A Take-No-Prisoners Trial Lawyer Who Now Helps Prisoners and Others Make Peace 

John Reed: [00:00:08] We talk a lot on the podcast about being open to opportunities and changing direction. It’s a common theme among Sticky Lawyers. Discovering an untapped need in the marketplace, parlaying a hobby or skill into a successful niche, or taking a chance on a new career trajectory are what Sticky Lawyers do.

[00:00:27] Meaningful insights and discoveries are great, but then there are epiphanies, revelations that hit you like a two-by-four square in the forehead and speak to your soul. Whether it’s divine intervention, intense self-reflection, or a deeply felt sense that you need to pursue a different purpose, never underestimate the power of an epiphany.

[00:00:48] Practicing law isn’t for everybody, nor is every practice area right for every lawyer. And even if the money is good – like, seriously good – personal and professional fulfillment can still elude you.

[00:00:59] Today’s guest is that person. Once an aggressive, intimidating, and hard-charging litigator in California, Doug Noll experienced an epiphany. He realized that, for him, resolving disputes through verdicts and settlements wasn’t enough. So, he embarked upon a journey of education to learn how to help people overcome disagreement through mutual understanding. That journey ultimately led him to create Prison of Peace, a now international program to reduce violence and promote peaceful conflict resolution among prison inmates. And that’s only part of this Sticky Lawyer’s story. Let’s get to it.

John Reed: [00:01:35] Hey, Doug. Welcome to the podcast.

Doug Noll: [00:01:37] Hey John. Great to be here.

John Reed: [00:01:39] So let’s set the stage. Very few lawyers start out in alternative dispute resolution. It’s usually a skill that you develop by being in the courtroom. What was your practice before you changed direction?

Doug Noll: [00:01:53] I was a hardcore business and commercial civil trial lawyer. I’ve lost count of how many jury trials I tried. Arbitrations, federal court, state court. You name it, I did it. All business and commercial, pretty much.

John Reed: [00:02:05] I assume you were successful in this practice.

Doug Noll: [00:02:07] I was. I had a reputation for being extremely aggressive, highly ethical. And if you wanted to win against me, you had to work harder than me, which is really hard to do.

John Reed: [00:02:18] The ethical part I get. That translates well into an ADR career or practice. Were you seen as somewhat partisan because of the work that you were doing? It wasn’t personal injury, so it wasn’t necessarily plaintiff-defense. Part of being attractive to both sides and dispute resolution is to have experience with both aspects.

Doug Noll: [00:02:40] When I left the practice of law in 2000 and became a mediator, people were a little surprised and a little hesitant. Because I had such a fierce reputation, no one was really sure what they would get with me. But I started handling some very difficult cases and got them resolved and sort of made my bones.

[00:03:00] And that’s when people realized I applied the same intelligence and hard work that I applied in litigation to helping people resolve disputes. That’s when the work started coming in.

John Reed: [00:03:10] So let’s go back to 2000. What was the pivotal moment, or was it a gradual transition?

Doug Noll: [00:03:16] It was gradual. The story is that in the mid-eighties, I took up the martial arts. And when I was 40, I earned my second-degree black belt, and this was a Northern Chinese Kung fu style. Our motto was, we break bones, not boards. It was street fighting. That’s really what it was.

John Reed: [00:03:33] So it’s the litigation of martial arts.

Doug Noll: This is hardcore. Basically, the way I was trained was never fight. But if you do fight, kill. For example, once you get somebody on the ground, you kick them in the head and then you kick them in the ribs. You break their ribs, and you break the jaw, and maybe you kill them. Make sure they don’t get up.

[00:03:52] Now that’s illegal, but that’s how I was trained. And I was pretty aggressive. So my teacher, Dashi Food, said, “Noll, you gotta go study Tai Chi as a martial art.” And Tai Chi has two paradoxes. The first is the softer you are, the stronger you are. And the second paradox is the more vulnerable you are, the more powerful you are. I didn’t get it. But I studied Tai Chi and eventually began to teach it. And I actually had my own students.

[00:04:22] And then I was in a courtroom in the mid-nineties, and I was cross-examining somebody, and the thought came to me, “What the heck am I doing in here?” And after that trial, I had a vacation planned, a river trip, a whitewater trip up in Idaho.

[00:04:35] And I spent the week on the Main Salmon with, in my raft, thinking about how many people I’d really served as a trial lawyer. And I could only count five people in 20-plus years that really came out of the system better off than going in. And I just said, you know something, I don’t want to go another 30 years and say I’ve only helped 15 people. That doesn’t work for me. So, I didn’t know what I was going to do. And when I came back to town and drove down out of the mountains to my office where I was a partner, litigation partner, I heard a public service announcement for a new master’s degree in peacemaking and complex studies being offered at Fresno Pacific University, which is one of the West Coast Mennonite universities.

