by Margaret Irwin | Mar 17, 2025 | Information, Life After Prison, Newsletter, Prisons, Profiles
By Margaret Irwin
Growing up in a troubled home, Jessica Jacobs had to deal with a lot of problems; and as she puts it, the problems get passed down from one generation to the next. Jessica appreciates her mother, who did the best she could to take care of the family, mostly as a single mom. Nevertheless, Jessica had her first child at 14. She was fostered by a friend of the family when her mom wasn’t able to take care of her. Jessica started working full time and had to drop out of school very early. By the age of 16 she was emancipated and living in her own apartment.
She was locked up for the first time for a DUI when she was 17. For Jessica, the probation system in Wisconsin seemed to be set up to keep her incarcerated. She was caught up in a cycle, she says; “every dumb decision” landed her back in jail. She didn’t realize it at the time, but she was suffering from PTSD and used alcohol and drugs to self-medicate. Continued substance abuse eventually led her to prison in her 20’s. What she needed was treatment, not incarceration. She overdosed twice in an attempt to end her suffering. The response of the carceral system, when this young woman was near death, was to charge her for having drugs in her system. She readily admitted she had taken the drugs, but no drugs were found in her possession. Her mental health was further impaired due to assaults by prison officers.
In prison Jessica found the programming was of mixed value. Some of it was okay, but other programs she labels “treacherous.” “They want you to become a robot,” she says. In any case, these programs didn’t help her break free from addiction, which she so badly wanted and needed. She found an additional barrier to healing in transitional housing arrangements that were often not healthy and safe.
Jessica’s desperate search for help eventually led her to discover she was suffering from PTSD. She hadn’t understood that she was having a mental health crisis when her life would spiral out of control. She had to learn what PTSD does to you; she had to learn to recognize what was happening and to use techniques to deal with the crisis.
As she healed, Jessica became determined to make changes for people inside prison, as well as when they are released. She began her educational journey with the Odyssey program. From there she graduated from Madison College, and now she is a student at the UW. She plans to declare a double major in social welfare and anthropology. Every step of the way, she has been encouraged by mentors to take the next step.
Another form of learning was Jessica’s introduction to advocacy groups – first FREE, and then MOSES and WISDOM. She attended trainings; she learned about the JSRI and Conditions of Confinement task forces; she met supportive people like Peggy West-Schroder, James Morgan, and Rachel Kincade. Last year Peggy told her to apply for the position of organizer of FREE Madison, and she got the job!
FREE works to support both women in prison and those formerly incarcerated. Jessica helps FREE work toward their goals, which include a prison doula program, Health Care for All, Unchained Wisconsin (legislation to prohibit shackling of pregnant women in prison), Housing Not Handcuffs (dignified housing as a human right), and Circles of Support for women involved in the carceral system. Jessica currently leads a Circle of Support in the Dane County juvenile detention center. She feels called to work with girls who are in trouble because she has been there herself. She finds joy in the way the girls connect with her immediately when she tells her story.
In her journey of transformation from troubled young person to free, strong, and mature contributing citizen, Jessica has “gone with the flow,” letting her higher power guide her. Her career goal is to teach, either in an alternative high school or in prison. She would love to work in Odyssey Beyond Bars. Outside of work, her greatest source of joy is her sons, as she watches them become successful young men.
Last December Jessica was one of the honorees at the MOSES Transformation Celebration. Her message to MOSES is one of thanks for our support, work, and commitment. “You have such empathy and compassion to do this work,” she says, “even though you haven’t directly experienced these things.”
by Sherry Reames | Mar 17, 2025 | Juvenile Justice, Newsletter, Prisons, Racial Equity, Reviews
Wes Moore, The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates. Random House, 2011
Review by Sherry Reames
Wes Moore was not yet governor of Maryland when he wrote this book, but his career was clearly full of promise. In the decade since his college graduation, he had won a Rhodes Scholarship for further study at Oxford, served with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, been chosen as a White House Fellow, and even given one of the speeches at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. As he explains in his introduction, the book originated when he learned about another young Black man named Wes Moore, approximately the same age and from a similar neighborhood, who was awaiting trial for murder. Struck by the coincidences, the author started corresponding with “the other Wes” and got his permission to interview people who knew him well and tell their stories side by side. The book begins with this powerful passage:
“This is the story of two boys living in Baltimore with similar histories and an identical name: Wes Moore. One of us is free and has experienced things that he never even knew to dream about as a kid. The other will spend every day until his death behind bars for an armed robbery that left a police officer and father of five dead. The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his. Our stories are obviously specific to our two lives, but I hope they will illuminate the crucial inflection points where our paths diverge and our fates are sealed. It’s unsettling to know how little separates each of us from another life altogether” (p. xi).
