high level mediation and arbitration practice. So he is a busy guy. He's won lots of awards, including California Attorney of the Year in 2012, along with his colleague Laura Coffer, for their pro bono Prison of Peace Project, which we'll be talking about today. He's the author of a couple of books, uh, Deescalate How to Calm an Angry Person in 90 Seconds or Less, and Elusive Peace, How Modern Diplomatic Strategies Could Better Resolve World Conflicts. And Doug, like Bill is an adjunct faculty member of the Pepperdine School of Lost Strauss Institute for Dispute Resolution. You know, they've, they've met before and talked before and
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Bill, yeah, I think it was four or five years ago you had me on your program. Done. That's right. I think this, well,
Speaker 2 (03:28):
No, it was longer than that because I did my, I did my podcast in 2000, 2008, so it was more like 20 years ago.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
Wow. Time is flying for all
Speaker 2 (03:37):
I know. I know
Speaker 1 (03:39):
well, you're a podcast pioneer.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
I, I, I was, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Wow. Doug has a much bigger bio than I've said in this one paragraph, but we'll probably touch on some of that in, in our discussion. I know you're, you're, you're interested to, to hear what he has to say, but we're going to ask him a couple of quick fun questions first so you can get to know him a little better and fall in love with them. So, Doug, where did you grow up?
Speaker 2 (04:03):
I grew up in San Marino, California, which for those of you that are not, uh, familiar with Southern California is in the Pasadena area.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Okay. So kind of, we have a lot of listeners across the world. So that would be the Los Angeles area. Right.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
And it would be in the San Gral Valley of Los Angeles, which would be to the e northeast of downtown Los Angeles, about 15 miles.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Wow. I spent eight months in my early twenties, like very early twenties in Baldwin Park. So a little ways away and a little different . Um, your favorite reading genre or a movie? Either one.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
I, uh, these days I mostly use Audible cuz I can do multi multitask, but I've always loved science fiction and so I'm always looking for really creative, interesting science fiction stuff because the people that write science fiction are thinking about where, what's our technology today and what's it gonna look like a thousand years from now? And so I just find it fascinating to see what, what people speculate on.
Speaker 3 (04:59):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Interesting. I I'm not a big science fiction fan, but my husband read this series about the Bob Averse. Does that sound
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Familiar? I've heard of it, but I haven't read
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Anything about it. Oh my God. I I think it's science fiction, but it, it was to me anyway, , but it's, you might check it out. It was sounded really fascinating cuz it's about the future and what could be in technology and all that.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
It actually, science fiction was one of my favorite subjects in junior high school and high school. And I remember being Isaac OV and Right. All Highline and
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
All those guys when 2001 was just forever in the future . Right,
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Right. I know.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Here we are. Here we are today. I
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Never grew out of it. Yeah. So maybe I didn't mature as much as you did Bill
Speaker 3 (05:43):
. I know. Real life kinda grabbed me, but I still think about that stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 2 (05:48):
There you go.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Oh, that's great. Uh, next question. Where do you wish you could live anywhere in the world?
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Right where I am right now. Ah,
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Good
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Answer. I, I live 50 miles south of Yosemite National Park in the Central Sierra and Nevada foothills. I've got 10 acres. Um, my commute when I, my commute is really 10 feet to my office, , if I have to leave the property, it's a, it's a mile down a dirt road then it's a mile on a one lane road that's 20 miles on a two lane mountain wood before I hit my first freeway. Ah. So it's pretty lovely.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
That's a little bit of paradise on earth. Yeah. And you have a lovely dog who I got to meet a few minutes ago. Um, I I imagine she goes on walks with you down that
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Road. Does and we well and we, we work her pretty hard up as a border colleague, Young Border college. She needs a lot of exercise.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
I bet she does. . She's some sheep to chase . I heard. Um, okay, if, here's the, the big tricky question. If you could spend one hour with someone to have a discussion, you know, ask questions or just sit with, who would it be?
