It's not a good idea to laugh at fellow participants in an anger-management class. But it is hard for classmates to suppress their giggles as "Lou" tells his story. Last year, Lou says, he discovered that his wife's Internet tastes ran to the louche--specifically, sex chat-room sites. Worse, he suspected that she had begun to date a guy she had met online. The man even phoned their house. Lou, a round-faced immigrant with a soft voice and tortoise-shell eyeglasses, tried to persuade his spouse to be faithful to him. She wouldn't.
So one day he followed his wife, who was "all dolled up," to an assignation with the lover at a restaurant. To make a long story short, the cuckold beat the lover senseless with a motorcycle helmet--sending him to the hospital--and for good measure, rammed the lover's Jeep into a hydrant. The police came, lawyers were hired, Lou and his wife split--and Lou ended up here in a classroom in Brooklyn, N.Y., as part of a plea bargain with prosecutors. Though the others chuckle at the fate of Lou's victim--after all, they wouldn't be here if they didn't want to kick someone's butt--instructor Alan Greenfield presents a good reason to count to 10 next time. "You could have put this guy away," he warns Lou. "You would have been doing a lot of time, regretting something for the rest of your life."
Prosecutors across the U.S. are sending thousands of criminals for anger-management instruction each year. District attorneys offer the classes mostly to first-time offenders like Lou, folks who seem to have forgotten how to take a time-out. There are no solid figures on how popular the courses have become, but six were given last month just for those in the New York City criminal-justice system--roughly double the number for the same period last year. (Each class has about 20 students.) Several other courses were held throughout the city by therapists and the new breed of anger consultants.
New York is surely an irascible city, but similar classes are cropping up in much quieter places, towns like Medway, in southern Massachusetts, and Sumter, in rural South Carolina. In Chicago, Leonard Ingram, a.k.a. Bhagwan Ra Afrika, incorporates "Western, Eastern and African approaches" into anger treatments. And Thomas Nelson Publishers of Nashville puts out an Anger Workbook that reminds enraged Christians that Jesus said we should love our neighbors as ourselves.
Companies around the U.S. have begun asking short-tempered employees to sit through such classes, and anger management is often included in drug treatment and couples counseling. New Hope/Anger Management Inc., based in West Palm Beach, Fla., which has conducted 200 courses in the past seven years, started out treating halfway-house criminals but works today with wealthy businessmen, the homeless and children as young as eight. Even the six-year-old in Flint, Mich., who killed his classmate in February had reportedly been scheduled to undergo anger therapy. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who gunned down 13 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., had taken anger-management classes a year earlier for stealing from a car.