"Violence is primarily a man's business and it is about upholding male honor. It is not a morality play, it is a tragedy and it is also understandable and preventable." - James F. Gilligan, M.D.

Perhaps few people would be surprised to learn that 90% of all the homicides in the United States are done by men to men - and of the remaining ten percent, 90% are done by men to women and children.

"Violence is primarily a man's business and it is about upholding male honor," says Dr. James Gilligan, psychiatrist, University of Pennsylvania professor and author, who has studied violence for over thirty years. Much of that time he has spent working with violent criminals, and asking, "Why are men violent?" and "Can they change?"

In 1997, the San Francisco County Jail began offering inmates convicted of violent crimes an intervention program called manalive. Manhood & Violence: Fatal Peril, which aired Sunday, 10/17, 2004 at 11 p.m. ET, profiles a group of men who participated in manalive. Remarkably, after only four months of intense immersion, the re-arrest rate for violent crimes dropped by 80% for its graduates.

Cell Block Pod #CJ8 holds up to 64 inmates. Twelve hours a day, six days a week, these men - all violent offenders - are involved in the first restorative justice effort of its kind. Manalive is a core component of the Sheriff's program "Resolve to Stop the Violence Project" (RSVP). Initially organized as a community program, manalive first teaches men to stop their violence. Eventually those men go out into the community to teach other men how to stop their violence.

The object of the program is to deconstruct the "Male-Role Belief System," and then reconstruct each man's "true authentic self." Their first step of deconstruction is to reveal the "hit man," an image of the unfeeling tough-guy that many men carry around with them. When such a man feels fear, he calls up his "hit man" to protect himself from humiliation. The program defines his "hit man" as the image a man uses to hide his vulnerable self - and enforce the authority that he has been trained to accept as part of the "Male-Role Belief System."

This one-hour documentary focuses on nine of the men as they engage one another in deeply emotional sessions such as manalive's peer-training, community resolution and RSVP's victim impact. One of the subjects of this documentary is Barry, an inmate in the program, who has been arrested for armed robbery, assault with great bodily injury and attempted murder.

"When I was five I came home crying because I got beat-up in school," he remembers, "My father beat me with a razor strap, and said, 'Boy, we're not going to have any punks in this house.' Little Barry liked people and didn't want to fight. After that, I had to put that little kid away. So from five years old I've been running on my hit man."

In the manalive group, Barry brings his hands up in the gesture that represents "Fatal Peril." Fatal peril is that moment of shock when each man feels fear and has to decide whether he is going to deny his fear and become violent, or really feel his fear and acknowledge his "true self." This is the beginning of reconstruction.

"It's a trade-school for intimacy," says Hamish Sinclair, the creator and designer of the manalive program. "Once a man has learned to stop his violence, we then have the problem of what he's going to do instead of being violent," Hamish says, "In the program we teach the men the business of self-identification because at this point they still don't know who they are. The reconstruction, a six-part program, is the process of internalizing, of teaching the men how to feel. It takes them from fantasy to reality."

While all the men in the RSVP program are violent, none has committed murder.

"The point is to intervene before that happens," says Sunny Schwartz, co-founder of RSVP and its administrator, "And the reality is that 100% of the men in our custody are getting out. Nationwide, 90% are getting out of prisons and when one of these guys is released into my neighborhood, I want to make sure he has spent his time working day and night looking at his behavior and how to change it."

"It took me years to discover the fiercely guarded secret of violent men; they do feel something; they feel ashamed, chronically ashamed, acutely ashamed - over matters that are so trivial that their very triviality makes it even more shameful," says Dr. Gilligan who sees violence as a public health problem that needs to be treated as a disease. He says he has come to understand that the common underlying cause of violence is shame and that violent behavior occurs when a man doesn't see himself as having any nonviolent means to gain respect and find justice. "Violence is not a morality play, it's a tragedy. It is understandable and it is preventable," he says.

A year later, Hudson River Film & Video returned and videotaped some of the men who had been released. The men's stories and the program that changed their lives is the subject of Manhood & Violence: Fatal Peril.

For more on Manhood & Violence: Fatal Peril, visit the Reentry Web Site and download the free discussion guide.

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