by MOSES Publications | Apr 30, 2024 | Life After Prison, Newsletter, Reviews
Film Review: The 50 Is Changing Lives
By Margaret Irwin
The 50 is the story – set in California – of a unique way to give incarcerated people a second chance: by training them to become addiction counselors. In March, EXPO sponsored a showing of this documentary at the Urban League’s handsome new Black Business Hub on South Park Street.
In 2006, the federal government decreed that California must reduce its prison population by 50,000 to relieve overcrowding. At that time, more than 85% of prison residents were involved in drug use. In response, and for the first time, the state legislature budgeted money specifically for rehabilitation. This funding enabled some determined individuals to introduce an offender/ mentor certification program for 50 residents of Solano State Prison.
The program was met with suspicion to start with, but the positive impact it had on participants eventually persuaded many others to join. The program has since spread to other California prisons, and other groups of 50 have had the opportunity to turn their lives around, proving the truth of The 50’s motto: “There is life after death.”
What makes “The 50” program so effective is that in order to become addiction counselors, the men have to deal with their own selves first. This involves looking deep within to review the traumas from their past, examine their core beliefs, and identify the roadblocks that keep them from moving forward. They not only have to answer these questions for themselves; they also have to share them with the others in the group. Some brave men allowed themselves to be filmed telling their stories, in the hope of encouraging others. As one noted: “We are experts in the field when it comes to loneliness, fear, and pain.”
At the conclusion of the film, a panel of people with lived experience, including James Morgan, shared their reactions. As one participant noted, if the world shows you you’re not worth anything, it’s vitally important to be part of a community that tells you otherwise. The panelists pointed out that similar deep trauma work is now happening in Wisconsin prisons. It took some 20 years to get the Department of Corrections to allow the training of peer-support specialists to work in the prisons. Having relatable mentors has made a huge difference, one panelist said.
The speakers agreed that family plays a crucial role in the fate of young people. An unhealthy family is very hard to break away from; young people often turn to gangs as a substitute for the community they miss at home. Therefore, it is imperative to invest in families before children find themselves on the road to incarceration. One recommended model for youthful offenders is an academy run by counselors with lived experience. The youth are given everything they need – food, housing, therapy, skills training, and, most importantly, love. They are seeking what we all need: a sense of worth and value.
You can find a link to view the film at the50film.com.
by MOSES Publications | Apr 30, 2024 | Information, Newsletter, Support MOSES
Featuring a New MOSES Member: Middleton Community Church UCC
By Margaret Irwin
Middleton Community Church United Church of Christ (referred to hereafter as MCC) was founded in 1936 by 34 people who wanted a Sunday school for children in the area whose families were not members of the existing Lutheran or Catholic congregations. It has been known ever since as “a church home for those who do not have a home,” welcoming people from a variety of religious backgrounds.
As the church grew in numbers, it moved to a larger location in downtown Middleton; since 2005 its spacious new home is opposite the Pope Farm Conservancy at the corner of Old Sauk Road and Schewe Road. The Rev. Zayna Thomley pastors the congregation, which now numbers over 300.
MCC focuses its decisions on making a difference in our world. While planning for their new location, the congregation found a parcel of 20 acres. Although they didn’t need this much space, they bought it and then looked for a developer who was willing to build smaller, more affordable houses than those already in the neighborhood. These “cottages” plus a child-care center will eventually occupy 10 acres of the land.
MCC enjoys welcoming its neighbors for summer twilight movies on the lawn, “Trunk or Treat” for Halloween, and an Electric Vehicle and Sustainability Show, where folks can talk to owners about their EV’s, test-ride an E-bike, learn about sustainability, and enjoy music, food, and games. The church has a special relationship with the neighboring public school, serving as a safe space for the students in emergencies. It’s also involved in the Forward Garden at the Pope Farm, where food is raised for local pantries.
These activities and many others that extend MCC’s reach beyond the church walls are the responsibility of the Mission and Stewardship Board. A recent survey of MCC members revealed their interest in justice in many forms: reproductive, environmental, racial, criminal, immigration, economic, and health and welfare.
Joining MOSES was a natural for this activist church. Member Ralph Jackson has played an important role in planning for the new jail through MOSES’s Justice System Reform Initiative task force. His wife, Marie, reports she had a life-changing experience when visiting a Wisconsin prison with the Rev. Jerry Hancock. It led her to take her therapy dog for regular visits with the residents of a correctional facility in Dodge County.
