by MOSES Publications | Nov 1, 2025 | Uncategorized
Good News in Brief
The college-in-prison program that began at Bard College in New York in 1999 has expanded in recent years to 18 additional colleges and universities in 13 states. Among the schools that now offer prisoners the opportunity for a high-quality liberal arts education behind bars are Wesleyan University, Grinnell College, Morehouse, Yale, Villanova, Boston College, and Notre Dame. For more information, see the website of the Consortium for Liberal Arts in Prison.
In Wisconsin, the UW Prison Education Initiative offers coursework to people in seven prisons. In four of these prisons, the UW Odyssey Project’s Odyssey Beyond Bars offers a credit-bearing class, English 100, to help potential students build confidence and skills.
by MOSES Publications | Oct 16, 2025 | Immigration, WISDOM
Introducing the WISDOM Task Force on Immigration
By Sherry Reames
WISDOM’s statewide Task Force on Immigration has been meeting monthly since November 2024 with the general goal of “empower[ing] individuals and communities to fight for immigrant rights, ending discriminatory practices, restoring fair access to identification, and preparing for emergencies.” Since this is a broad and ambitious mission, the task force has defined four focus areas and invites participants to choose the group that interests them most, “meet with point people, and join in researching and reaching out to partners for effective change.” Here are the four subcommittees:
- “Know Your Rights and Family Emergency Preparedness.” This group reviews and shares tools for providing immigrants and their allies with essential information about their rights during interactions with police and ICE agents and also shares resources to help immigrants prepare in advance for potential arrest, deportation, and family separation.
- “Public Safety: Ending 287(g) [which allows state and local law enforcement agencies to partner with ICE for certain law enforcement functions] and limiting sheriffs’ collaboration with ICE.” This group works to mobilize public opinion against both formal agreements and informal collaboration with ICE, because public safety tends to suffer when immigrant communities are afraid to talk to local police.
- “Drivers’ Cards for All.” When denied any access to drivers’ licenses, undocumented people are compelled to go without car insurance, heightening the risk for other drivers. They also risk a police record and potential deportation every time they drive to work or take their kids to school. This WISDOM group works with the Coalition for Safe Roads and other partners to identify undecided legislators and persuade them to support the bill that would restore immigrants’ access to drivers’ cards.
- “Employer Emergency Preparedness.” The goal of this group is to review and share resources to help farmers, businesses, and factory managers prepare for potential immigration raids, reminding them of their rights and helping them find ways to reduce the risk to their workers and their businesses.
If you, your neighbors, or members of your congregations would like to know more about these campaigns, the first step is to sign up online at wisdomwisconsin.org/immigration. That will get you onto the email list. The monthly task force meeting is held on the second Monday of every month, 6:30-7:30 p.m. on Zoom. For questions or concerns, please contact Amanda Ali, aali@wisdomwisconsin.org.
by MOSES Publications | Oct 16, 2025 | Advocacy, Criminal Legal System, Events, WISDOM
Community Listening Session at the Capitol Coming Up on Nov. 12
WISDOM’s Community Listening Session on November 12 will provide a valuable opportunity to discuss our priority issues with a group of legislators, legislative aides, and interested members of the public. The event is scheduled for the North Hearing Room on the second floor of the State Capitol from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on that Wednesday. Speakers will include representatives from WISDOM’s major campaigns for Immigrant Rights and Environmental Justice/Rights of Nature as well as the Transformational Justice Campaign, which those of us in MOSES usually hear more about.
Please add this important event to your calendars and plan not only to come yourself (registering in advance if possible), but also encourage your legislators to be there. We’re hoping in particular to reach many of the recently elected senators and reps, who may not know much yet about our issues. Also, please publicize this gathering to your congregations and neighbors, and help spread the word to our friends and allies in organizations like Nehemiah, JustDane, the Madison Justice Team, and the League of Women Voters.
