A men's work revolution in Folsom Prison: Interview with Aaron Burris
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Aaron is one of the best men’s work facilitators I’ve ever met. He’s also a Gulf War veteran, did 22 years in prison for murder, and helped turn Folsom Prison into one of the most powerful centers for men’s work in the US. This work became the focus of the award winning documentary The Work.
We talk about that journey, and Aaron’s vision to overhaul communities around social support.
How prison makes men worse
Johnny: You've talked about how prison made you worse and how violent and depressive prison is. Before you started doing "the work," what did a day inside look like for you?
Aaron: Wake up, eat some breakfast, get ready for yard, put the knife on. It was like going to work. Go out there in the middle of all the gang members and the race politics and sort out who owes who for what? And who said this and shouldn't have and deserves to be stabbed? And fuck the cops. How do I stick it to the man today? How do I make myself as comfortable as possible in hell?
Johnny: You said you go out with your knife. What are you anticipating?
Aaron: Violence. It's simple, man. It's like spontaneous human combustion, man. You can be standing next to two people that are having a normal conversation, and all of a sudden, one of them bursts into fire and catches everything around them on fire like an incendiary grenade. They were just talking and next thing you know, they're stabbing each other. When they start stabbing each other or fighting, my relationship to that person matters. Is it one of my homeboys? Is it an enemy? Is he fighting with an ally? Do I have to back his play? Immediate strategic assessment of what I should do, because whether I act or I don't will decide whether I live or die, not by the violence, but by the prison politics. You were supposed to do this and you didn't. Convict justice is coming.
Johnny: What about the environment of prison is depressing?
Aaron: It's Groundhog Day, man. You're looking for things that are different so that you can feel different because of the monotony. And then on top of that, these same men are now losing family members that are dying. Moms and dads are old. They're dying. Tragedy strikes. They lose a brother, a sister, a child. And this general sense of being in somewhere where you cannot get away from sadness.
How men’s group work created a shift
Johnny: How did sitting in a men's group circle change you?
Aaron: I was a drug addict, a gang member in the middle of everything going on. I had just come back out the hole from stabbing one of my homeboys and was a general shit starter because that's what you do. That's your full-time job. I walked into a chapel and sat down.
It became an oasis. It became a monastery, a safe haven. It became all the things that I have words for now to describe it. But in the moment, it was getting out of the rain and getting dry and warm. And it's the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. Getting emotionally vulnerable. It was like water to a dying man.
Johnny: Was that immediate? Or how long did it take for you to see that?
Aaron: Took me six months to really fall in and believe. But I was seeing the value in it in the sense that it was helping people right away. I could see it was really helping people, watching someone resolve some trauma or get support. I think it was a spark of love, man, of human beings just loving each other. No strings, no agendas, no you're my fucking brother I got to love you… none of that shit. I genuinely care because I fucking care. Your ass was in that chair because you wanted to be there.
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The power of Inside Circle
Johnny: And so Inside Circle, this group you got tapped into, somehow prevented race riots for over 9 years, spawned some of the greatest facilitators in men's work, and got men out of prison who are serving life sentences. What did it take for Inside Circle to become so powerful?
Aaron: Oh, man, don't make me do this, man. Don't make me cry, Johnny.
Johnny: That's welcome.
Aaron: It took men who didn't know how to love, who had not felt a lot of love in their life, to learn to receive love. And the healing power of that love became a crucible for, who am I? Why am I here? Not “what have I done?” Not prison. Who am I standing here in this time and space? And what am I here for?
Johnny: What about Inside Circle allowed that to happen? Because a lot of people, I'm sure, would love for that to happen across prisons everywhere.
Aaron: So you have to understand that prison. New Folsom Prison is where all the lifers from old Folsom and San Quentin ended up doing time that were still hard to reach, still in the middle of shit. And that type of violent environment, when a man that has lived in that cesspool and survived and evolved into this convict mentality and can walk on that type of yard and is respected as a man, not just as being in a gang.
And that man makes a change in his life and begins to live from purpose and mission and impact and healing. That's some powerful stuff, man. And when it's not one guy, when it's like 20 or 30 guys that are driving - we got to the point we were having 8, 9, 10 groups a week. Everything from facilitator group to elder group to new initiate group. If they weren't at a visit, they were in there for 4 hours of their free time finding themselves. We created a culture of healing and love.
And the other thing I think what makes it so powerful - the man who started Inside Circle, from the beginning, had the courage to look at us and say, “The cops need this too and we have to take it to them.” In a room full of killers and gang members and shot callers, he looked at us and said, “This is what we got to do.”
There were times, man, where there were cops actively working to shut down the group. And you're sitting where 95 percent of the men in that room have killed somebody. 50 percent of the men in that room have tried to kill somebody in prison with their bare hands or with a shank, and you're going to go and try and take this away from them? The men that got in the way of that energy of wanting to kill this cop for trying to shut it down, the men that stood up to that in a good way, that's what created us.
The vision of circle work as social support
Johnny: What does the vision that started in Folsom Prison look like today?
Aaron: We're still in prisons in California. We still run circles. We also work with correctional officers and executive staff on emotional wellness. That in and of itself is a miracle that they'll even sit down and work with us. We've worked with the prosecutor and the probation office to run workshops and to develop a mentorship program in San Francisco. We work inside New Jersey in the juvenile justice system.
We just finished project Restore Bed-Stuy, working with two different projects in New York - that's two enemy armies [gangs]. And now they sit at a table together and they're doing their healing work in circles together.
One of the larger projects we've been involved in is the Aspire project, and it's my baby, man. It's infrastructure that provides the basic needs of people to lead an emotional healthy life, stable housing, access to Health Department mental health services, which includes circle. Say there's a domestic violence issue in a neighborhood, and there's an Aspire community there. We immediately step in and deal with the person who was hurt, and provide the emotional trauma support before trauma can take root and begin to have an effect on behavior, and that person can spiral into drug addiction and hurt someone else. And we also deal with the person also who did the hurting.
What's going on? Hurt people hurt people. People don't just hurt people for no reason. There's something going on, and we begin to unpack that and work with that person so that it doesn't happen again.
We're at the phase now where in the next 24 months, we'll begin to coalesce into our three top sites that we have targeted.
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You can follow Inside Circle on Instagram at @inside_circle.