Weekly Seminar Liberated Intellects to Further Education for Madison’s Formerly Incarcerated
By Robert Hall
Introduction
In the late 20th century, digital technologies contributed to the United States’ expanding carceral state. Police departments embraced computer programs to guide predictive policing, and digital databases published collated criminal data for all to see. These programs contributed to exacerbation of racial profiling and the criminalization of the poor, augmenting the growing pains in the adolescence of the prison and thus consolidating the largest carceral growth spurt on the planet, all within the United States. While scholars have written about these technologies and the carceral systems they supported in terms of privacy versus surveillance, asymmetrical power relations, and race-class intersections, the ways in which social scientists and other academics enabled their rapid growth is not well explored (Linskens Christie; Ferguson; Foucault; Jefferson; Eubanks). For instance, UW-Madison Criminologist Herman Goldstein theorized in the 1970s about policing, eventually yielding successful praxis, which was then applied by early technologists (Goldstein 236-258; Spelman). The artifacts and legacies of their computational infrastructure in part guides policing today (Wisconsin Court System). Since the Wisconsin Idea, by definition, ambiguously calls for the use of university ideas outside of the classroom to benefit or impact the people and the state, then Goldstein’s work in the prison industry, despite having an unorthodox, untrendy, and unintuitive connotation, is a footnote of the Wisconsin Idea (Cambridge Center).
More positively defined, traditionally conceptualized, and currently implemented ways that the Wisconsin Idea benefits the public is through programs like the Wisconsin Prison Humanities Project (WPHP) and Odyssey Beyond Bars (OBB) which help the incarcerated through interactive coursework in prisons. Unexpectedly, these organizations use education to intellectually liberate those same prisoners that Goldstein helped corral. Goldstein aiding the industrialization of prisons at a public university and these university educational groups helping the prison-impacted are at odds, showing the fractured practice of the Wisconsin Idea.
While UW-Madison educational programs are active in the prisons as jumpstart programs for eventual education at the universities, there is currently a gap in support and training during the interstitial period after release. This interstitial period is crucial for continued educational development when individuals are at greatest risk of recidivism. This is where the weekly seminar Liberated Intellects (LI) will continue the process of educational rehabilitation for the formerly incarcerated by bridging the gap between prison and further education. LI is an organization for helping the formerly incarcerated pursue higher education, amidst a developing reentry field. LI consists of mentors from the WPHP, First Generation Foresight LLC, and WISCIENCE, and is supported by the Wisconsin Idea Fellowship and Cyrena Pondrom Leadership Trust.
LI aims to reduce recidivism for formerly incarcerated Wisconsin residents by offering a weekly seminar to provide guidance in educational applications. The LI mentoring team will include academics, some of whom are formerly incarcerated and others already actively interfacing with incarcerated populations, who will establish continuity and rapport, guiding students through readings and application forms, while providing feedback on participants’ essays. By providing education, LI aspires to ameliorate adverse experiences, improve opportunities for well-paying jobs, reduce recidivism, and pave the path to future college degrees. LI’s objectives are to 1) offer resources defining educational routes (e.g., Associates degrees, 2-to-4-year transfer, and 4-year colleges and universities), 2) provide guidance to students in filling out college applications and financial aid paperwork, and 3) introduce students to navigate higher education and access academic and financial resources.
LI will use UW-Madison’s vast scholarly infrastructure to foster educational independence among the formerly incarcerated. Reentry-oriented education is feasible if desire exists among the formerly incarcerated to pursue education, desire from academics to help such people, and if one or a few academics personally familiar with the cultures and assumptions of the justice system, academia, and criminality itself will help. On the latter point, Robert Hall, UW-Madison undergraduate and LI creator, would fill a formerly incarcerated role. On the former needs, precedents exist in the WPHP and OBB, both thriving in a seemingly counterintuitive, incarcerated environment. These groups demonstrate that justice-impacted individuals wish to learn, and that there are academics excited to teach them. Adjacently, there is precedent exhibited in organizations which attempt to facilitate healthy and productive reentry via daily living needs. Such organizations include the prominent JUSTDANE and Nehemiah among others, with some members having both academic and criminal backgrounds. This further proves the desire for these freed individuals to improve their lives alongside community leaders trained in academia, who also had experiences within the carceral system. LI will work within the framework of these proven themes.
Impact of Imprisonment on Educational Opportunities
The Wisconsin Idea, in part, aims to help the marginalized and disadvantaged. Former inmates are often ignored by society even though prisons generate inequality across all intersections with specific collateral effects. Wisconsin’s incarceration rate is five times higher than the next leading NATO country and its prisons are at 113% capacity as of September 2021 (Prison Policy “Wisconsin”). The prison population highlights the disparity of ethnic and socioeconomic groups. In Wisconsin, Black people make up 6% of the population, but are 42% of the prison population—America’s largest carceral race discrepancy. Likewise, Wisconsinites who are African- and Native-American are more likely to receive prison sentences than their European-American counterparts (National Public Radio).
Former inmates often have low job prospects and dire educational backgrounds, due to disenfranchisement in public school systems and added bias because of their prior incarceration. Half of the formerly incarcerated have only a high school diploma or GED, often earned while imprisoned—and a quarter have neither. In increasingly skillset-dominated job markets, education is crucial. Even though in 2019, 37.1% of 25–44-year-olds had a bachelor’s degree, in 2008 only 4% of prior inmates aged over 24 had earned bachelor’s degrees or more (National Science Foundation). Fewer than 4% will have graduate degrees. Even 4 years after release and without recidivating, many do not attain further education suggesting that education could profoundly affect life outcomes (Prison Policy “Getting back”). For example, a study from 2007, reported inmates who received education in prison were 43% less likely to recidivate (Rand Corporation). LI actuates Wisconsin Idea tenets by expanding educational access, amplifying obscured voices, and helping individuals navigate difficult experiences.
