"These are men who never learned to play in their own childhood," Naki says. He gets the men to sing little songs and clap along. "They laugh at first, but pretty soon they're saying, 'One more time! Let's sing it again!' OK, so we sing it again."

It's almost impossible to imagine anyone getting groups of inmates in Halawa, OCCC or Waiawa to sing little songs or talk about their unmet childhood needs, but Tom Naki, with his nahenahe way of speaking and his pa'a belief in the resilience of the human heart, is an irresistible force.

Naki grew up in Wai'anae in a pure Hawaiian family of nine children. His mother died when he was 12, and his father took over the nurturing of the family. He shares stories of his "papa" with the men in his class, describing how his father used to put him on his shoulders and run around the house when they played, or how his father instructed all the kids to wash their faces in rainwater before they went to work in the lo'i.

"I do that in my class. The attention starts to drift and I tell them, 'Go wash your face and come back.' Sometimes I have rainwater I brought with me, but in prison, cannot bring anything inside, so I make them go to the sink."

Naki earned his bachelor's degree at Chaminade and his master's from UH-Manoa. He studied the Nurturing Parenting program, designed by Stephen Bavolek, Ph.D., and adapted the material to be culturally appropriate to Hawai'i.

For example, Naki shows a picture of a kalo plant to his class of prisoners.

"This is you," he tells them, "the makua kane, the adult male parent." He points to the keiki growing off the main corm. "And these are your children."

The point is made that children need to be nurtured and cared for, not stomped down and crushed.

One of the most powerful sessions in the program is when Naki asks the participants to think of one instance in their often brutal and sorrowful childhoods when they were nurtured by their own fathers. Some of the more hardened men swear there was nothing at all like that in their past. Naki makes them dig deep. He says they always come up with something, even if it's a small moment or a fleeting memory.

"They say they remember one time their dad took them fishing. Or maybe dad let them help fix car. That one memory is like opening up a door."

"For me, it was watching my father shave," says John Dudoit, a former inmate who has remade his life. Dudoit now helps Naki teach the classes. "Till this day, I still use the same aftershave my dad used. Unreal, yeah?"

Naki asks the men to remember that moment, that feeling, and to build on it, and most importantly, to work on bringing those feelings to their own children. Keep the good, add on with new ideas and behaviors, and throw away the abusive patterns. The students actually make lists of things to throw away; things like being judgmental, passiveness, conditional love, guilt trips and hitting.

Funding the Nurturing Fathers program has always been tricky. Sometimes, Naki has gone ahead and taught the class for free when grant money didn't come through. He believes in the work that much. And he loves it.

John Dudoit loves the program, too.

"I spent 30-something years on the other side of life. I got out in 2001 and made a total change. It is possible. Now, I get to be the father I never was for my kids and my grandkids."

The foundation of the program is men teaching men how to be solid, nurturing fathers. Not all of the students make it. "Some are too hard-head," Naki says. But most of the participants become eager to learn and to change. The change is measurable in pre- and post-psychological testing.

Says Dudoit: "This one guy, he was saying, 'My dad gave me lickins' and I turned out OK.

I learned from it. Look where I am today.' And I'm thinking yeah, braddah, you sitting in jail and you think that's OK?

I told him to try to remember how it felt when he was a small boy and he got lickins from his father. He said he didn't like it. And I said, 'So how do you think your kids feel?' And he was like, 'Oh, my God.' He never thought of it that way. That was it for him. That was his beginning."