The Toughest Love
The headquarters of the Delancey Street Foundation occupies a piece of prime real estate near the base of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, tucked between luxury condominiums and ritzy waterfront eateries. The 400,000-square-foot, four-story complex looks like a Disneyfied Mediterranean villa, with red tile roofs, flower boxes, and sun-filled windows overlooking the bustling waterfront. Inside are 177 dorms, a pool, a movie theater, and an unpretentious restaurant known as a hangout for local dignitaries. Rep. Nancy Pelosi described the facility as “the living room of the city.”
On a third-floor wall hang dozens of framed photos of “HOT SHOTS WHO LIKE US”—a who’s who of California’s Democratic elite and celebrities of a certain vintage, posing with Delancey’s co-founder and CEO, Mimi Silbert. With her big auburn hair and infectious smile, she’s pictured with Hillary and Bill Clinton, Kamala Harris, former Mayor Willie Brown, Colin Powell, Tony Blair, Clint Eastwood, and Jane Fonda. The grip-and-grins are a tribute to Delancey’s reputation as one of the nation’s highest-profile self-help organizations, known for bringing countless lives back from the brink.
The photos are also a testament to the 78-year-old Silbert’s influence. Pelosi has likened Silbert to Mother Teresa and recently called her “the queen of redemption in all of America.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein once urged “anyone, anywhere in the United States that has an interest in replicating a program to rehabilitate American drug addicts that works to go to San Francisco, to call Mimi Silbert.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom became close with Silbert during his own efforts to get sober more than a decade ago. “I never went to rehab,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I went to Mimi.”
Delancey is a bit like a kibbutz where people go instead of prison. With the exception of Silbert, the program is run entirely by people recovering from addiction, and former prisoners, nearly all of whom were sent to the program by judges as an alternative to incarceration or as part of probation or parole. Since it was founded in a cramped apartment in the early ’70s, it has grown into an operation with 1,000 residents in six locations nationwide and more than $119 million in the bank. Delancey’s facilities defy the stereotype of a gloomy halfway house: There’s a Mission-style former hotel in Los Angeles, a ranch in New Mexico, and a turreted manor in New York. Residents, most of whom live in the California facilities, stay for a minimum of two years while working for—and eventually managing—the program’s many enterprises, which include moving companies, catering services, and bustling eateries. The program is predominantly funded by profit from its businesses; residents receive free room and board. During the holiday season, Delancey runs dozens of Christmas tree lots, inviting customers to “Buy A Tree Save A Life!!”
Over nearly half a century, more than 23,000 people have completed the program. Yet as Delancey has become a beloved fixture in San Francisco and a model for rehabs and prison diversion programs around the world, it has been subject to little oversight or scrutiny. Interviews with dozens of Delancey graduates, lawyers, judges, and criminologists paint a picture of an eccentric program with a number of long-standing practices that are rarely discussed in public. New participants are cut off from the outside world and required to spend hours doing monotonous jobs. They must participate in “Games,” in which they receive and dish out intense criticism, often in the form of yelling and cursing. Until a few years ago, residents were required to stay awake for two-day sessions; sometimes those who nodded off were awoken with a spritz of water. They work long hours for no pay, sometimes at events for the politicians who praise the program. Delancey doesn’t offer mental health services and it forbids psychiatric medications. In private conversations, some public defenders in San Francisco liken the program to a cult.
There is loads of anecdotal evidence of the program’s successes, but there is little scientific evidence to support Delancey’s tough-love methods, some of which were inherited from the notorious rehab group Synanon. Even though nearly all of Delancey’s residents come through the criminal justice system, no state or local agency oversees the program, and its recidivism rates haven’t been studied in three decades.
It’s hard to question the appeal Delancey holds for judges and DAs trying to figure out what to do with a specific kind of offender: someone ineligible or unsuited for a typical rehab but deserving of one more chance before prison. Delancey checks a lot of boxes: It’s tougher and longer than most addiction treatment programs; it takes violent offenders; it’s not prison; and it’s free. “Most judges don’t relish the
