UW Prison Education Program Growing
Initiative created in December 2020 has gotten nearly $6 million in public and private grants.
Jail (Pixabay License)
A two-year push to make college education more accessible to Wisconsin inmates has gained momentum with nearly $6 million in public and private grants.
The funding will help matriculate inmates and “break the back of recidivism,” Tommy Thompson, University of Wisconsin System interim president and former governor, said.
Thompson, who has said he regrets overseeing a large expansion of Wisconsin’s prison system when he was governor in the 1990s, included the initiative in his first UW System budget proposal when he sought a $95.7 million increase in state funding for the state’s campuses compared to the previous budget.
Lawmakers provided $8.25 million in additional general purpose revenue to system schools while lifting an eight-year freeze on resident undergraduate tuition increases.
In November, Madison-based student loan servicing company Ascendium Education Group awarded a $150,000 grant toward the prison education effort. In December, Gov. Tony Evers and Wisconsin Economic Development Corp, Secretary Missy Hughes awarded a $5.7 million grant toward the initiative.
The funding will be used for planning and developing pilot programs between prisons and UW-Oshkosh, UW-Milwaukee, UW-Parkside, UW-Green Bay and UW-Madison, along with the UW System’s online Extended Campus.
“That was like Christmas all over again with all the lights and trimmings,” Thompson said. “We have, now, the resources to set up a system in Wisconsin that could actually break the back of recidivism.”
Monday’s roundtable also included former inmates who received college degrees and career training while incarcerated. They provided guidance to the people creating the Prison Education Initiative.
Hope Wesley Early is a recovery coach and program coordinator with Hope Council on Alcohol and Other Drugs in Racine. She said she had no doubt she would be able to finish her schooling while incarcerated because she was motivated to change her life. But she had difficulty seeing the connection between that education and solid employment.
“As a felon, you hear all the rumors like, ‘You’re a felon now, you’re not going to be able to get a good job, you’re not going to be able to work,'” she said.
Robert Taliaferro agreed and said he was lucky to have a network of mentors who connected him to a job after finishing a 38-year prison sentence less than a month ago. Taliaferro said he took classes through UW-Madison’s Odyssey Project and a Minnesota prison education program.
“If you’re going to have an educational program that’s fine, but you have to be able to sit up there and follow it up,” Taliaferro said.
He said relationships need to be built with employers so that they are willing to accept highly motivated and highly skilled former inmates.
“They’ve been working for pennies an hour,” Taliaferro said. “They’re willing to work for $10, $15, $20, $30 an hour if you give them that opportunity. That needs to be part of the educational process. Get them educated, get them out there and get the employers to say, ‘We will hire you. We can trust you.'”
Peter Moreno is an attorney and the founder of UW-Madison’s Odyssey Beyond Bars. He said a lot of planning has to happen now to marry the UW System and the DOC.
“I think sometimes we hope that we can just walk in the door of the prisons and start teaching classes as we would on campus,” Moreno said. “It sometimes doesn’t work that way, for very valid reasons related to security and logistics that exist in the prisons that we have to navigate.”
“All that’s taking some time, I think, given the fact that this is such a large investment,” Moreno said. “We really want to get off on the right foot. We feel like this is going to be our chance to establish a permanent presence for the university in the Department of Corrections. And we want to make sure we do it right.”
Moreno said a first step will be creating college preparatory courses that teach writing and communication skills inmates will need if they’re interested in pursuing college. Eventually, he said, that could be expanded to include programs offering bachelor degree programs and job-specific credentials.
Listen to the WPR report here.
WPR reporter Diane Bezucha contributed to this story.
Editor’s note: Wisconsin Public Radio is a service of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Wisconsin Educational Communications”
Public, private grants add momentum to UW System Prison Education Initiative was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.
I have difficulty with the notion of workplace trust described here. Anytime a business creates a situation where one employee is unchecked by others, that business is setting itself up for a failure. Frankly, I want to be in an environment where my work is scrutinized in a good way by my fellow workers because, like all humans, sometimes I make mistakes. This is as true for the machinist as it is for the doctor.