About the CSP-Sacramento Men's Support Group,
what is now referred to as Inside Circle, took shape after a race riot that occurred on the B-Facility yard in 1996. Several inmates were seriously hurt during the melee, one fatally. Witnessing the madness of this event had a profound effect on inmate Patrick Nolan. During his first month of several spent confined to his cell on lockdown following the riot, he could only feel the pain and hopelessness that weighed heavily upon the environment. When he was finally released, it was with an intense determination to shift the dynamic driving such extreme violence and hatred.
He met with Dennis Merino, the Deacon for the Catholic community at CSP-Sacramento, and asked him if he could start a support group. At the time, he had no experiential knowledge of what a support group was about. All he knew was that a forum was needed in this environment, a neutral group, where inmates of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds could come together and openly communicate.
He started by seeking out guys from the racially segregated groups defining the prison environment, instinctively reaching out to older cons he had grown to respect, not thinking they would want to participate. Surprisingly, several did, taking on roles of leadership and drawing the attention of younger cons.
Initially the Men’s Support Group was a forum for communication, but in the year following their first meeting, it became so much more. A typical meeting held in the facility’s chapel began by lighting a candle mounted on a wooden log that, if viewed from above, resembled the shape of a heart. Group members sat facing the flickering flame of the candle with leadership passing from person to person each week.
The group belonged to each participant equally and it was commonly agreed that they would only get back what they put in. They experienced the atmosphere as highly charged, sacred and spiritual. Somehow, the language of long ago, buried in the recesses of their psyches, found release and expression. Although they were aware that they sat in a chapel on the sterile gray grounds of a prison, they felt as if they were sitting in a dark cave around a raging fire, sharing stories of times past. Stories of personal defeats and successes. Stories of love and loss. Stories of fear, rage, hate, and self-hate.