If you can come early that day and help to welcome people, distribute materials, take attendance, or whatever, please contact James Morgan or Mark Rice to volunteer.
by MOSES Publications | Oct 16, 2025 | Prisons, Reviews
Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison
By Shaka Senghor: Convergent Books (a Penguin Random House division), 2016
Reviewed by Pam Gates
This is a painful book to read. It makes one feel the struggles and despair of someone locked away in prison. But – read the whole book. Things didn’t look too good for Shaka Senghor, born Jay White, during his teens or for much of the time he was in prison. But Shaka Senghor did at last find himself; his trek from despair and rage to hope, forgiveness, and strong, positive participation in society makes a gripping story.
Shaka Senghor was imprisoned at age 19 for murder. He spent the next 19 years in various Michigan prisons, struggling for years with a ferocious anger. He endured a total of seven years in solitary; participated in prison gangs, often as a leader; and generally conducted himself as a lost soul, disrespected and disrespecting. His surroundings were grim, clearly meant to accomplish nothing more than removal from society, punishment, and deep, deep shaming. There was no rehabilitation, just a continuation of the dog-eat-dog atmosphere of the crack-addled streets, whose anger and danger followed the men behind the prison walls and preoccupied them most of the time they were there.
It started when Jay was 11, with his parents’ divorce. Before that, he’d been raised middle-class, with a mom, a dad, and three sisters, and he remembered a reasonably happy home. He dreamed of becoming a doctor. But by the time he was 14, he’d been seriously rejected by his mother, who beat him for minor infractions and often said she wished he’d never been born. She finally decided he had to go live with his father, and that appears to have been the last interaction between mother and son.
By 14, Jay was earning plenty as a crack dealer, watching respected members of his community crawling on the floor in the crack house he sold at. He spent big on clothes and drink and began carrying a gun for protection after he was shot at by a rival drug dealer.
Jay’s father and stepmother provided a loving home, but the pain of his mother’s rejection was too much; he came close to blowing his brains out with a shotgun at age 15. It was the open love of his father, plus Jay’s own concern for his 2-year-old nephew and the child’s mom, his stepsister, that kept him from completing the act.
The story moves from the streets to jail to the streets, and from prison to prison, though not always in chronological order. Each chapter is titled by a correctional facility or an address somewhere in Detroit, and the month and year that the chapter took place. Gradually, Senghor worries more and more about his son, and that he can’t be with him. He worries that he’s not a brother to his sisters, nor an uncle to his nephew. His situation looks hopeless, and he often acts out in the prison atmosphere of anger, disrespect, and rejection. But his father never gives up on him, visiting when he can, sometimes with other family members, and maintaining connection via letters as well.
Jay eventually finds a group that offers self-help and mutual respect among the prisoners, particularly the members of the group. While allied with this group, he changes his name. He notes his gift for leadership and decides to use it for positive ends. During his last stretch in “the hole” he starts reading spiritual books, really thinking about things, and journaling his thoughts, realizing that the hurt he’s been carrying from his mother’s rejection is the base for so much of his behavior. The act of writing about this and about the insanity he sees around him in “the hole” takes away their power. His letters to his family become more meaningful and life-changing, and he even starts writing novels!
Eventually he meets a woman who facilitates HOPE (Helping Our Prisoners Elevate), a group he’s attending in prison, and they develop a powerful bond. She stays by him when he is transferred upstate (again!), making it almost impossible for her (or anyone else) to visit him. She stays by him when his parole, which felt so certain, is again denied.
Shaka Senghor makes no excuses for himself. He acknowledges the cruelty and wrong of the murder he committed, how it tore apart families, his own included. But his determination and abilities, the love of his son, the loyalty and love of his father, and the dedication of a strong woman pull him through. When he is finally released, he takes on leadership roles, lecturing widely on criminal-legal system reform, an inspiration to thousands, as the book cover proclaims. Certainly this book, though at times painful, is also an inspiration, showing us the power of the human spirit, even under extreme circumstances.
by MOSES Publications | Aug 27, 2025 | Community Issues, Newsletter
South Side Farmer’s Market A Real Treasure
By Pam Gates
The South Side Farmer’s Market has been in business for 24 years, providing south Madison with fresh, affordable food in a safe, family-friendly place on the Labor Temple grounds, 1602 S. Park St., at the corner of Wingra Drive and South Park Street.