The Jacksons have kept the congregation informed of MOSES’s activities as they shepherded MCC toward membership. The congregation was officially welcomed as a new member at the February MOSES general meeting. We look forward to a fruitful partnership with the committed folks at MCC.
by MOSES Publications | Apr 30, 2024 | Information, Life After Prison, Newsletter
Life After Prison: A Few Hours with JustDane’s Returning Prisoner Simulation
By Katie Mulligan
Walk a mile in someone’s shoes before you render judgment. I had a chance to follow that familiar advice last December.
The occasion was a simulation program of what it is like for a person leaving prison and trying to survive in the outside world. JustDane, a criminal-justice organization, offered this program, in which each attendee adopted the persona of a newly released prisoner who struggles to meet such ordinary needs as food and housing.
My role-playing shoes belonged to Lester Jacoby, a Black man on parole after serving a 25-year sentence for a murder committed when he was 19. Lester had worked in the prison kitchen and hoped to go to MATC to study culinary arts. He had a temporary home in his sister’s trailer.
This simulation program was to cover the first four weeks after release from prison. Fifteen minutes were allowed to accomplish tasks typically designated for a week. A loud bell announced the end of each segment, and those not in their chairs risked a return to prison.
I found a birth certificate, transportation vouchers, and $300 in cash in Lester’s folder, along with a rubber band for my wrist. I had my first encounter with the reality of my situation when I learned that Lester had to wear an electronic monitoring device as a condition of his parole – and use his scant funds for the privilege.
“Make sure you get your basic needs met,” urged the organizers. “Basic” didn’t mean easy. One side of the room was lined with a long table of people sitting behind signs. The first sign read “sex offender registration.” I became most familiar with the person behind the “parole officer” sign. Each of us had to sign in with our parole officer every week – or risk a return to prison.
Lester and I had a relaxed first week. “Our” sister had not yet tired of my presence. I used a transportation voucher to get my official ID and stood in line to report to my parole officer. But when I returned to my seat, I learned that my calm was undeserved.
Quite a few attendees reported that they had spent time in jail for violations of their parole conditions. The list of possible offenses was long and included failure to pay restitution, register as a sex offender, or pass a drug test. I noticed men wearing badges circling the room and reading name tags, in search of other offenders. I began to sense what it would be like to live with the constant fear of breaking a rule that could mean a return to prison.
I headed for the room containing the job center and had my first taste of a bureaucratic challenge. After spending precious minutes in the line behind the job counselor’s desk, I learned I had to wait in another line for a form. I rushed back to the table to sign in with my parole officer and waited in line again. The bell rang before I could return to the job center.
During week three, I arrived at the job counselor’s desk and pleaded for a job that would help me pursue my interest in culinary arts and allow me to move out of my sister’s trailer. The best offer was a position as a cafeteria assistant in a hospital that paid $257 a week.
By week four, I had nearly abandoned the idea of pretending I was Lester and was just angry about the incredible odds against anyone in his situation. I got the list of available apartments and found the cheapest was $625/month for a studio. By the end of the simulation, I was arguing with the person playing a social worker who advised me to get a roommate.
My last words in the simulation were, “I’m a 45-year-old Black man who was convicted of murder and has a very low-paying job. No one is going to rent to me in this market.”
What did I learn from this experience? I knew, of course, that finding a good-paying job for someone with a prison record and minimal work experience would be difficult. But I was astounded by the number and variety of obstacles that confront someone trying to survive in a changed and challenging world.
Attendees reported that they received only a two-week supply of medication for physical and mental conditions. Many of them had a mental illness, which likely was exacerbated by their incarceration. Opening a bank account posed a whole new set of problems, but it was important for finding housing. Cell phones and credit cards were unfamiliar items. All of us struggled with transportation problems as we tried to find work and housing.
I knew that Wisconsin has a particularly shameful record concerning its rate of revocation of parole and subsequent return to prison. The state has 18 rules of supervision that include such vague requirements as “avoiding conduct not in the best interest of the public welfare.” A person can be revoked and sent back to prison for breaking a rule that does not involve a crime. However, I did not anticipate how stressful it would be to try to find a job and a place to live while fearing I would break a rule I did not understand.
The simulation could not begin to capture what must be one of the most difficult aspects of life after release. Many people struggle alone with these demanding challenges. This idea was reinforced in the panel discussion that followed the simulation. One of the panelists, who had been out of prison for five years, said he had considered suicide two years ago. “I was saved because I could talk to my friends at JustDane,” he said. “They had become my family.”