Speaker 2 (06:49):
I think that I'd like to spend an hour with Bill Gates. I
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Thought you were gonna say Bill. And I was like, Oh, here he is.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
This,
Speaker 2 (06:55):
You know, his whole life is, is now philanthropy and he's particularly interested in moving the needle in big ways in, in a lot of areas, including, uh, global warming. And I just love to chew, chew with him on a while on his thinking about what's, what it's gonna take to stop global warming. Uh, and, and what kinds of things he's seeing down the road with the technologies that his, his trust is, is funding. I think that'd be really interesting.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Fascinating.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Yeah, no doubt.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Yeah, I think the big picture, big picture thinkers like him are just whole different world and I think we need, so make sense? Yeah. Have a good talk,
Speaker 2 (07:34):
. Thanks Bill. Thanks for the introduction. Bye bye. I know he is your new best friend, right?
Speaker 3 (07:38):
?
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Uh, that's great. Okay, well thanks for indulging us with that information. It's, it's just kind of fun. But, um, now let's get to Prison of Peace. I'm so interested about this program you've devel developed. Um, when you and I spoke uh, a couple of weeks ago and, and you mentioned it, I just was almost salivating cuz it's just, it's so exciting to see something positive happening in the prison population. So I'm gonna hand the mic over to you and say, Let tell us all about Prison of Peace Project.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
I will. And feel fear to jump in and ask questions along the way. Yeah. On August 19th and 2009, I received a phone call from my dear friend and colleague Laurel Coffer, who's a Los Angeles based mediator and lawyer. And she asked me, she read me a letter that she, she's, who was literally standing at her mailbox, uh, in Woodland Hills where she lives. And he read me this letter that was written by a woman named Susan Russo. And just as a side note, Susan passed away in prison a week ago.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Ah,
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Susan was serving a life sentence without possibility of parole and she was representing a net, what's called a networking group. Uh, a group of 150 or so Women Serving Life and long term sentences. And they were housed in the largest, most violent women's prison in the World, Valley State Prison for Women in Chi California, which is about an hour and 15 minutes from where I live. And basically Susan was asking Laurel if Laurel would be willing to come into the prison and teach the women how to become mediators or how they could learn mediation skills because they were tired of the prison violence and they wanted to stop it. So Laurel read the letter to me and said, What do you think? And I thought about it for nano a second and I said, I think if this is for real, I think we should do this.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
So we wrote back to Susan cuz we wanted to make sure it wasn't a scam. And she wrote back to us a 15 page handwritten, handwritten letter answering all our questions in great detail. And we determined that this was the real deal. So it took us six months to get, finally get permission to go into the prison and start the work. And we had never been in prison before. We did know anything about working in prison. This is all new to us. Both Laurel and I like Bill, are very experienced trainers and teachers and professors in media in teaching mediation, negotiation skills like that. But we knew going in that, that our students are incarcerated students did not have the normal skills that most other people have because they're in prison and they're in prison because they lack a lot of skills. So we decided to start at ground zero seeing they had no skills whatsoever, no emotional intelligence, no social skills, no communication skills, no problem solving skills, nothing.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
And so we developed a, the prisoner peace curriculum to take somebody who has no knowledge of any of this stuff and build up their skills to the point where we could then introduce them to the standard interest based mediation process, which is kind of the standard process that everybody teaches, especially in the commu community mediation world. And that's what we did. And so, and, and we spent, once we got permission to go, we, we started developing a curriculum and we finally started teaching our first 15 women, uh, in April of 2010 in this dingy conference room on D Yard. And let me tell you something, working in prisons is not like working in corporate America. really detail teaching environment is about as primitive and grim and dirty as you can possibly imagine. Uh, and we were in this very grim, dingy conference room, uh, that was really used as storage with half the fluorescent lights out.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