[00:05:10] And the Mennonites are one of the three traditional Protestant peace churches. And that grabbed my attention. And so, I looked into it, and I actually enrolled. And so, by that August I was a full-time master’s degree student, a ,three-quarter-time law professor, and a full-time trial lawyer. And that Master’s degree program completely changed my life. My mentors were the people who started the International Restorative Justice Movement, and I was deeply schooled in restorative justice and all the depths of human conflict, what causes conflict from a huge multidisciplinary approach.

[00:05:45] And I began to study neuroscience, psychology, history, theology, sociology, anthropology. I mean, it was just an incredible academic experience, intellectual experience, and it really opened my eyes to what human conflict is all about. And I saw why the law was so limiting and I saw the flaws in the system, and I saw this is why people hate lawyers. And so, I said, okay, I’m going to become a peacemaker.

[00:06:14] So I went back to my firm and told my partners that, and they all about had a heart attack because I was the second largest earner in the firm. And the idea of me leaving litigation was not appealing. So, we compromised and said, “Well, I’m going to go through with this master’s degree program, I’ll continue to litigate and try cases, and we’ll see what happens at the end.” So, we got to the end, on an October Friday, late October. The managing partner, who was my peer, he and I graduated from law school the same year, came into my office.

[00:06:42] Well, by then, they had really downsized me. They fired my secretary, they put me into a paralegal, kicked me out of the partner’s office, put me in a paralegal carrel. You know, I mean, kind of trying to send me a message, right? And he came into my little paralegal cubicle that was my office and said, “We’re not paying you anymore until you quit this peacemaking shit.” And I said, “Okay, I’ll think about that.” So, I went home and with my then wife did the, did the numbers and figured out I don’t need to work here anymore. So, I went in Monday morning, and grabbed him, and went into the firm administrator’s office. Here’s my keys, here’s my credit cards, here’s my stuff, here’s my phone, here’s my stuff. I’m done. I’ll be gone by Friday. And I walked out that Friday. I walked away from $10 million on the table, more money that I earned, than I’d taken out, more money that I had generated than I’d taken out. And I started my peacemaking practice on November 1st, 2000. Never looked back.

John Reed: [00:07:34] There’s a lot to unpack here. Your martial arts master, what did he see that prompted him to say, you need to cool your jets and, and maybe pursue a different approach or philosophy to your training?

Doug Noll: [00:07:48] He saw somebody who was extremely focused and disciplined, very aggressive in everything. including fighting. And he felt that I might hurt somebody with this training, and he didn’t want to take me any further down the path until I mellowed out a little bit. And he thought that Tai Chi would be a really good way to balance me out. And he was absolutely right.

[00:08:13] Tai Chi taught me a lot and took me in directions in my life that I would’ve – not only peacemaking, but I learned about chi, which is subtle energy. And I learned how to move Chi. So, I was like, I can take a business card and blow it across the table with my energy. And that got me into healing. So, I became a subtle energy healer, which blew my mind. As a lawyer, we’re trained to be skeptics, and we’re trained in empirical observation and stuff. And I’m seeing and doing stuff that science can’t explain. But there it is. It’s happening right in front of me. So, it really changed me. He saw, he somehow intuited, that was what I needed. And so, he gave me that guidance. It changed my life.

John Reed: [00:08:54] So, the parallels obviously between hardcore litigation and the first discipline you pursued in martial arts are self-evident. It probably wasn’t on a conscious level, but was that Tai Chi and Chi and philosophy? And I know I’m not getting the words right, but forgive me. Was it somewhere in your mind that one day when you were in front of a jury and the feeling came over you that I don’t have to be that way anymore?

Doug Noll: [00:09:21] Yeah. I mean, that’s what happened. I was in a courtroom cross-examining somebody, and a thought came to me, “What the heck am I doing in here?” At that time, John, I was living two lives. I did not have an integrated life. I had my professional life as a trial lawyer, which those of us that do this work, that it is all-consuming, and you do whatever you have to do within ethical boundaries to be a really successful trial lawyer. And then there was the other part of my life, which was service and philosophy and contemplation and martial arts and contemplative practice. Those two parts of my life were completely separate.

John Reed: [00:09:54] Not a lot of harmony there.

Doug Noll: [00:09:55] Not a lot of harmony. It wasn’t until I left the practice of law that everything came together. And I think there was somewhere inside me as I reflect back on this, because that was 25, more than 25 years ago. The gap was closing, and it was inevitable that I would leave the practice of the law.