JustDane offers programs that address many of these problems. Circles of Support is particularly relevant. Five community members meet with a person before s/he leaves prison and develop a reentry plan. Thereafter, they meet weekly for up to a year to provide support and help resolve problems. Check out the website at https://justdane.org for other efforts. The organization has an almost 50-year history (it used to be known as Madison Area Urban Ministry) and boasts a two-year recidivism rate of 9-10% for its participants, compared with the state average of 67%.
by MOSES Publications | Apr 30, 2024 | Information, MOSES activities, MOSES leadership, Newsletter
Meet MOSES President Saundra Brown
By Pam Gates
Saundra Brown became MOSES president at the beginning of 2024. She has a strong vision on how to strengthen MOSES and next steps to move it forward. She recently shared her visions and goals with the MOSES newsletter team.
Frequent one-on-ones between MOSES members are important! “We’re not communicating with one another enough,” Saundra says. “I want to put an emphasis on one-on-ones. You can’t have too many. Even if you’ve done one with someone, it’s good to do another. You can always learn something new about someone. This is very important to me.”
How can we grow MOSES? “There are so many issues,” Saundra says. “We need more faces of the people impacted the most, Black and brown people. There aren’t enough of the people who are re-entering the community in MOSES. Why? Are we intentionally reaching out in specific areas of our communities? Is our outreach compelling? I am leading an effort to reach out to African American churches.”
Saundra started this effort with a visit by the MOSES executive committee to her church, St. Paul AME, on Sunday, April 21. All the visits involve a group of five to ten members of MOSES, e.g. the Fundraising Team, the Communications Team, task forces, etc., attending a Sunday service at an African American church. The visits include a 10-15 minute presentation of an overview of MOSES, along with an invitation to become a member of this great organization called MOSES. Saundra plans to contact pastors of other African American churches in Madison, to arrange visits to their congregations on upcoming third or fourth Sundays.
What has happened to the Individuals Caucus? “It recently came to my attention that the Individuals Caucus is no longer functioning. I have asked James Morgan, our community organizer, to facilitate its re-establishment.”
We need shorter meetings, and fewer of them! “That results in better take-aways,” Saundra says. “Meetings are necessary, but distributing a well planned-out agenda that makes clear the core issues we seek to address a few days before the meeting, insisting that participants are prepared to discuss topics on the agenda, and starting and ending on time all make an effective meeting. When holding a meeting longer than one and a half hours, we stand the chance of the people losing interest and forgetting most of what was said after the first 45 minutes of the meeting. Fewer, shorter meetings result in better quality time.”
Let’s participate in the Juneteenth celebration on June 15 at Penn Park! “I’d love for MOSES to make signs and march with them in the parade. I also want to do tabling. We need a tablecloth with the MOSES logo, plus materials about MOSES on the table. We also need people to sign up to table, to make signs, and to march in the parade, which starts at 10 a.m. at Fountain of Life Church on Badger Road [about ½ mile south of Penn Park]. Please see the sign-up opportunity elsewhere in this newsletter.”
Ed.: It’s on page XX.
Training for MOSES members: It is one of my goals to implement more MOSES, WISDOM, and Gamaliel training and to follow up on those trainings with a strategic plan of action. I believe it is important to become knowledgeable, but to move the knowledge into the realm of action is even more important. There are no plateaus in the work of MOSES. We never stop learning, because the world never stops teaching!
There is a Gamaliel training coming up in July in Eau Claire. Gamaliel trainings are useful and well organized. Their goal is to make their trainees stronger. Everyone that goes comes away with some positiveness toward their work in the community. It is important that every MOSES member attend a Gamaliel training.
Saundra has a very busy life outside of her MOSES commitments. She works hard for her church, St. Paul AME (African Methodist Episcopal), and she tutors children, both privately and at One City Schools. She is also the director of Saturday Scholars, a Saturday-morning program funded by 100 Black Men and housed at Creekside School in Sun Prairie. The program, for kids in grades K-5 who are one to three grades behind, emphasizes reading, writing, spelling, and math. There are three lead teachers, each of whom has an education assistant; the child-to-teacher ratio is 4:1. Saturday Scholars, which is completing its third year, has a spring and a fall session. It uses a University of Florida Science of Reading (SOR) program for its reading instruction.
Saturday Scholars is supportive to the students’ families, too. “We provide computers to parents,” Saundra says, “and we try to meet other needs if they let us know – if they’re not too proud.”
In her earlier career, Saundra taught in Madison public schools. “I retired due to Act 10. I didn’t know what it was going to do to my retirement,” she says. But Saundra can hardly be said to have retired!