And I, you know, it was really quite something. But these women were aged from about 65 down to their late twenties, early thirties. Very diverse ethnically, educationally, and experientially. Many of, most all of them were in prison because of one kind of a homicide or another. And we started, and of course the first thing that I observed was they were extremely hostile towards me because I'm a big white Anglo-Saxon lawyer mediator. Everything, anything bad that had ever happened to these women, happened to them by somebody that looks like me. So it was a very humbling experience for me to, to have to figure out how do I build trust with these 15 women? And that's how it started. Uh, in those days we did the entire curriculum in 12 weeks start to finish. And it, we did that because we didn't know any better. Now, we'd take that same 12 week curriculum and it's spread out over a year.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Cause it, it darn near killed us. We went in every Wednesday and spent all day with them, uh, every Wednesday for 12 weeks because the two of you, just the two of us, and you know, you don't have PowerPoints, we eventually got permission to bring in flip charts and stuff like that, but everything is old. It's all old school. We wrote all the manuals. So we had a student manual for them. And we, and we trained out of, we knew the material inside and out. So we, and so we, and basically started training the curriculum. It's evolved over the years. So the way the curriculum works now, just to describe it briefly, is that it's, uh, divided into four separate workshops. The first workshop is called the Circle Keeper Workshop. And in this workshop we introduce our students to the concept of restorative justice. Because although we're not a restorative justice program, the restorative justice philosophy underlies the whole, the whole underpinnings of prison of peace.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
And then we teach them how to listen. Uh, we teach four levels of reflective listening, which, which are mirroring, paraphrasing, core messaging and ethic labeling. And we teach them to use use statements when they're reflecting. We don't use any of that old Thomas Gordon active listening crap that doesn't work. Or people use life statements. And the ethic labeling was a skill that I developed. We added that on to the three levels that most people teach. And then when they, after they be gotten introduced to how to listen to each other in a very different way. And it's so funny to, you know, we always started the beginning of the listening segment. We say, How many of you think, how many of you think you're good listeners? And they all raise their hands, . And then we say, Well, how many of you thought you were good listeners?
Speaker 2 (14:04):
And now know better? And they, and they said, I don't, generally, they say, you know, I didn't know crap about listening . So after that, the second part of the Circle keep workshop is teaching 'em how to be a circle keeper. And we, we developed, um, a peace circle process, which is a really a listening peace circle. Where, where one, there are three questions that are asked that are based on a value. For example, what is hope? How does hope show up in your community? How can you create more hope over the next week? So the last question is always a call to action. And what's interesting about our circles is that it goes left to right, left to right, no right to left. And the person that the person that speaks then turns to the person on her left has a talking stick in her hand. And the, the next person to the left now has to reflect back everything that the speaker said, summarize, paraphrase it, and also label the, the emotions of the speaker. So they're, they're paraphrasing poor messaging and ethic labeling. So it's, it's a, it's a developmental process to learn how to listen. And then there's a negotiation between the, the speaker and the listener until the speaker says, Yes, I, I've been heard. And then she passes the talking stick on to the next person. And then that woman talks. So we introduce peace circles in week one.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
If you could say a little more about affect labeling, because I think that's so essential and in some ways similar to what we do with our ear statements,
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Right? I have a master's degree in peace making and conflict studies in addition to my law degree. And I'd learned a lot about conflict and peace. The one thing that my brilliant teachers did not have was a good way to calm angry people down. But I, in my, when I studied my, for my master's degree in the late nineties, I got into neuroscience and with, I was tutored by John Alman at Caltech University as a lay student of neuroscience. So I started reading all about the, the neuroscience of emotions. And in those days, there wasn't much out there. But I, I would just read every, every study that I could get my hands on. Finally, I guess it all just sort of a assimilated in me because I was in a very difficult mediation in 2005 and these people were screaming at each other.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