John Reed: [00:10:12] To the extent that there are words to describe it, what did it feel like to leave that hardcore litigation, that courtroom bulldog persona behind? What was the emotion at that time?

Doug Noll: [00:10:29] It was relief and curiosity, more than anything else, and it was like a new life, starting out on a new life. I was devoting my life to service, to humanity, in a very different way. And so, I just had to be open to whatever came my way in that regard. And today, here I am 20, 25 years later, and I serve more people in a week than I served in 22 years as a trial lawyer.

John Reed: [00:10:55] You mentioned the degree you pursued. Many, if not most jurisdictions, have lawyers go through a program, 40 hours here in Michigan and other jurisdictions –

Doug Noll: [00:11:06] Same thing here in California. You don’t know nothin’ after 40 hours.

John Reed: [00:11:09] It’s like getting your driver’s license, but not really. So, when you decided to go into peacemaking, probably in that time you were thinking dispute resolution may be more contained within legal.

Doug Noll: [00:11:19] I really did not want to involve myself in litigated disputes. Of course, that’s where the money is, that’s where most of the work is. But I really wanted to work on disputes where litigation was not an option. So, I ended up doing a lot of family business conflicts. I’ve worked with some of the largest, wealthiest families in California that had internal strife and conflict and partnership disputes. All kinds of business relationship disputes where you couldn’t litigate because you’d destroy your wealth. That work was much, much harder than doing a – in a litigated dispute, you’re basically a golden retriever carrying offers back and forth across the room. It takes very little skill. That’s why it’s only 40 hours. It takes very little skill to manage that sort of thing. It takes some skill, you know, more complicated —

John Reed: [00:12:02] We’re not going to besmirch those that are making their living by ADR.

Doug Noll: [00:12:05] But compared to that, where you’re working in joint session and people would rather kill each other than talk, it’s a completely different skillset. So that’s what I really wanted to do, and that’s what I ended up doing as well as, you know, the litigated dispute. And I found that to be much more satisfying because it was much more difficult. And it really pushed me in terms of skill development.

John Reed: [00:12:24] I have to imagine that the parties in these family disputes, family business disputes, the best thing they thought they could get was maybe some sort of agreement. Agree to disagree or something like that. And never the thought that they would get peace. Maybe you can talk to us about why it was hard, but why that hard work delivered the fantastic result that it did.

Doug Noll: [00:12:48] Well, it’s hard because you’re dealing with human beings who have extraordinarily strong emotions and resentments that have been building for decades. And now, all of a sudden, it’s coming to the surface, and people can’t tolerate the anxiety and the tension and the emotion anymore. So, something’s got to give. And you have to walk into that situation and get people talking to each other in a constructive way.

[00:13:17] And so, how do you do that? How do you calm people down that are so beyond angry that they can hardly even stand to be in the room with another family member? I discovered and then developed a really powerful way to de-escalate strong emotions. That’s the go-to skill. You start with that. You start with calming people down, getting them de-escalated. And then once they’re de-escalated and they feel deeply heard and validated, they’re in a mental place, an emotion place, where they can actually engage in constructive problem solving. And then, basically as a general proposition, I would engage them in interest-based negotiation as opposed to distributed negotiation, which is what litigated mediation is.

John Reed: [00:13:59] Shuttle diplomacy.

Doug Noll: [00:14:00] Shuttle diplomacy. That’s compromise. In these kinds of disputes, compromise will not work. So, what you’ve got to do is, you’ve got to get people to what’s called integrated bargaining, technically. And what you’ve got to do is get them, you’ve got to help them uncover their interests, needs, goals, and desires, and then come up with a solution that satisfies all interests, needs, goals, and desires.

[00:14:21] So it’s a comprehensive agreement. Then you’ve got to look at what’s, what’s going to cause this agreement to fail, and if it does fail, what do we do next? You’ve got to failure-proof it. And then you’ve got to build in accountability because litigation is not an option here. And so, how do you get people to one, agree to a durable agreement, and two, do what they say they’re going to do?

John Reed: [00:14:44] You wrote the book, which I think you’re referring to, “De-escalate: How to Calm an Angry Person in 90 Seconds or Less.” Here’s your chance. I’m really, really mad at you, Doug. I thought we had an agreement, but you broke it, and it cost me money, and I took a reputational hit. Okay, de-escalate me. Go ahead.

Doug Noll: [00:15:02] So John, man, you are really pissed off. You’re frustrated, you’re angry, and you feel really deeply disrespected, and you feel like you haven’t been heard, you haven’t been listened to, and you feel completely unappreciated and unsupported. And you’re really anxious and worried and concerned, and you’re really offended. You’re a little ashamed and humiliated by all of this because you feel like you got sucked in and you’re really sad, and you’re upset and you’re unhappy, and this actually depresses you at times and at the end of the day, John, you feel completely abandoned and rejected and betrayed, and you feel all alone and you feel unloved and unlovable.