Through attentiveness and determination, the formerly incarcerated can make headway in college and aspire to be an integrated-intellectual—or a scholar combining personal disadvantage with academic ability to diligently address unjust disparities with which they are familiar. Coming out as an integrated-intellectual is worthwhile for the impact that one can have on others. The formerly incarcerated are in a distinct position relative to many current UW-Madison students. The formerly incarcerated know the struggles of social and academic self-efficacy, and one path for how to traverse them. For UW-Madison faculty and students, the formerly incarcerated uniquely offer a bridge between incarceration and education, and veritable insight into the inner turmoil and unspoken injustices which pervade society. With LI, formerly incarcerated people will use their studies to enhance personal objectives of helping victims of disadvantaged backgrounds effectively manage projects and gain control of how others see their past. LI will aim to free individuals from the cycle of incarceration, while simultaneously saving taxpayer money on countless carceral facilities, reentry programs, social programs, and the collaterals of criminality. Therefore, while LI associates with traditional and orthodox criminal justice system reformists, LI also aligns with those who vigorously promote freedom as a constitutional virtue, support forgiveness and rebirth, and practice fiscal conservation.
LI Program Structure: Sharing Priorities, Sharing Meals, and Sharing Futures
LI will meet for two hours on Thursday evenings, for ten weeks. Each meeting will include a presentation from a guest speaker, community building time, and a workshop to practice skills related to the presentation. Each week they will share a meal together to learn from one another, exchange stories, talk about personal experiences that week, and the goals they set for themselves. The meetings will be held at the South Campus Community Center to provide ease of access for students. To improve rapport, address questions, and help with essays, there should be an open invite to students to an optional study hall. The program will consist of two cohorts. The first cohort will meet during Fall 2022 and the second during Spring 2023. Where possible, LI will draw from well-established reentry organizations, such as JUSTDANE, EXPO, and Nehemiah to recruit student-participants, utilizing their working relationships they have already fostered as reentry experts. Madison Area Jail Ministry, the Prison Ministry Project, Criminal Justice Reform, churches, jails, probation offices, and others will receive invitations to share with their communities for more outreach.
LI falls within the category of Wisconsin Idea—or a project which takes classroom knowledge for use in the public—and therefore has university support. In the spring of 2022, the Public Humanities Exchange for Undergraduates initially supported LI. As of the summer of 2022, the Wisconsin Idea Fellowship (with American Family Social Entrepreneurship Distinction) and the Cyrena Pondrom Leadership Trust endorse the project, both of which help undergraduate students realize their aspirations in a community-oriented project. From these benefactors there is funding for a 12-person LI cohort in Fall 2022 and another in Spring 2023. The future intention is to find both university and community partners to institutionalize the program so that it may continue to operate beyond this pilot program. Additionally, LI is a Wisconsin Idea that goes further by uniquely having inspiration from lived experience—here as incarceration—mutually inform classroom knowledge. In this sense, it is a departure from organizations which have yet to utilize the formerly incarcerated in leadership roles.
With strong potential for valuable support, having many students successfully finish is important to demonstrate that outcomes are met. Difficult to quantify, but wholly necessary nonetheless, are the moment-to-moment interactions that will encourage unique community building among LI peers, mentors, and guests (Pentland). This community growth is especially poignant for those formerly incarcerated traditionally degraded by the different echelons of society—nonetheless made all the stronger when community finally forms for them. In large part, this will be achieved through the weekly communal meal held during each seminar. This meal is vital to form community among the students, and if the students knew that the meal was funded by multiple organizations in the UW-Madison community, they would feel further acknowledged, understood, and purposefully supported (University of Oxford). With multipronged support, every student in LI will also have plenty of food for the seminars with possible leftovers to take home. Furthermore, community support would contribute to a graduation ceremony with meals—for students and their invited families—and graduation certificates. More students translate to increased LI graduates—perhaps future UW students—thus showing Madison the potential of this program. Adding funds to a food budget allows for ease of decision making in the face of an uncertain future. For instance, the local situation relies on unknown factors including Covid-19 oscillations and global conflict perturbations, each known to effect global markets, including staples like food (Thompson). Likewise, the exact nature of and unknown directions in the rate of inflation for the next six to twelve months could also affect food prices (Authers). The last things LI should encounter, if avoidable, is instability and lack of food.
The groundwork for LI to thrive is laid with both Wisconsin Idea Fellowship and Cyrena Pondrom Leadership Trust support alongside community partner readiness. The website, which contains further information about organizers, partners, and structure, is accessible at https://liberatedintellects.wisc.edu/ and is ready for applicants and supporters. Distinctively, LI is filling a currently unoccupied niche in Madison rehabilitation. LI could represent a strong initial impact in an educational field that needs a regional beginning. There are currently groups inside and outside the prisons who have set precedents which speak to the potential success, including WPHP and OBB alongside JUSTDANE and Nehemiah. To ensure the success and continued viability of LI, a strong cohort size needs to be attained. To retain students, exterior community support and interior community building activities—including the all-important group meal—need to be fortified. Moreover, dedicated funding is needed for student success coupled with passionate volunteers to see their success through. Finally, while support from academics and community partners is lauded, an overarching goal is to develop the formerly incarcerated into academics themselves and to become active in their communities to which they belong, so that they are viewed as equals. In this respect, LI seeks to continue keeping the formerly incarcerated in administrative and decision-making roles whenever and however possible to set a precedent of self-determination and to protect its students against shifting or conflicting interests.
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