Within the next year, and with encouragement from Peck, I sold my practice and began conducting research for my dissertation in a medium-security prison. The purpose of the research was to "test the effects of an innovative group process intervention technique (community building) on reading performance among a population of incarcerated adult males." The research was successful in bringing about the outcomes I had predicted. The groups who became "communities" increased their average reading scores by one letter grade every seven weeks while the control groups showed practically no improvement (see Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, Vol. 20 3/4, 1994, Roberts, Cheek & Mumm).
Beyond the progress in reading skills, however, there were significant changes in the men's behaviors, attitudes, and concerns toward one another within the treatment (community) groups. Each group was comprised of 55 men who lived together in a dormitory. Security personnel and prisoners alike began to report higher levels of respect between the two factions.

Other conditions slowly improved in the treatment dormitories as the men began to use the communication skills they developed in the workshops to work out their differences. Men who had lived together for years, barely exchanging words, now began to converse with each other, sometimes even disclosing things that formerly would have put them in dangerously vulnerable positions. When one prisoner admitted that he was a former narcotics police officer, the group accepted him and did not seek the common retribution that would likely have occurred a few weeks earlier.

It wasn't a surprise that these changes also brought about a considerable decrease in violence and other major rule infractions within the dormitory. As major infractions decreased, however, minor infractions temporarily increased. The reason for this was simple. As the men learned to respect themselves and to give respect to others, they also began to expect it in return. This meant that when a correctional officer "blew off" at one of them, the individual would respond by saying, "I don't talk to you like that anymore and I don't want you to talk to me like that." On man told a correctional officer, "I don't want to be called Psycho anymore. My name is (Andrew Pennington)."

Since the correctional officers in the treatment (community) dorms did not yet understand what was happening, they took these kinds of comments as insubordination and wrote them up as minor infractions. Once I had determined which of the correctional officers I could reason with and explained to them what was going on, the situation improved. Eventually, the aura of respect so permeated the treatment dorms that among correctional personnel they soon became coveted job placements.

The pervasiveness of drug addictions within this inmate group, however, and the paucity of treatment was a shocking realization. It soon became apparent that the community building process would also serve as a meaningful intervention in conjunction with basic drug education and recovery topics that one of my staff added to our services. The response to this was startling, with many of the men devouring the information, and trusting that it was coming from a 'safe' source. This meant that the new level of trust among the community members extended to the group facilitators.

I understood that the primary element of this new experience of community building was a certain sensibility that Scott Peck called, "extraordinary respect," a term that was first used by Peck in his book entitled The Different Drum. For the vast majority of participants, to be treated with respect and dignity as a human being - in spite of the terrible crimes that many of them had committed - was a completely new experience, and for many, a transforming one. No one - not their parents, teachers, principals, the police, and certainly not prison officials - had ever treated them like this on a consistent basis. When the men of the treatment groups consistently received this respect, they gained respect for themselves and others.

I soon became aware that this extraordinary new technology of community building was not new. In fact, "grief work", as I now termed it, had been an essential practice of indigenous cultures throughout the millennia of time. This new perspective came to me when I attended the first multicultural men's conference in Buffalo Gap, West Virginia. There I met a man who would become my mentor and teacher for the next 13 years. Malidoma Somé was raised in the village of Dano in Burkina Faso, West Africa. He was initiated into the ancestral tribal traditions, and had become a medicine man and diviner in the Dagara culture. Malidoma held three Master's degrees and two Doctorate degrees. At the time he was teaching African and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and has since authored three books on African wisdom, ritual, initiation, and healing. Through subsequent years of work and study with Malidoma, which included three trips with him to his village in Africa, he has given me vastly different perspectives on my work and, indeed, my own culture.

For a long period of time, the more I learned about ritual initiation as carried out by the Dagara, the more my frustration grew over the fact that we can never go back to those indigenous ways of bringing our young into true adulthood. Malidoma's perspective of initiation in the West, however, gives me hope that our efforts in community building as grief work are on the right course. In his book, The Healing Wisdom of Africa, Somé tells the story of a man's fall from success in business and society that results in a prison sentence, parole, and starting his life over again. He cites this man's experience as an example in every way of a true initiation. Stripped of everything, all that is left for him to transform into his future is himself and his life's true purpose. "It just doesn't have the formality of an indigenous initiation," he says, "but initiation is intimately connected to ordeal." From the indigenous point of view, Somé says that even our worst ordeals should have the effect of "stretching the physical self far enough to bring about more awareness, more sense of responsibility, more wisdom. Discipline arises from and is aimed toward the knowledge that one is going somewhere purposeful in life."

Somé points out, however, that the immediate issue for us in this country is not finding initiatory experiences [trouble or trauma], but rather, it is how to bring closure to the pain and suffering that results from them. "The problem is that in order for such suffering to pass, it has to be recognized. It is the absence of radical and genuine recognition and acknowledgment that makes suffering [and the need for a drug] grow larger."

The initiatory experience and the suffering that accompanies it end when the person's suffering has been acknowledged by others. Radical recognition takes place when a community witnesses the hardship being endured by a person, or the wounds he or she suffered. An ordeal that has not been witnessed or acknowledged is likely to repeat itself.
"There is an endless series of unresolved initiations in the modern world due to the isolationism we practice and our troubles, therefore, become personalized," Somé says. "In addition, there is a tendency for many to ostracize people who seek to have their suffering acknowledged. The psyche of a person who seeks recognition as a way to end the suffering from an initiation experience interprets this ostracism as a sign that the world hasn't noticed, so it sends a message to repeat the experience in hopes that next time someone will notice."

One other important understanding shared by the indigenous cultures and modern psychology is that repressed emotions eventually erupt in their monstrous forms. The Dagara elders say that the monstrous form of grief is rage. In my current work with former offenders, this violent emotion brought forth from childhood and prison gets recognized and acknowledged in community-building groups of 50 to 75 "witnesses." Hence, grief work is the core process of our program for moving participants beyond their suffering, thus reducing their risk of relapse into drugs, violence, crime, and reincarceration. Through the process of grief, they tend to find a way through their pain and discover what is underneath - their ability to reason and to think their way through difficulty and conflict. Connecting with one's grief also serves as a powerful antidote for the spiritual, communal, and intrapersonal isolation that characterizes addictive behavior.