by MOSES Publications | Oct 30, 2024 | Information, Life After Prison, Newsletter
By Ken Warren
At our MOSES monthly meeting in October, we had the pleasure of meeting Kory Finfrock and his spouse, Tonia. Kory was born in Stoughton in 1979 and was a student in Edgerton from the early grades until he dropped out of high school. He later earned his HSED. Kory’s father died several years ago, but his mother is well and living in the area. Kory also has a 26-year-old son, but that relationship is strained because, Kory recognizes, he has let his family down.
Kory’s negative interaction with the legal system began during his teen years. By the year 2000, he had been sentenced to the Wisconsin correctional system. Upon release in 2005, he fell into a problem with drug use, which led to other criminal acts. By 2006, he again was confined, which lasted until 2019.
While in the Wisconsin correctional system, Kory took advantage of opportunities to prepare for his return home. He was able to work in a machine shop and earned a technical college degree in machine tool operations. He participated in many support groups while confined. Along the way, he also earned a culinary certification from a technical college and completed a 6,240-hour apprenticeship. Before his release in 2015, Kory was transferred to the minimum-security facility at Oregon and was able to participate in a work-release program, where he secured a job with a finishing company. After release, he was promoted to the shop supervisor position.
Upon release, Kory was motivated to become a productive member of the community. He got married and became a homeowner. Unfortunately, in early 2024, another poor choice resulted in a return to confinement for seven months.
Kory still owns the home in Stoughton, where his wife lives, but due to a restriction put in place by his parole agent, he is not allowed to be in Stoughton. The restrictions stem from a traffic citation that took place back in 2022. At the current time, he is paying for motel rooms on a weekly basis and looking for more affordable housing, as well as employment. He feels positive about his employment search, as he has had multiple positive interviews. He has had less success with his housing, as he has been rejected several times due to his record.
Another personal challenge for Kory is to win back the trust of his family. He understands their hesitancy and disappointment and recognizes that it will be a slow process. His son is 26 years old, and Kory has been absent for much of his life.
When asked about current support structures, Kory immediately mentions his wife, saying that she has been a gift to him. In addition to her emotional support, she also works in the area of psychiatric mental health and drug-related care as a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner and is able to offer guidance and direction. For example, she is assisting him in obtaining an attorney and appealing the restriction which prevents him from living in his own home, as well as providing community resources and an abundance of housing leads. Kory also has a counselor he sees regularly and participates in an AODA (alcohol and other drugs) after-care group.
Kory said that he felt welcome and comfortable when he attended our MOSES meeting. He believes that prison reform is very important, but he was happy to hear of our efforts regarding the challenges of negotiating reentry into society. He liked what he heard about our efforts and goals. He looks forward to becoming a responsible and contributing member of the community. We hope that will include his continued involvement with MOSES.
by MOSES Publications | Oct 30, 2024 | Newsletter, Support MOSES
Why I Am a Sustaining Member
By Barbie Jackson
I am so grateful that I was able to find my way to MOSES in 2017. So grateful that I learned how to roll up my sleeves and help this marvelous organization advocate for social justice.
I have learned from MOSES that successful advocacy requires us to build power, which in turn requires organized people and organized money. We organize people through our relationships with one another and with those we hope to influence. We organize money by donating financially, and the most effective way to do that is by being a sustaining member – that is, setting up a monthly donation, deducted from our checking account.
So why is MOSES so important to me? I tell this story every time I have a one-on-one conversation to build relationships within MOSES.
I was blessed to be able to raise a traumatized niece and nephew who were found to be in need of protective services. It was challenging at first, but we built a family of care and healing through the years. After both children had graduated from high school, I found my way to the Allied Drive neighborhood and began a 25-year journey mentoring teens. Most of these children were Black. Many came from traumatic family circumstances. Some struggled a great deal, some found success in life, and some had trouble with the law from time to time.
In the summer of 2016, while I was out of the country, I heard one more time about a policeman shooting a young, unarmed Black man in the back. I had heard these terrible stories many times before, but this time I was deeply impacted. I couldn’t reach and hug the children I knew, and I realized this could have happened to someone I had grown to love. At that moment, I determined that I would make a change to the systems that allowed such violence to occur.
That fall at a community meeting I met James Morgan, who is now MOSES’s community organizer, and Jeannie Verschay, who co-chairs MOSES’s longest-standing task force. We were talking about criminal-legal system reform, and they encouraged me to join their work, which I did.
I have learned from MOSES how to understand the problems with the carceral system in this country, the extreme racial disparities in Wisconsin’s prisons and the Dane County Jail, and the systemic traumatization of children in need of protective services, who enter the public school system with traumas that affect their sense of belonging, and thus their learning capacity and sometimes their behavior.