John Reed: [00:15:42] Wow. I feel like I need to go to counseling now.

Doug Noll: [00:15:47] But you felt it, didn’t you? And that’s not wrong.

John Reed: [00:15:49] I felt it, and you can’t argue with feelings. You can’t debate feelings, and so you start from, from a truth.

Doug Noll: [00:15:58] That’s right.

John Reed: [00:15:59] The degree that you pursued, it wasn’t a law degree. It wasn’t an LLM or an extension of a law degree as you describe. In that title was restorative justice. And in fact, the people you learned from were leaders, pioneers in that. Define restorative justice, as best as possible and why it is preferred over other forms of resolution.

Doug Noll: [00:16:22] Anybody who knows anything about restorative justice will know that defining it is difficult. It is a practice and it’s a philosophy and I think I can describe it this way.

[00:16:32] We call a process restorative when three things happen. Number one, the parties who have been harmed, the offender and the victims, come together and they talk about what happened. Number two, they work on trying to make things as right as possible between them. And number three, they follow through and do what they say they’re going to do. So, there’s accountability. When that happens, we say that there has been restoration of a relationship.

[00:17:03] The difference between restorative justice and retributive justice, retributive justice is our criminal justice system. And in retributive justice, we measure justice by punishment. The more punishment there is, the more justice there is. It’s really a state-sanctioned form of vengeance, and we know that vengeance is a really interesting emotion. I call it an anticipatory emotion because when we think about harming somebody else because they’ve harmed us – I want to hurt you more than you’ve hurt me, so you can really feel what I feel – we get a dopamine squirt out of a part of the brain called the striatum, and it makes us feel good.

[00:17:41] But what’s interesting is that if we actually get the chance to either observe state-imposed vengeance, for example, a capital execution or imprisonment of an offender, we feel no dopamine whatsoever, and we feel let down. We feel like there hasn’t been justice. It’s not sufficient. I don’t feel the release of the offense that I was expecting. And so, I get pissed off and angry, and that’s how three strikes came about with Mike Reynolds here in Central California. He was the guy that started it. And a whole bunch of other situations.

[00:18:16] When you engage in restorative justice on the other hand, and you have the courage as a victim to meet with your offender and to sit down and work through the story of what happened and why it happened and how it happened and the effects of the offense, and then talk about and figure out ways to make things as right as possible, in that process, you are deeply heard and validated, and the need for vengeance goes away and you’re able to get closure around the offense and around the problem and move on with life. You don’t forget what happened. You can never forget what happened, but you can reconstruct your life with a new understanding and a new maturity that you didn’t have before.

[00:19:01] All the studies that have looked at restorative justice find that it outperforms retributive justice by orders of magnitude, by any measure you want. In fact, there was an interesting study done here in California, I think, in the late nineties. What happened was the legislature passed a law requiring all juvenile cases to go through restorative justice. Deukmejian, who’s a law and order guy, Governor George Deukmejian at that time said, no way. And then, of course, what you always do when it’s a difficult problem, it’s a work-avoidant behavior. You find a commission to study it. And so, he vetoed the bill and sent a message back to the legislature. This has got to be evidence-based.

[00:19:37] So the legislature commissioned a study, and the study came back, looking at restorative justice programs around California, comparing them to similar outcomes. Very data-driven double-blind study. And found that by every measure that the legislature established, and the legislature tried to establish criteria so difficult that it would’ve been impossible to meet. Restorative justice processes and programs exceeded those benchmarks and made the criminal system look sick.

[00:20:08] For example, that study showed that in the juvenile system, restitution occurred about 15% of the time. Similar case in restorative justice: 95%. Re-offending recidivism in the retributive system: recidivism ran 75 to 85%. A juvenile offender that went through restorative justice: 5% recidivism. Offender satisfaction or victim satisfaction: Retributive system: zero, negative. Restorative system: 98%. I mean, take any statistic you want. Time and cost. Retributive system costs between $50,000 and $100,000 per offense, plus the cost of incarceration, which is not even included in that.

Doug Noll: [00:20:50] Cost of a restorative justice process: less than $5,000. What happened to that study? What do you think?

John Reed: [00:20:57] Politically unpopular.

Doug Noll: [00:20:58] It got buried. You can still find it. If you know where to look on the California, on the California Judicial Council website. It’s there, but it is totally buried.

John Reed: [00:21:07] Because it doesn’t ring law and order.