I mean, if there were knives on the table, there would be blood on the floor. And I didn't know what to do. And so I just watched them for a minute, just vile insults, divorce couple of course. And finally the thought came to me, listened to the emotions, and that's what I have them do. And a couple hours later when we went through the proc, I did, I had them ignore the words and just focused on each other's emotions. And one, one person was telling this story, I'd had the other person just describe what emotion is he going through? What emotion is she going through? And they managed to do that. And at, at the end, the ex-husband started sobbing. And when he stopped and blew his nose and tuned himself up, he looked across the table and said, That's the first time you listen to me in 25 years.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Wow. My jaw dropped. They settled the case. I didn't say a word. They settled a case. There was a stupid little 18,000 problem. They, they settled a case and walked out holding him to have lunch with each other. Did, do you think they ever got back together? I have no idea. But that's how it started. And then two years later, Matthew Lieberman, a neuroscientist out of UCLA and his colleagues published the seminal study that showed why this technique called ethic labeling worked. And it shows that when you re, when you reflect back somebody's emotions with, uh, or when people start labeling their emotions, the emotional centers of the brain are inhibited. And at the same time, the right ventral lateral prefrontal totex is activated and it takes about 90 seconds. So I started developing a way of teaching this. And so the basic technique is to ignore the words, read the emotions, and there's never one emotion.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
There's usually eight or on emotions that come with anger, typically with anger and upset. And then reflect back the emotions with a simple use statement. So that's a affect labeling. And people have to get used to the idea of one, using you statements, telling people what they feel and two, reflecting emotions. And so there are, there are people have sometimes have challenges overcoming a lot of, of, uh, cultural barriers we have around these sorts of things. But once you learn how to do it and you start doing it, it not only reprograms your brain, it transforms your life, but it also transforms the life of the people that you're listening to. So I, I'm devoting my, pretty much my career today to teaching people how to do this skill because it's so powerful, both of you and we d demonstrated over the last 13 years how powerful it is in prison.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
So we teach that we're teaching our students how to ethic label and then we teach them peace circles. And now what happens is they finish the circle keeper workshop. And today, then once they've done all our homework, cuz it's a lot of practical stuff they have to do, we send them to peacemaker one workshop. And in that workshop we teach them how to make durable agreements. How do you make an, how do you get somebody to do what they say they're going to do? How do you make, make a durable agreement? And second, we teach them how to help people solve problems without giving advice. We call that results based listening. And that's the Peacemaker one workshop. The Peacemaker two workshop is all about managing strong emotions. You're, you're on strong emotions and the emotions, strong emotions of somebody else. And we also teach them how to develop emotional self-awareness.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
And then we also teach them how to morally reengage somebody who's morally disengaged, which is an obvious problem in prison. And then when they finish the Peacemaker two workshop, they now qualify for the mediation workshop. And that's a three day workshop, uh, where we teach them basics of interest based mediation. And when they complete that workshop and then go out and do all the homework, there's a lot of homework involved, then we certify them as a prison of peace mediator. Our goal, our goal from the very beginning was to make prison of peace sustainable in every prison. So we were not only interested in teaching people how to become peacemakers and mediators, but we also wanted to bring out, develop a cadre of trainers. And that's why we worked with lifers and long termers is because we thought they would be in prison for a while and would be able to teach, continue to teach these skills.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
And so it took takes today it takes one year, Well before the pandemic, it took one year to become a mediator. And then it typically took another two or three years before we had a cadre of trainers in place ready to take over the project. So the way the project evolved was we were Valley State Prison for women in 2010, 12, and then the state repurposed the prison to men's prison. The women were, were moved out at the end of 2012 across the street to Central California Women's Facility and down to Southern California at this California Institute for Women. We were able to successfully help them establish a prisoner peace program at c w. And it's still running today. And the fact is being run by one of our former trainers who was in prison. And she goes back in and teaches work coordinates the program.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Amazing p cwf, We, we've never been able to get in there. Uh, unfortunately the warden who was running the place when the or our our women went across, um, was corrupt. And ultimately she, she and the whole upper management of that prison were fired. And I think some people were, I, I believe some people, well, I dunno whether anybody was indicted or not, but it was a corrupt administration. She didn't want anything to do with us. Wow. And we'd never been able to really get back in there. But then the old pr this, the women's prison was converted to a men's prison. And we got kept getting calls from the warden and the inmate family councils saying, Will you please come in and teach prison to piece to them in? And we didn't know whether it worked, but finally we said yes and it worked.