We seek to disrupt all of these systems. Together we learn and grow in relationship to build power and make the change we envision. And together we can contribute the money needed to support this work. That is why I am a sustaining member. Please join me.
by MOSES Publications | Oct 30, 2024 | Advocacy, Information, RJAC Racial Justice for All Children, Schools
Update on the Right to Read Bill (ACT 20)
By Shel Gross and Tracy Frank
The Racial Justice for All Children committee (RJAC), and specifically the Education Advocacy Group (EAG), has been learning that advocacy work requires time, long-term commitment, nuanced inspection, and connections. Over the past few years, a lot has happened in the state and in our local community in the area of reading. In Wisconsin, fewer than 40% of students are proficient in reading by the end of third grade, and Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) has been hovering around that 40% as well.
In the summer of 2023, EAG worked to support the adoption of legislation that is now called ACT 20. This article traces a bit of the progress, and also the lack of progress, related to ACT 20, which is otherwise known as the Right to Read bill. RJAC lead Shel Gross, a longtime registered lobbyist in Wisconsin, knew that while the signing of that bill on July 19, 2023, was significant, it was not the end of our advocacy work. The good news was that the MMSD was ahead of the law and had adopted a science of reading-based curriculum that met the requirements of ACT 20 a couple of years earlier. Other area districts, including Sun Prairie Area School District (SPASD), had not made the required changes, so work there had to be done quickly.
EAG was eager to do advocacy work to help implement the bill. This included advising on the hiring of a new UW-Madison School of Education dean, who will support the training required for new educators. It also involved connecting with Barb Novak, the new Department of Public Instruction (DPI) literacy director.
EAG has been in communication with both MMSD and SPASD to help ensure that they are following Act 20’s requirements for keeping parents informed and for developing personal reading plans for students who are not yet proficient in reading.
We kept a close eye on the work of the Early Literacy Curriculum Council (ELCC), which was charged with identifying literacy curriculum that would be eligible for state financial support, and we recognized their final approval of four comprehensive, knowledge-based curricula. However, while reviewing one of those curricula, Amplify CKLA, which was chosen by SPASD, EAG lead Tracy Frank and others living in the Sun Prairie community, as well as statewide Indigenous organizations, found serious concerns: that the knowledge-based components of the curriculum center history from a white male European perspective. When we asked the ELCC why this curriculum was approved, given these concerns, the ELCC reported that its criteria for approval did not include reviewing the content of the required knowledge components.
In response to the Sun Prairie community’s concerns, the district created a committee to review and modify the newly purchased curriculum. This work was deeper and more costly than expected, and many outside consultants were involved. In the past few years, SPASD has been in the news for concerns about curriculum violence (i.e., when the curriculum used causes harm) and discipline decisions that are harmful to Black and brown students. As a result, EAG has met with district leaders and voiced concerns in multiple position statements to the district.
Now, EAG, with support from MOSES, has gone back to DPI and the ELCC with concerns that the CKLA curriculum does not meet another law, ACT 31. This law relates to American Indian education and also states that school districts must provide adequate instructional materials which reflect the cultural diversity and pluralistic nature of American society. While we are not yet assured that the review of curricula will have increased standards, there may be a trailer bill in the next budget cycle that EAG can engage in. The concern about the knowledge-based components of the curriculum was not on our radar as this process began, but it is well within the scope of MOSES’s work, because it impacts students’ sense of belonging: Do they see themselves in the content of their studies?
In addition, since the approval of ACT 20, the $50 million promised for reading coaches and reimbursement to districts purchasing curricula from the ELCC list has been held up in lawsuits and politics. The Joint Finance Committee has not released the money to date, which is also a big area of concern.
At this time, EAG is eager to connect with parents in the community to help ensure that they are aware of the new expectations for personalized reading plans if their child is struggling. We are continuing our connection with the above school districts and all the statewide entities involved, as well as increasing our connections with other advocacy groups, so that we are prepared for future advocacy opportunities.
We are optimistic for improved reading proficiency in our state, while we also know that there is much work to be done. We are currently looking for more people to join MOSES’s Education Advocacy Group, so that we can continue engaging in immediate advocacy as well as be ready to have a larger impact as opportunities arise.
We encourage all within MOSES to know that while advocacy work is slow and the nuances can be very frustrating and confusing, there is good reason to stay strong, work together, and continue to press ahead with what will have the biggest impact. RJAC’s goal is to eradicate the school-to-prison pipeline, and we know that reading scores have a large impact on a student’s willingness to engage positively in the school environment. Keeping kids in the classroom and learning will help to keep them out of our prison system, and with that mission in mind, we march on together to a brighter future.
by MOSES Publications | Oct 15, 2024 | Events, Life After Prison, Newsletter
Some Highlights from the EXPO Gala, Held October 5
By Sherry Reames
I bought tickets for this year’s EXPO (EX-incarcerated People Organizing) celebration and fundraiser primarily because I wanted to hear the guest speaker, Susan Burton. Ms. Burton’s organization, A New Way of Life, is providing a transformative model of housing for formerly incarcerated women, as many of us learned from Delilah McKinney when she spoke at the MOSES Lunch and Learn in May.