Doug Noll: [00:21:09] It doesn’t. Here’s the thing. Politicians get elected on fear. That’s why the dog catcher of Clovis says the Fresno County Deputy Sheriff’s Association supports me, even though the dog catcher has nothing to do with the legal system. Because politicians, they get elected on fear. And the reason for that is because the media focuses on crime because it’s cheap news. It’s really easy to report on crime. And crime sells. It’s scintillating. Peace does not sell. Peace is extremely boring. You’ll never see a media article on peacemaking. Never, ever.

[00:21:44] It’s so interesting when, you know, for example, you’ll see that maybe it’ll be an international conflict and peacemakers are sent in, and so the headline will be peacemaking in wherever. And it’ll say, peacemakers are in so and so and they’re mediating with us, and then the tanks come rolling in, and they immediately go to the violence. Right.

John Reed: [00:22:01] Yeah, unfortunately.

Doug Noll: [00:22:02] Yeah, it’s boring. The voters are exposed to nothing but crime and think that they live in crime-ridden cities, which they don’t. The likelihood of an average citizen being a victim of crime is, like, really small no matter where you live. It’s gotten lower over the years, but we still have politicians who are on law and order.

[00:22:23] And here’s the thing that I ask people, I’ll just give you another number. Here in California, I think our prison budget, not our criminal justice system, our prison budget is, I think, $15 billion a year. It was as high as $30 billion a year. It’s come down quite a bit, but it’s still more money than we spend on universities and state universities and our whole university system in California, from community college all the way up to the Cal system. We spend more money on prisons than we do on higher education.

[00:22:50] And the question I like to ask my friends is, do you feel safer today than you felt 20 years ago? And the answer is no. Well, what are we doing? Why are we spending all this money when we know there are systems out there that work better? And nobody has an answer for that.

John Reed: [00:23:05] If I’m an elected prosecutor and I want to get reelected, I want to show you my win record, right? Even though the longer-term numbers, recidivism, some of the other ones you mentioned are impressive, that’s probably outside of my election cycle. I need the wins now.

Doug Noll: [00:23:22] That’s right. Exactly. And if you go talk to anybody in any county here in California that’s involved in the criminal justice system, where you’re talking to the judges or the DA or the public defenders, the private counsel, they’ll all tell you the system’s completely broken. Completely broken. And they just do their jobs because that’s what they know how to do. And no one can get above it all and think about it and say, this is crazy, let’s stop it.

[00:23:45] And nobody has the power to stop it because the judges don’t have any power. And certainly, the DA and the public defenders don’t have any power to change this system. The legislature doesn’t want to do it for the reason we talked about. The governor can’t do anything because the governor’s got to get elected on law and order. And so, the system just keeps clinking along, and we end up paying billions and billions and billions of dollars a year, and it doesn’t make us any safer.

John Reed: [00:24:08] We’ve talked about this idea of restorative justice within the criminal context. I believe it does. But tell me, it also has a place in other types of disputes.

Doug Noll: [00:24:17] Absolutely. This is why I started working on relationship dispute because I knew that restorative justice principles could probably be really useful in helping people find reconciliation and peace in their family relationships. Or in other cases, like clergy sexual abuse cases, I used restorative principles to great effect. Wherever there are relationships that have been fractured by violence or harm, restorative justice can usually, not always, but can usually mend the harm or begin the healing process. It doesn’t cause healing, but it can begin the healing process.

John Reed: [00:24:52] Let’s go back to the criminal context for a second. I hear all of the pros, but I guess from a procedural perspective – I have committed a crime. The victim has the courage, as you say, to want to enter into a restorative justice process with me. The prosecutor is on board with it.

Doug Noll: [00:25:12] The court has to be on board with it.

John Reed: [00:25:14] And the court as well. And we get to a positive understanding. How does that agreement get implemented so that it has teeth, should something go wrong?

Doug Noll: [00:25:26] Typically, the agreement becomes the order of probation, so that if the agreement is not fulfilled, then it’s a violation of probation. That’s typically how it’s done. Or parole, if we’re post-incarceration, post-conviction incarceration. The agreement gets incorporated into the terms of probation, and now it becomes a court-enforceable agreement.

John Reed: [00:25:44] We’ve talked about criminal prosecution and restorative justice there. You created the Prison of Peace Project with Laurel Kaufer. What is that? How does it work? And what was the impetus?

Doug Noll: [00:25:57] So let’s start with the last question first.

John Reed: [00:25:58] Okay, good.