As this introduction suggests, the narrative focuses on “inflection points,” with each chapter juxtaposing the experiences of the author (“I”) with those of “Wes” during the most formative years of their young lives. In many ways they start from the same position: fatherless almost from the start (though for very different reasons), being raised by a hard-working single mother who does her best to keep them in school and safe from bad influences in their neighborhoods. But it was the 1980s, and the streets were full of young drug dealers who flaunted their expensive shoes and fine clothes, presenting a huge temptation to kids who desperately wanted to look cool and fit in. Even before their teens, both Wes Moores start getting into trouble – skipping school much of the time, failing their classes, getting into fights, already being picked up by the police. Both mothers make desperate efforts to get them back on the right path, but that proves to be harder than they imagine.
If my summary of the similarities makes these kids’ life stories sound overly predictable, trust me – they’re not! Both narratives are complex, richly detailed, and absorbing. I found myself rooting for the mothers and other relatives who intervened, trying to save these kids, and grieved when the kids made more and more bad choices. I won’t spoil the suspense by explaining what finally saved the successful Wes Moore, except to say that it took a lot more people than his mother to turn him around and start unleashing his potential. Here’s how he puts it in the Epilogue:
“What changed was that I found myself surrounded by people – starting with my mom, grandparents, uncles, and aunts, and leading to a string of wonderful role models and mentors – who kept pushing me to see more than was directly in front of me, to see the boundless possibilities of the wider world and the unexplored possibilities within myself. People who taught me that no accident of birth – not being black or relatively poor, being from Baltimore or the Bronx or fatherless – would ever define or limit me. In other words, they helped me to discover what it means to be free” (pp. 179-80).
The trajectory of the other Wes continued to spiral tragically downward, spurred partly by the fact that he left school too early and never found better role models and mentors. But of course it’s not that simple. In a final reflection on his book, added a year after its first publication, the author reflects that he hopes these two stories will encourage other youngsters to think seriously about taking control of their own destinies and will also encourage parents and mentors who are trying to raise kids in hostile environments.
The book was a New York Times best-seller when it came out, and it is still relevant to the needs of today. In an effort to make it even more useful, the paperback edition includes an extensive resource guide, identifying organizations across the country that are working to help young people discover their potential, and discussion questions suitable for classrooms or book groups. If your church or neighborhood is looking for a readable, enlightening book on race, poverty, and juvenile crime in the U.S., this would be a perfect choice.
by MOSES Publications | Mar 1, 2025 | Life After Prison, Prisons, Reviews, Yearbook
MOSES Goes to the Library and the Theater
The following books and theater events were reviewed in the five 2024 MOSES newsletters. They provide helpful background on mass incarceration in the U.S. and its effects. The books themselves can generally be found in the Madison Public Library system and often in one of our lending libraries.
Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women. By Susan Burton and Cari Lynn, with a foreword by Michelle Alexander, 2017
Susan Burton, who spoke at Madison’s sold-out EXPO Gala on Oct. 5, 2024, has also been mentoring the establishment of a safe house for formerly incarcerated women in Fitchburg. Burton is a pioneer in this area. After a long, lonely, seesaw struggle with addiction, imprisonment, release, relapse, and re-incarceration, she finally ended up in a safe house in South Los Angeles and was able to begin healing from the many tragedies of her life. In the five safe houses she eventually established in that city, she has provided the same opportunities for healing, reuniting with children, and rejoining the community to over 1,000 previously incarcerated women. Her organization, A New Way of Life, is a “model for a less punitive, more effective approach to rehabilitation and reentry.” (book jacket)
The Kernel of Truth, a play by local community leader Corey Marionneaux, premiered in the Overture Center’s Capital Theater on Father’s Day weekend, 2024. The play highlights incarcerated men trying to carry out their responsibilities to their kids from behind bars. It presents the stories of the men, who are imprisoned in a county jail, and shows how they come to understand the complexities of the criminal legal system and eventually realize their own power to build new lives and transform their communities. In the play, each man steps forward to speak directly to the audience, while relevant statistics about racism and other social issues flash on large screens. The audience learns the human costs of the current system, both for those locked up and for their families and communities.
Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change. By Ben Austen, 2023
This book starts with a history of how we got to where we are now — mass incarceration and mass supervision, with severe racial disparities throughout. 1973 was when the U.S. prison population started going up every year, fueled by “law and order” and “tough on crime” policies and politicians. Austen then follows the stories of two Black men who went to prison in Illinois as teenagers in the early ‘70s, as they try over and over to gain parole: struggles fraught with unpredictability and susceptible to racial bias and other extraneous factors. Lastly, Austen tells of campaigns in Illinois and other states to greatly expand the possibility of second chances. Our society can’t afford to continue “our devastating over-reliance on imprisonment,” he says; we must keep trying to change what we’ve wrought.
The 50 is a documentary about giving incarcerated people a second chance by training them as addiction counselors. EXPO sponsored the film showing and a panel afterward at the Urban League’s Black Business Hub in March 2024. The story: In 2006, the federal government ordered California to reduce its prison population by 50,000 to relieve overcrowding. Over 85% of those in prison were involved in drug use. For the first time, the state legislature had budgeted money for rehabilitation, and some determined people introduced an offender/mentor certification program for 50 Solano state prison residents. Success spread the program to other prisons in the state, a success that was due to the counselors’ having to deal with their own traumatized selves first. View the film at the50film.com.
Taking Action for Social Justice Through the FAST Program: A Memoir by a Social Worker. By Dr. Lynn McDonald, 2023
Dr. Lynn McDonald is a Madison resident and social worker who in 1998 established FAST (Families and Schools Together), a program whose purpose is to establish and strengthen bonds between schools and families, between parents and their children, and among parents in the program. McDonald took FAST to 23 countries. She allowed for and encouraged cultural modifications but insisted that the basic outline be followed. It was especially critical that everyone in the participating families felt respected, and that they had a voice. It is amazing what this eight-week program could and did accomplish in very different parts of the world; it significantly improved the school success of the children involved. Madison schools used to participate, but funding has run out; $1 million is needed to reinstate it.
The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done: One Juror’s Reckoning with Racial Injustice. By Carol Menaker, 2023
In 1976, Carol Menaker, a young white middle-class woman living in Philadelphia, was summoned for jury duty in a high-profile in-prison murder case. The jury was sequestered; she was separated from her husband and her life for the 21 days it took from jury selection to jury decision on the fate of a young Black man already in prison for murder. The jury was told that if he’d been present at the murders, he was guilty. Menaker accepted this information, voted with the rest of the jury to convict, and went back to her own life. But as years went by, she began researching the man she’d convicted and now does what she can to reverse both convictions, as all evidence points to them both being tragically wrong, fueled by racism and politics. She tries to be fair to all involved, but the convicted man is still in prison.
by MOSES Publications | Mar 1, 2025 | Events, Life After Prison, Prisons, Yearbook
Additional Learning Opportunities for MOSES and the Community in 2024
(1) “End the Lockdowns,” a community forum at First Unitarian Society on Feb. 1, presented dramatic testimony about the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Wisconsin’s overcrowded prisons. James Wilbur, outgoing director of prison inreach for WISDOM, described the squalid conditions inside Waupun and Green Bay in particular, and tragic personal stories were added by family members whose incarcerated loved ones had died or been severely injured as a result of abuse or neglect by prison staff.
Confronting the obvious need to alleviate this crisis, Mark Rice, director of WISDOM’s Transformational Justice Campaign, outlined some practical steps that Gov. Evers and the DOC could take to reduce the prison population; and two local state legislators, Sen. Kelda Roys and Rep. Shelia Stubbs, both D-Madison, suggested some smaller steps toward reform that might win enough bipartisan support to become law in the near future. The take-away message from the forum was to keep lobbying and educating more voters about the needed changes.
(2) Panel of Experts on Parole Issues: Also on Feb. 1, the UW Law School gathered a distinguished panel to discuss the pluses and minuses of the parole system in Wisconsin and elsewhere in the U.S. The panel included Ben Austen, author of Correction: Prison, Parole, and the Possibility of Reform; ACLU Staff Attorney Emma Shakeshaft; John Tate II, who chaired the Wisconsin Parole Commission from 2019 to 2022; and Danté Cottingham, a former juvenile lifer who received parole during Tate’s tenure. Among the issues they addressed were the intended purposes of parole, the susceptibility of parole boards to bias and politics, what actually works to encourage rehabilitation and successful re-entry, and how the system can be reformed to enable more successes. For more on parole, see the fuller account of this event in the MOSES Newsletter for February/March 2024 and our review of Austen’s important book.