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Was it scary though? Was it a, a different experience? It wasn't scary, but it was just, we just didn't know actually. I mean I know people are gonna be offended by this, but the men are much easier to teach than the women for a whole bunch of d Interesting. Yeah. For a whole bunch of different reasons. Um, so we were doing this all pro bono. We picked up a few grants, but we basically, we were paying for everything out of our own pockets. We basically, we sacrificed our mediation practices, let them go to do this work because it's pretty much full-time work. And we were, both of us were broke at the end of 2016. We had applied for grants from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. And we'd been turned down two times. Two years we'd been turned down and we applied one more time.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
We said, Well if we get turned down this time, we'll shut down cuz we just can't afford to do this anymore. Well, the state came through and gave us grants to start prison and peace and six more prisons. So now we really expanded very rapidly in 20 16, 17, 18, 19, we went from one prison to 15 prisons. And now we were really hustling to get the work done. Um, for three years I worked in Corcoran State Prison, which is one of the two California Super Maxes. I I was working in the, the most a violent yard, D yard, which was where Charles Manson was. I was actually teaching a hundred feet from his cell. Wow. First time I went in there, I was teaching men coming outta gangs were in cages and shackles in a semi-circle around me. That was my learning environment.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
The pandemic hit and the state said, You gotta spend your money. Well we had like 750,000 bucks and or something like that. And you, you can't spend the money if you can't get into prison, right? So they said, Well we don't care what you do, just get rid of it. You can't give it back to us. So we asked and we can we do a, can we film everything? And they said, Oh, that's a great idea. So that's what we did in 20 20 20 20 21, uh, we hired a Hollywood film crew. We brought in trainers that had been in prison. Mm, our best trainers that had been in trip prison and aren't had been released. We brought them in to Los Angeles and we spent the better part of the month filming our entire curriculum. And now we've got it all on film digital. And, and we just finishing up now writing all the manuals and prison piece will now be available to any prison in the world cuz we can subtitle everything that is so fantastic.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
But in the meantime, ex expanded. We have a colleague who's has got 14 prisons going on Greece. We've got over 15 prisons in California. Uh, in fact, the world went to Cal cmc, California Men's Colony in San Obispo to, it's our first experiment using the, the the digital filming, the, the lessons. And she went up there last week and teach facilitators how to use this stuff. So we're gonna be very anxious to see how well this works. We've got, uh, we've been doing, we've been doing a prison in Connecticut and we will roll out prison peace throughout the entire Connecticut prison system. And of course we've got entries and, and interest all over the world. We're gonna be doing a a, a program in a Danish women's prison. Uh, Laura was in Europe at the beginning of the summer and spent four hours with the Danish prison authorities.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
They got really excited about it. So we'll be doing something there. And we've got inquiries from all over the place now. And, and of course with it being on digital, it doesn't take nearly the time or effort to train people how to teach this program because it's all there. All they have to new know how to do is facilitate a group, which, you know, that's pretty easy and we'll even teach you how to do that. So, um, you basically have to go in and turn, it's a little more complex in this, but turn the light switch on, push the play button, sit back, and we take it from there on the, on the video. So we're hoping over the next couple of years that we're gonna, we're gonna move from approximately 30 prisons to 300 and then a thousand and then 10,000 prisons. So we wanna see this in as many prisons around the world as we possibly can because the RO results are unbelievable in California. We try to keep track of the people in our program that have been released, uh, I don't know the exact numbers, something on the order of 6,000 in, we've trained over 20,000 inmates. I think we've trained over, I don't have all the numbers straight. Laurel's got the number she's takes numbers
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Prison at. But what's amazing is that every student has gone completely through our training and has been released, has not re-offended. We don't have any reports of recidivism from any of our fully trained students.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised because there's probably so much trauma that led them to the, to the day they entered prison, Right? I mean they, would you say that many come from a trauma background, they just haven't learned skills?