Each Gala attendee received a copy of the book Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women. But Ms. Burton was too modest to give a very long speech. She shared a little of her own life story: falling into despair and addiction after the death of her 5-year-old son, and being sent back to prison six times because she relapsed whenever she returned to her troubled old neighborhood in South Los Angeles. What finally saved her was being welcomed into a safe and quiet home in Santa Monica, where she could genuinely start to heal from all the traumas.
As a result of that experience, she decided to buy a little house and turn it into a sanctuary for a few recently released women. Today her organization has a dozen such houses in South Los Angeles, each of them providing its residents with other needed services, including assistance in reuniting with their children, and there are dozens more in other parts of the country.
Ms. Burton’s program started taking root in Wisconsin, she said, when EXPO and FREE members Marianne Oleson, Tamra Oman, and Delilah McKinney came to one of her training sessions. They established the first house here in Madison with her advice and assistance, and she continues to work with them on both planning and fundraising. As she explained, “We do the work behind the hope – and hope is not free.” If the rest of us want to help provide safer, healthier housing for vulnerable women, an ideal way is to make a recurring financial donation.
Besides its headline speaker, the EXPO Gala featured selected artworks and a catalog from “Art Against the Odds,” a major exhibition of works by incarcerated artists that has been shown in Milwaukee and elsewhere in Wisconsin, but unfortunately not yet in Madison because of last-minute snags at our Museum of Contemporary Art. This wonderful collection is reportedly still in need of a permanent home.
The program at the Gala also included awards and brief speeches by some heroic members of the community who are doing vital work on behalf of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. This year’s honorees: (1) Cheri Branham, a social worker and prison doula who gave birth to her own child while in prison 10 years ago; (2) David Murrell, a former juvenile lifer who now works with incarcerated people in his position with WISDOM; (3) Peter Moreno, director of Odyssey Behind Bars, which is now partnering with the UW-Green Bay to offer Wisconsin’s first associate degree programs in the prisons; (4) Erica Nelson, director of Lift Wisconsin, which helps returnees get their drivers’ licenses back; and (5) Ruben Gaona, director of “My Way Out,” which tries to provide returnees with whatever they need, from bicycles to moral and psychological support.
Another highlight of this sold-out event was the company! People were connecting and reconnecting throughout the enormous Monona Terrace dining room. I happened to be seated next to Jeffrey Stovall, the principal of Wright Middle School, and enjoyed hearing news about that school (where I used to volunteer as a tutor) and the work of Jeffrey’s wife, who owns a home in Milwaukee for women re-entering the community after incarceration. Pam Gates reported that she had the honor of sitting next to Eugene Nelson, who has worked with Project Return in Milwaukee for six years, helping people get back on their feet after incarceration. After his own 21-year incarceration for a crime he didn’t commit, Eugene is very proud of his work, his clients, and most of all of his tiny daughter, who had just celebrated her first birthday!
by MOSES Publications | Aug 30, 2024 | Newsletter, Prisons, Reviews
Ben Austen, Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change, New York: Flatiron Books, 2023
review by Sherry Reames
I bought this book because of its focus on long-term prisoners seeking parole, but it sheds so much light on the larger stories surrounding today’s prison crisis that I think every member and friend of MOSES should read it. If we are serious about dismantling the systems of mass incarceration and the racial disparities that contribute to them, we need to understand how those systems, which didn’t exist fifty years ago, were created and what keeps them going despite the enormous toll they take on our society.
The Prison Boom. Austen dates the beginning of mass incarceration to 1973. That’s when the US prison population started to go up every year, increasing eightfold (from about 200,000 to a peak of more than 1.6 million). The seeds of this massive change were planted back in the 1960s, Austen reminds us. The Kerner Commission recommended attacking the “root causes of crime” with big investments in inner-city schools, job opportunities, and subsidies for childcare, food, and housing. But President Johnson and Congress backed off, redirecting more funds to policing instead.
