This content was created by Doug Noll. This content was uploaded by Doug Noll. This is a YouTube clip titled "Prison of Peace Doug Noll Clip" (posted December 6, 2017). In a first-person account, the speaker (Doug Noll) describes receiving a letter from Susan Russo and collaborating with mediator Laurel Copper to train women serving life sentences as mediators and peacemakers pro bono, how they navigated prison bureaucracy, the inaugural training in April 2010, and the program's expansion (multiple California prisons, sites in Greece, planned openings in Connecticut, Australia and New Zealand). The excerpt emphasizes the program's impact and a moral about following your heart to do service work. The narrative mentions Chief Deputy Warden Velda Dobson-Davis and other participants but is delivered as a single-speaker story rather than a dialogue.
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So in August of 2009, I was sitting at my desk and I got a phone call from my good friend Laurel Copper, who's a well-known mediator in Los Angeles. And she said, "Hey, I just got this letter and I need to read it to you." And so I said, "Okay, go ahead. Let me, let me hear it." So she read the letter and what it was was a letter from a woman by the name of Susan Russo. Who was serving a life sentence without possibility of parole in the largest, most violent women's prison in the world, which happened to be about an hour and a half from where I live. And what she was requesting was that we come in and train the lifers in that prison, women who were serving life sentences, to be mediators and peacemakers because they wanted to end the violence. So the world asked me, so what do you think? And I thought about it for a nanosecond, and I thought, you know, if this is for real, I think we should pretty check this out and do it. So I said that. I said, yeah, I think we should do this. And she said, yeah, I think so too. So we spent the next 6 months working through the prison bureaucracy, which we— neither one of us, although we're both lawyers, neither one of us ever worked in a prison before. And we had— it was our first lesson in how prisons work, which is very slowly. And finally, we got in front of Chief Deputy Warden Velda Dobson-Davis, who is one of the most remarkable women I've ever met. And she listened to us and she said, "You want to teach our lifers how to be peacemakers and mediators?" We said, "Yeah." And she said, "You want to do this for free?" And we said, "Yeah, we'll do this pro bono." And she thought about it for a second and said, "Okay, I think we should do this." Let's make it happen. 3 weeks later, in April of 2010, we were training our first 15 women in Prison of Peace. We had no idea what Prison of Peace would turn into. And here we are today in 2017, and Prison of Peace is operating in 11 prisons in California, 4 prisons in Greece. We're opening in Connecticut next year. Worla is going to Australia and New Zealand next summer. To see if Prison of Peace can be started in Brisbane. And we get inquiries from all over the world every day about how to do Prison of Peace in prisons all over the world. And the lesson that this has taught me is that if you follow your heart and not worry about the money, amazing things can happen to your lives, and you can do amazing service work and help and change the lives of millions of people just by doing what your heart tells you to do.
