Screaming and Christmas Trees: A Beloved Rehab's Dark Side
The Mother Jones Podcast
Mother Jones
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 8 July 2020
⏱️ 25 minutes
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Summary
Over nearly five decades, Delancey Street Foundation in San Francisco has built a reputation as one of the nation's highest-profile rehab centers and prison diversion programs. It's earned a cult-like following among judges, politicians, and celebrities, including Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Gavin Newsom, Jane Fonda, and Clint Eastwood. But Delancey it has been subject to little oversight or scrutiny. On this episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, senior reporter Julia Lurie investigates an eccentric program with a number of long-standing practices that are rarely discussed in public. Participants work long hours with no pay, get not mental health services, are forbid from using psychiatric medications, and undergo rituals that some describe as psychological torture. Many Delancey alums credit the program's tough-love approach with saving their lives. But for others, it led to their unraveling.
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, so can I? |
| 0:02.0 | Julia. |
| 0:05.0 | I'm so can I... |
| 0:07.0 | I'm so excited. |
| 0:10.0 | Julia Lurie, describe what we're listening to you right now. Where are you and what's around you? |
| 0:17.0 | This is the Delancey Street Foundation earlier this year, back when we could visit places in person and Delancey's |
| 0:25.6 | headquarters take up a full block on the Embarcadero, the waterfront in San Francisco. |
| 0:31.5 | Just down the road is Oracle Park where the San Francisco Giants play. |
| 0:36.0 | I talked several times over the course of several years to Mimi Silbert, the co-founder and president of Delancey. |
| 0:47.0 | She's basically made this organization |
| 0:50.0 | her whole life for the past nearly 50 years. She's five feet tall. She's this |
| 0:55.9 | 78 year old ball of energy and every time we met we met in a private room in the |
| 1:02.4 | Delancey Street restaurant where I was greeted with like pots of tea and finger sandwiches and like these perfectly like placed napkins and it was it was really sort of the whole shebang. |
| 1:20.4 | This is the Mother Jones podcast. I'm Jimmy Licking in Oakland. |
| 1:25.0 | I wagged my finger and say this is that you have to. On today's show, with all the talk recently about defending the police and abolishing prisons, we're taking you |
| 1:44.7 | inside what is arguably the biggest prison diversion program in California, the |
| 1:50.3 | Jelance Street Foundation. |
| 1:52.4 | Its fans run the gamut from Kamala Harris to Clint Eastwood. |
| 1:56.0 | It's a place where unconventional methods have saved some |
| 2:00.0 | and traumatized others. |
| 2:02.0 | For over 50 years, the Delancey Street and traumatized others. |
| 2:02.8 | For over 50 years, the Delancey Street Foundation has offered scores of people in crisis |
... |
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