Robert Pierce, owner of the Market, has been doing this kind of work “one way or another,” he says, since he was a kid growing up in South Madison. “I’ve been growing and picking and working people’s gardens ever since I can remember,” he says.
Robert’s grandmother had an enormous garden on the south side, right next to what is now the Alliant Energy Center parking lot. “I picked, she canned a lot, and we gave lots away. I think that’s why I do what I do now,” he observes.
He remembers with a laugh the “old ladies” who didn’t want to go into their gardens for fear of snakes; Robert was a godsend for them.
“I’ve always worked with people, trained people,” he says. “I was taught by my grandmother, so I started teaching others.” One way he’s done that is by hiring people who have been in the carceral system and teaching them about growing food and selling it, through a program called FAIR: Farming After Incarceration and Release.
“’Felon’ is the new N-word,” he says. “When I got out [many years ago], I couldn’t find a job anywhere. I must’ve put in a hundred applications. I ended up growing food organically on five acres and going to school.”
The owner of the five acres, a local man named Sam Shapiro, kept urging him to take on the whole parcel of land: 22.5 acres. And his instructor at the school urged him to leave the program, which he said wouldn’t get him where he wanted to be. “Go live your dream,” he said. Robert finally settled for 20 acres, and that’s how his Half of 40 Acres Farm got its name.
Robert has worked with at-risk kids as well as with adults. Through a program funded by Obama’s first stimulus package, he teamed up with Milwaukee-based Growing Power, which works to bring fresh, healthy food to inner city neighborhoods. The kids, who were recommended by school guidance counselors, learned how to make spreadsheets, how to grow food, and how to sell it; they had a stand next to his at the South Side Market.
Robert has also held cooking classes at the Labor Temple, right next to where his market is located, aimed at college students. He was amazed at how many students had no idea how to cook the food he was selling them.
“I need funding to continue these programs,” he said. He appears to be pretty successful at getting grants for his projects, but fund-raising helps as well. He plans to hold a fund-raiser on a Sunday in October; it will feature a meal by an excellent chef served under a tent on the Labor Temple grounds.
A young woman stopped by while I was talking with Robert, just to say hi (and to try a piece of the fine yellow watermelon he was sharing!) She said she’d worked at the market at one time, as had just about every other family member and friend; the South Side Farmer’s Market is truly a family operation. At one time there were 47 vendors, but that number has dwindled to one or two at the moment, depending on the day. But what they lack in number of stands, they make up in energy and friendliness, as well as their beautiful, delicious produce. And the location offers a safe place for kids to run around while their parents or grandparents shop and chat.
“The Labor Temple has truly been a blessing,” Robert said. At one point he had farm stands in front of all the Steve’s Liquor Stores. He was on the Square for 10 years, and he has had stands at a lot of other places in town, such as the Villager on Park, but he felt that most of them weren’t safe, convenient places for his customers.
Re: his work with the FAIR program, he says: “When you give people a chance to straighten up their lives, … things just work out. … I can put the seeds in the ground, but I can’t make them grow.” He is working with JustDane in that program, currently with two people; for five years he worked with five people each year. He provides the work and instruction in how to do it; JustDane provides the mentoring. “I need another grant to get more people,” he says. “People who are labeled felons struggle,” he declares. “I know; I’ve been there. The system is totally against them. It wants them to trip up and be sent back.”
Robert is doing what he can to make sure that doesn’t happen, to at least a few!
The South Side Farmer’s Market is open the last Sunday in April through the last Sunday in October, Tuesdays and Fridays, 2-6 p.m., Sundays, 11 a.m.-3 p.m.