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Every single one of them. I think what happens is we, by learning these skills, they build their own emotional intelligence. They build social skills that allow them to deal with conflict. They build their own emotional self-awareness so they don't get upset. They're non-reactive. And you know, we teach them what it means to be a human being. And a lot of these people we oftentimes ask about their life stories in the beginning and, and, you know, what was the dominant emotion in your family? And I'll never forget when I was in Corcoran is gang banger got up and said, the only emotion in my family was raw anger. And you know, if, if that's what you're raised in, that's what you're gonna be.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Absolutely. So have you had, uh, any, any pushback from groups or anyone?
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Very little In the beginning we had resistance from the correctional officers because in the beginning, in the, in the early years, in 2000 10, 11, 12, at that time, the Aryan Brotherhood not only had a strong presence in the prison, but also had a strong prison presence in the Prison Guard Union. And they were, they were not happy with inmate lovers and peacemakers, the department corrected that to its credit and change. Its hiring became much more selective about who it was hiring. And we noticed a big shift in attitudes and around 20 15, 20 16 to the point that when I would drive into Corcoran every week, the guy, the guy at the gate always knew who I was. And he would always think, Thank thank you Mr No for coming in and helping these guys. These people are gonna be my neighbors someday and you're making 'em good neighbors. Thank you so much. So that was really gratifying. The only other pushback that we got that I recall is in that first prison, second cohort, we're in the middle of training our second cohort of 30 women. And this very well dressed woman comes marching up to me and starts screaming at me, Who the fuck are you and what are you doing here? And oh, what the fuck are you doing in this prison? You're abusing these women. Turned out she was the prison psychologist. . No.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Yeah,
Speaker 2 (28:18):
Yay. Just lit me a new one and I just started deescalating her. You're on her
Speaker 1 (28:23):
Territory, right?
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Well I looked, I mean she had the same trauma problems as all the other women do. Oh, and, and ,
Speaker 1 (28:31):
That's the reactive F
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Bombing. That's right. Unmanaged
Speaker 1 (28:35):
Emotions.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
Well, you know, a person with a PhD, you know, so, so I just sat there and ethic labeler and calmed her down. And, um, she finally saw that the women were all laughing and learning and kind of figured out that no, this was not an abusive situation. This was a really healthy situation for these women. And that's the only pushback we've re we've ever really gotten. Now, now sometimes we'll go into a prison and the, and they're not happy to see us there, they being the administration, because in order to do this work, it takes a huge amount of coordination between the high administration warden's office, the person in charge of programming that's called the committee relations manager, the yard captains, the, you know, the, the unit sergeants. You gotta have, you gotta have all the balls lined up to make this work. And that takes a, that takes a lot of effort. And so when we're in prisons where that motivation does not exist, the pro program is not as successful, but where it all lines up, the program is amazing. We got an unsolicited letter from the warden at Valley State Prison for women before it repurposed, saying that as a result of present peace, the prison was much, much quieter than it has ever been before.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Doug, thank you for sharing. You know, this fascinating work with us and, uh, the good news is you are sticking around for another episode to expand more on the Prison of Peace project. So I know our listeners will appreciate that and I hope everyone will tune in again to hear more about the Prison of Peace Project. Uh, you'll find a link in the show notes to Doug's website and, uh, there'll be lots more information about Prison of Peace on there and we'll have the links to his books also in the show notes. So as I said, we'll have Doug back next week and, uh, we'll we'd love it if you'd join us. Um, if you have any questions, send them to podcast high conflict institute.com or submit them to high conflict institute.com/podcast. And if you'd tell your friends about us, we'd be grateful. And we also be grateful if you leave a review for us wherever you listen to our podcast. Until next week, have a great week and keep learning about high conflict behavior and practice it so we can help everyone find the missing piece.
Speaker 4 (30:58):
It's
Speaker 1 (30:58):
All Your Fault is a production of True Story FM Engineering by Andy Nelson. Music, by Wolf Samuels, John Coggins, and zip Moran. Find the show, show notes and transcripts@truestory.fm for high conflict institute.com/podcast. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show.