Doug Noll: [00:25:59] So, in August of 2009, I received a phone call from my dear friend and colleague, Laurel Kaufer, who’s a lawyer and mediator in Los Angeles and, like me, is an adjunct at the Strauss Institute of Dispute Resolution at Pepperdine. And she said, “You got a minute?” I said, “Yeah.” “So, I got a letter I want to read you.” And she and I actually quote the letter in my book, “Deescalate.” And this letter was from a woman by the name of Susan Russo, who was serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole in the largest, most violent women’s prison in the world, which happened to be about an hour and 15 minutes from where I live. And she was asking if Laurel would be willing to come into the prison and train all of the lifers how to become peacemakers and mediators to stop the prison violence, because they were tired of it. They were there for life. They weren’t getting out, and wanted a peaceful community to live in.

[00:26:47] So Laurel read the letter to me and said, “What do you think?” And I thought about it for about a nanosecond, and I thought, you know, if this is real, I think we should do this. We wrote back to Susan with a long list of questions, and two, three weeks later, she wrote back to us in handwritten 25 pages, something like that. I mean this massive letter. And we said, okay, she’s for real. Let’s figure out how to do this.

[00:27:13] Neither one of us had any experience with the prison system. So, we put together a kind of proposal, and then we started at the bottom of the food chain in the prison administration. And it took six months before we finally got to the acting warden, an incredible woman by the name of Velda Dobson Davis. And she listened to us and said, “Yeah, let’s do this. It’s not costing us anything, right?” I said, “No, it’s just costing you your time. We’ll do, we’ll do everything.” “Okay. Let’s do this.”

[00:27:37] Now we had to put the program together and curriculum. Well, we’re both good at curriculum development and both very experienced teachers and trainers, but we made some assumptions. The first is that none of our incarcerated students were to have any skill whatsoever. The reason they’re in prison is because they lacked certain skills. Before we could teach them how to be a mediator, we had to teach them like hundreds of different skills. And we started with listening.

[00:28:02] I had developed the skill of affect labeling, de-escalation, reflective listening. And so, we started with that skill and said the very first thing we’re going to start and teach them restorative justice principles. This is not a restorative justice program, but I understand that what we’re trying to do is work with fights and arguments before they get to violence in a restorative way. That was the underlying philosophy. The very first thing we taught them is how to engage in reflective listening. And then from there, we slowly build their skills over a year until we finally get them to a place where they’re ready to learn mediation. And then we take them through a 24-hour mediation training over three days. And we teach them interest-based mediation. All through this whole process, it’s all experiential. We come in and we teach them, and they have to go out and do it and write reports and come back with homework and tell us what they’ve learned and so forth.

[00:28:49] So we started with 15 women in March or April, 2010. The prison at that time had 3,600 inmates. That prison was designed to hold 2,200; I mean, it was horrible. By the time I think we were into week eight of what was then a 16-week program, we had 800 women on the waiting list wanting to learn this stuff. So, we spent three years, and our basic model was that, okay, we want to make this self-sustaining. It’s going to take three years. The very first cadre, couple of cadres of women we teach, we need to find the leaders and train them how to be trainers. That’s our goal, and that’s what we did.

[00:29:26] We taught our first cohort, found the leaders. They became mentors. Watched the second cohort. We trained the second cohort. By the time the second cohort was done, now we had some people who could be trained as trainers. We taught them how to do what we just did. Then they started teaching the women under our supervision. When we had enough people trained at the peacemaker level, then we moved to the next level, and that’s how we just developed the program.

[00:29:52] We started in that prison. It was repurposed to a men’s prison in 2013. We were asked to go into the men’s prison – we said no a bunch of times until finally we said yes – and started working with men. We had no idea how that was going to work. It worked out.

John Reed: [00:30:06] What was the hesitation?

Doug Noll: [00:30:08] We were not getting paid

John Reed: [00:30:09] Oh, that’s always a good hesitation.

Doug Noll: [00:30:11] We were pro bono for like six years and gave up our practices and gave up everything to do this work. I mean, we took huge financial hits on this. But we went into the men’s prison and then the women leaving Valley State Prison for Women went across the street to another prison called CCWF, Central California Women’s Facility, and then down to the California Institute for Women, CIW, down in Chino, California.

[00:30:33] And so we followed them into those two prisons. We had a lot of problems with CCWF at that time. Now we’re back in it. And people we trained 15 years ago are still in there, and now they’re training Prison of Peace again, which is really cool. CIW has always been strong. In 2015, we finally got some grants from the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, and that allowed us to expand. So today we’re in 15 California prisons, roughly. The entire state of Connecticut, their entire system is going to be teaching Prison of Peace. They’re in the process of staff training right now. They’re like one-tenth of the size of California. It’s nothing, but that’s okay. They’re training their staff, and then they’ll be rolling it out to their 10, I think they’ve got 10 or 12 prisons,  maybe not even that many. Five prisons. So, they’ll be rolling it out in Connecticut.