The conservative administrations that followed went further, offering “the racial dog whistle of law and order” in place of civil rights (p. 53). “Tough-on-crime” politicians argued that leniency was dangerous; those sent to prison were “career criminals,” “predisposed to crime,” and releasing them just endangered the rest of us. Mandatory minimums were introduced in response to such arguments, including life without parole for habitual offenders (54-55). Despite some attempts to restore fairness and proportionality to sentencing, legislators kept voting for harsher punishments to show “their commitment to public safety” (79-80). Prosecutors were given new ways to stack multiple charges on a single crime. Children were increasingly charged as adults. The 1994 Crime Bill pushed states to adopt even more severe policies, giving longer sentences and allowing fewer paths to release.
That larger context is crucial for understanding what happened to Michael Henderson and Johnnie Veal, whose stories form the heart of Austen’s book. When these two Black teenagers went to prison in Illinois in the early 1970s, it was almost unimaginable that they would still be behind bars almost fifty years later. Michael, who committed a reckless but accidental homicide, turned down a plea deal for 7-20 years, a reasonable sentence for that crime. Johnnie was convicted of participating in an ambush that killed two Chicago police officers, but he too became eligible to start applying for parole as early as 1980. During the ensuing decades both he and Michael grew into responsible adults who could provide convincing evidence of being fully rehabilitated. But their transformation didn’t seem to matter. The norms had changed so much that the odds were stacked against anyone convicted of a violent offense who asked for a second chance.
Parole Issues. Five suspenseful and revealing chapters of Austen’s book are devoted to the multiple efforts made by Michael and Johnnie and their supporters to finally get them a positive decision from the Illinois Parole Board. Some of the procedural details are specific to Illinois, where the board has eleven members, any one of whom may interview each parole applicant and present that applicant’s case for a vote by the board as a whole. But others factors undoubtedly apply to parole decisions in Wisconsin and elsewhere. Individual commissioners’ education and life experiences matter, of course, and so do the news cycle and the political winds that happen to be blowing on the day when the board makes its decision. New to me and worth learning more about, I think, is the difference it makes for prisoners like Michael and Johnnie to have the assistance of lawyers or trained volunteers as they prepare their cases for parole.
When Michael is eventually released in 2018, after serving 46 years, Austen’s narrative follows him through the initial months of re-entry. The details in this narrative (chapters 9 and 11) should open the eyes of anyone who doesn’t know how much is required from individuals released to community supervision and how hard it is to avoid being revoked and sent back to prison. When Michael is arrested for a mistake with his electronic ankle bracelet, Austen observes that such setbacks are inevitable: “With more than a dozen requirements to complete each day, people on mandatory supervised release were bound to miss a couple now and then. Parole supervision was set up as if the goal were to prove someone’s criminality by catching them in any of thousands of infractions. The system was not broken. It operated as if failure were by design” (203).
Another valuable and eye-opening part of Austen’s book is his account of the victims’ rights movement (ch. 8) and how it has been used over the past several decades to counter liberal criminal-justice reforms. In effect, Austen argues, advocates for victims have successfully argued that criminal justice is a zero-sum game, with the protection of victims enhanced by reducing the rights of defendants. Victim families have become powerful witnesses at parole hearings, potentially making the outcome even more arbitrary because it might depend on their ability to be there every time and because they rarely know anything about how the offender has changed and reformed over the years.
The Possibility of Change. Given the unpredictability of parole decisions and their susceptibility to racial bias and other extraneous factors, prisoners themselves joined the campaign in the late twentieth century to replace discretionary parole with systems like Wisconsin’s Truth in Sentencing, which use set formulas to determine release dates. But those systems, which replaced parole in state after state, have not reversed the trend toward harsh sentencing, and they also lack the most positive features of parole: the incentives for prisoners to use their time well and the opportunity for authorities to reward positive change and correct unnecessarily long sentences.
Are there better alternatives? The most encouraging parts of Austen’s book introduce readers to some campaigns in Illinois and other states to greatly expand the possibility of second chances, at least for particular groups of prisoners– most often those whose offenses were committed during their teens or early twenties. Among the national organizations supporting such campaigns are the Sentencing Project, which urges a 20-year maximum (the norm in most countries) for nearly all cases; the Vera Institute of Justice, which argues that 15 years is enough for anyone who was under 25 at the time of the crime; and the American Bar Association, which supports universal “second look” resentencing after 10 years (237).
Persuading state governments to try implementing such reforms will not be easy. Indeed, as Austen reflects at the end of this book, the small steps toward decarceration that he witnessed in 2020-21, when Johnnie Veal was finally released, were followed before the 2022 election by a “punitive backlash [in which] all forms of early release from prison or jail were cast as existential threats” (292). Advocates of reform were quickly replaced by hard-liners, and prison populations went up again. But this valuable book persuaded me, and I think it will persuade other readers, that we have to keep trying. Our society can’t afford to continue “our devastating overreliance on imprisonment” (293), and we can’t undo the devastation unless we offer many more prisoners a second chance.