Concluding remarks
“I want to be able to empower people with an understanding that the issues we’re encountering today are a rapid act of genocide,” Saundra says. “Our kids are dying. Our people are dying. If I haven’t done everything I could to eradicate the unjust systems that were put in place many, many years ago, then my life has not been worth living. I want to accomplish as much as I can during my tenure as president of MOSES, and in any other group that I am engaged in, to dismantle the unjust systems that have been put in place to cause harm to the lives of my brothers and sisters.
“As your president, I am looking for support and constructive criticism. [If you make suggestions,] let me think about them, then follow up with an honest and meaningful conversation. I’m more soulful than political; I think about the souls of people and their intentions.”
Every time she facilitates a MOSES meeting, Saundra starts it with the MOSES mission statement, because it speaks to the intentions of our work:
Our mission is to build collective power to dismantle the systems of mass incarceration and mass supervision and to eradicate the racial disparities in our community that contribute to them. We envision an end to the systems of mass incarceration and mass supervision; an end to systemic racism; a reallocation of resources to create racial and economic equity: a just society without discrimination in which all people thrive.
The agenda to achieve all that may involve a lot of political work, but it is, first and foremost, a statement of soul. It illustrates the soul of MOSES, and, as well, the soul of our president, Saundra Brown.
by MOSES Publications | Apr 30, 2024 | Newsletter, Reviews, Schools
Taking Action for Social Justice Through the FAST Program: A Memoir by a Social Worker
By Dr. Lynn McDonald, Founder of FAST, 2023
Reviewed by Pam Gates
Dr. Lynn McDonald is a Madison resident and social worker who in 1998 established a program called Families and Schools Together, or FAST. The purpose of FAST is to establish and strengthen bonds between schools and families, between parents and their children, and among the parents in the program. The long-term goal that gets most schools to undertake FAST is improving the school success of the children involved.
The FAST program has very specific requirements and procedures. For example, FAST must be undertaken as an effort of the community that is to be helped, and those who are to be helped must be represented in the planning. If the goal is to help Latino families at a school, the team planning the eight-week program must include at least one Latino person (preferably more, of course). Those who are to be “helped” must also help, part of the strengthening that is to go on: strengthening of bonds and strengthening of responsibility to oneself, to one’s children and family, to one’s community.
FAST has been expanded to 23 countries; the last project McDonald described in this memoir was in the Czech Republic. She describes visits to many of the other countries, either to help them get started with FAST or to see how they are doing, how they have adapted the FAST curriculum to their own cultures. Countries that have undertaken FAST range from Brazil, where a school serving favela (garbage dump) residents undertook the program, to Tajikistan, to Scotland — and many points in between: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, France, England, Ireland ….
FAST used to be implemented in the Madison schools, but funding has run out. The only Madison school that still has the FAST program as of the writing of this book is One City School. An effort is being made to reinstate the program in Madison schools, but $1 million has to be raised for that to happen. McDonald tells success stories from various communities, in Wisconsin and all over the world, that have implemented FAST in their schools; it is those stories that are perhaps the most interesting parts of the book, the most compelling encouragement to re-establish FAST here.
McDonald’s memoir ranges all over the place. She recollects her childhood, her marriages, her travels for FAST, and what happened in various places she visited. She has an amazing memory and has lived an amazing life within and beyond the arms of a large, close-knit family. The portrait that comes out of reading this book is of a vibrant, tireless person deeply committed to her work, to her family, and to her community – which seems to include the entire world!
But, like everyone else, McDonald had her problems. Some got her thinking, as a social worker, about solutions that she later made part of the FAST program. For example, she became a single parent when her children were very young (3 and 6), and her kids began acting out. She learned that focused, child-led play with each one of them eased the pain that they all were feeling and helped them to operate as a family again. That child-led play became an essential part of FAST years later.
McDonald was very strict on the requirements for establishing FAST at a school. She was flexible on cultural modifications, but the basic outline had to be followed. A critical FAST principle is that everyone in the participating families had to feel respected, and that they each had a voice. It was amazing what this eight-week program could and would accomplish, in very different parts of the world, using some very basic principles.
The FAST website describes the program thus: “FAST was one of the first prevention and early intervention programs to develop practical applications for adult and children’s mental health research findings. Today, our organization continues to evolve and improve our work in family engagement by integrating new scientific findings and research into our programs.” Find out more at www.familiesandschools.org. You may be inspired to add your voice to the effort to get FAST back in Madison schools.