[00:31:19] We’ve got a colleague in Greece who’s running it in 15 prisons in Greece, and colleagues in Italy now running Prison of Peace in three Northern Italian prisons. So, it’s slowly expanding into the European zone. And it’s just slowly growing. We’ve had remarkable results here in California. We’ve had over 700 life inmates released on parole, basically because of changing of the laws. And to our knowledge, nobody has reoffended. I mean, it’s remarkable. They’re all out there doing amazing work in the community, and they take these skills.

[00:31:53] In fact, I got a letter. Can I read this letter to you?

John Reed: [00:31:57] I’d love for you to do that. Sure.

Doug Noll: [00:32:00] Backstory. When we started teaching the men at Valley State Prison, one of the early students was a young man by the name of Daniel Hanson. He was in prison for 25-to-life because as a 14-year-old, he murdered three or four family members. And the story is horrible. He was horribly abused by these people, and finally he couldn’t take it anymore and he took a baseball bat and just smashed the crap out of everybody. And, and you know, he got arrested and convicted, and so Daniel was one of our early prison peace leaders. And he wrote me. I hadn’t heard from him in, I haven’t heard from him in eight years. And so, I get this letter about two weeks ago. It’s short, but it’s really cool.

[00:32:36] “Dear POP Daddy Doug.” I love that. “Hello, Doug. Been a while. Sorry for the lack of correspondence. Hope you’re well and POP is thriving. I found your address. Thought I’d send you some updates your way. I earned my Bachelor of Arts degree, graduated from Fresno State University, summa cum laude, in May, 2024. Our ceremony was in October of ‘24. The Fresno State President and 40 professors and staff came. It was a big deal. I made it into a master’s program, and that was at Cal State Dominguez Hills. However, the funding was not approved, and I’ll enclose the letter, and I’m waiting for them to figure out how I can get into that. Had my first parole hearing in 2022. Five-year denial.” Not unexpected. “I’ll go back in 2027. In the meantime, I’m up for resentencing, so we’ll see how that goes. Thank you for all that you have plowed into my life. You and POP set the foundation for all of my accomplishment. You gave me the fundamental life skills, communication skills, emotional management skills, et cetera.” In capital letters, “THANK YOU!!!” with three exclamation points. “All my regards to you and Laurel. Hope all is well. Daniel.”

John Reed: [00:33:38] Why haven’t you framed that yet, Doug?

Doug Noll: [00:33:40] I get letters like that all the time. Not all the time, but I’ve probably got five dozen letters like that.

John Reed: [00:33:46] How many letters do you get from clients who represented back in the eighties?

Doug Noll: [00:33:50] I’ve only gotten one.

John Reed: [00:33:51] Yeah, exactly. I think that proves the point

Doug Noll: [00:33:53] When a client died, her daughter wrote me and said, you saved our lives. Thank you for doing what you did. it. That’s the only client letter I’ve ever gotten.

John Reed: [00:34:02] You start with leaders in a new facility. You create mentors. You’ve got people on the wait list. Is the ultimate goal to have every person who’s incarcerated go through the program so that they have these skills with each other? Or are you, are you still trying to create mediators who can be called in when there are disputes as well?

Doug Noll: [00:34:24] Both. We have found that if a prison yard is, say, a thousand people, if we train 10 people in our skills, the violence decreases dramatically within 12 months. And if we train 25 people, or a hundred people, or 300 people, then the whole yard changes completely. There’s still a little bit of fight and arguing, but the kind of violence that people have been experiencing pretty much goes away. And we’ve gotten unsolicited letters from wardens saying that Prison of Peace completely changed the temperament of a prison yard.

John Reed: [00:34:53] You write, you present, you train, you teach, you’re skilled in the martial arts. You’re a level three ski instructor. You fly airplanes and helicopters. You whitewater raft. You fly fish. Oh, and you’re a jazz violinist and folk fiddler. Clearly, you’ve been a lifelong underachiever.

Doug Noll: [00:35:10] Right.

John Reed: [00:35:10] So tell us, Dr. Indiana Jones, where do you find the time for these extracurricular activities?

Doug Noll: [00:35:16] It’s really easy. I don’t own a television set. I don’t watch television. I don’t listen to the radio. It’s, it’s really easy. Just take that time and use it and apply it to something else. You want to free up three or four hours a day, get rid of your television set. Get off of social media. Get off your phone, stop watching TikTok, and now all of a sudden, you’ve got time to do stuff. Find something you’re already passionate about and go for it. And when you master that, then find something else. Always be a beginner at something.

John Reed: [00:35:43] You give off a sense of enlightenment. Let me go with this here. When you talk about the revelations you had in your martial arts training, moving from one discipline to another. A revelation you had while in court saying, this is not what I want to do. Your studies in various places. And I just wonder have you always been that hungry for knowledge, or was there some point in your life that caused you to change this direction so drastically?

Doug Noll: [00:36:18] That’s a great question. I think, and I thought about that. Let’s go back a little further, back to the beginning. I was born with a lot of disabilities. I was born in 1950 with

[00:36:29] poor vision, 20-400, almost legally blind. Two club feet, which had to be corrected by surgery, which means I wasn’t walking until I was three or four years old. Partially deaf. Bad teeth. Left-handed. And in those days, I wasn’t so severely disabled that they put you away in a home somewhere. But I was sufficiently disabled that I was not a normal kid. And I was also super smart.

[00:36:52] I encountered coach after coach after coach after coach who gave up on me. They just didn’t have the patience or the understanding of how to coach me and teach me and help me. So, I was always the klutz, not a very good athlete. They finally discovered my vision problem in the fourth grade when I was not doing well in school. They couldn’t figure out why. The nurse finally tested my eyes. I got these big thick Coke lens glasses, and I advanced three grade levels in one summer. And so, everything was a buzzkill for the girls, right? I had no social grace.

John Reed: [00:37:23] Yeah, you were a catch.

Doug Noll: [00:37:24] Oh God, no. So, I had a lot of emotional damage that stuck with me for a long time. And I began to take up stuff to overcompensate. No question about that. And I was overcompensating for all of this disability in skiing and everything else that I did. But I got to a place finally. I’m not sure when it was. It might’ve been when I took up the martial arts or maybe when I took up flying. I learned how to fly when I was 27. I think it started shifting in law school, where I began to realize that I really enjoyed learning. And so, I really enjoyed law school. A lot of people, lawyers say, I didn’t like it so much. I enjoyed law school, and I did well academically. I just thought it was, the intellectual challenge was great. I was not at the top of my class, but I was pretty close to the top. I was in the top 10%, top 15%, law review, and all that stuff. I enjoyed learning. I started to realize I enjoyed learning.

[00:38:13] So it no longer became a compensation, psychological compensation for all of this disability and the rejection that I had as a child. I just started learning to learn, loving to learn. I learned early on that I would only dedicate myself to things that I really wanted to learn. If I wasn’t willing to put in the work to become an expert at it, then I wasn’t going to do it. And that’s when I said, I’m not going to take up golf. Takes too much time, and I do not want to put in the 5,000 or 6,000 hours of practice it’s going to take to be a scratch golfer. And I will not take up golf unless eventually I can be a scratch golfer, just not willing to do that. So, I never took up golf, and that was kind of my attitude towards everything that I approached. I’m not going to do this unless I’m going to be the best. And if I’m going to be the best, then I’m going to dedicate myself to becoming the best.

[00:38:59] And even as a lawyer, I didn’t make the decision to become a really good trial lawyer until about three or four years into law. And then finally I said, okay, if I’m going to do this, let’s do it right. And then I became a really powerful lawyer. So, that’s what happened. And it’s amazing how much you can accomplish when you don’t watch television. And two, you just put your mind to doing something and say, I’m going to keep at this until I’m really good at it. And then once I got really good at it, then I was ready to go on and learn something else. And you just pick up these accomplishments over a period of life. For me, 75 years. And it’s just accomplishing one thing after another. I look back and, you know, it’s a life of accomplishment, but it’s a life of learning.

John Reed: [00:39:40] But there are connections amongst those various pursuits, are. It has all informed the being that you are right now, informed the mind that you have right now.

Doug Noll: [00:39:48] I’m a totally different being than I was 20 years ago, and I’m a totally way, radically different being than I was when I entered the process of law in 1977.

John Reed: [00:39:58] Well, if I’ve learned one thing today, Doug, it’s that if I don’t play golf and I don’t have a TV, I can do so much more in life.

Doug Noll: [00:40:05] Pretty much.

John Reed: [00:40:06] Doug, this has been a treat. What I love about these conversations is I’ve got questions, I’ve got them written down, I ask, and then halfway through, I kind of throw them out, and we just go with the conversation. But I’ve learned so much. You are truly living your best life, a life with purpose, and I so appreciate you sharing your story and your insights with me today.

Doug Noll: [00:40:25] Oh, you are welcome, John. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you.

John Reed: [00:40:28] Hey, listeners, regardless of where you found us, whether that’s Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, wherever, could you please take a moment to click the follow button or maybe even hit “subscribe”? That way you’ll be sure to learn about new episodes, and you’ll also be letting us know you’re a fan. Maybe you’d even give us a review. We’d certainly appreciate that.

[00:40:50] Until next time, I’m John Reed, and you’ve been listening to Sticky Lawyers.