(3) Lunch and Learn Fundraiser About Madison’s New SAFE House: On May 15, MOSES members and supporters gathered to hear a presentation by Delilah McKinney, about the special vulnerability of women during their re-entry from incarceration and the promise represented by Susan Burton’s SAFE Housing Network. McKinney shared her own inspiring journey: from dealing with post-prison trauma to becoming a peer specialist to help other women during re-entry, to learning from Burton how to meet newly released women’s need for secure housing until they get back on their feet, and to actually establishing the first such SAFE House in Wisconsin. Attendees at this event were encouraged to contribute financially to both the SAFE House and MOSES. The MOSES Newsletter also reviewed Burton’s book this year.
by MOSES Publications | Mar 1, 2025 | Advocacy, Prisons, WISDOM, Yearbook
Wisconsin Hears About Solitary Confinement
On April 23, 2024, in the state Capitol building, a panel of 10 spoke to a packed hearing room about the practice of solitary confinement in Wisconsin’s prisons and jails. The 70-plus listeners included five legislators and about twice that many aides; the panel included seven who had spent time in solitary, two ministers, and a woman who had recently lost her dad to suicide in solitary.
The first speaker was MOSES’s own Talib Akbar, who designed, and with the help of Edgewood College students built, a solitary confinement cell replica that is (as of December) on display at The Crossing on the UW campus. Akbar said that solitary changes people, alters them in some way. He began his volunteer effort to apprise the public about the realities of solitary in 2014 and has taken the cell, which people can actually sit in and experience, to various places in Madison, to different cities in Wisconsin, and to a few other states. He has also written a play, “Like an Animal in a Cage,” which has been performed by people who have spent time in solitary. He noted that the Wisconsin DOC has reduced maximum time in solitary from 360 days/year to 90, but said the practice needed to be ended entirely.
“Incarceration is one of the social deterrents to public health,” said Melissa Ludin from the ACLU. “A person who’s gone to prison is 12 times more likely to die than one who hasn’t been to prison. Incarceration causes PTSD, and solitary makes it even worse. Solitary is a jail within a prison.”
Ludin spent 100 days in solitary during an imprisonment in her youth; she was taken out only twice, for medical appointments. She still feels the long-term effects of that experience, though she’s been out since 2007.
Prince Rashad grew up in the early ‘80s and ended up in Green Bay Correctional Institution at age 18. In solitary, he became suicidal; “the experience made me more dangerous,” he said. He was sent to solitary six times; each time it was devastating.
“It brings no resolution or rehabilitation,” he said. “We need to align our criminal justice system with international human rights standards. Solitary confinement exacerbates existing psychological conditions — or starts new ones.”
Randy Forsterling said he was in Supermax for seven years and spent 360 days in solitary, so much time that it got to be routine, he said. He had friends who were “in the hole” for 20 to 30 years. When his mom died, he couldn’t even cry, he felt so stripped of his humanity. “People in solitary aren’t even seen as human beings,” he said.
Politics is the root cause of the prison system’s problems, Forsterling said. For example, the 1994 crime bill almost tripled Wisconsin’s prison population. He said that “we the people” need to get decent people elected and restore rehabilitative programs, which have slowly been disappearing, back into the system. The DOC doesn’t let people participate in the programs they must complete until near the end of their sentence, he said, which means they can’t complete them soon enough to be considered for release anywhere close to on time.
Megan Kolb tearfully related her father’s last days before he hanged himself after nine days in solitary confinement. He spent those days begging for his psychiatric meds, which he had not gotten in 71 days. He was given no paper, no pen, no books. “We need rehabilitation, not torture,” she declared.
“Bobby” was paroled three years ago by John Tate II (the crowd applauded this name), 27 years into a 60-year sentence. He spent over seven years in solitary. He went in with PTSD due to the loss of his parents, and while in prison received notice via phone that his brother had died. He got no support beyond the empathetic silence of fellow prisoners when his phone call was announced. “Solitary is torture,” he said. “I survived by will alone.” Bobby is now a state-certified peer-support specialist.
Jessica Jacobs is now the director of FREE, which advocates for incarcerated and previously incarcerated women. Two of FREE’s current campaigns are 1) to get doulas in prisons to assist pregnant women and 2) to end the shackling of pregnant women.
Jessica described additional dehumanizing aspects of prison that she experienced: being known only by a number, or maybe one’s last name; being physically abused and completely at the mercy of the guards; being put in solitary for no reason, perhaps even during the booking process. She said the reasons people are imprisoned — PTSD, trauma, sexual assault, substance abuse — are all signals of poverty, and that’s what we need to deal with. We need to expand programming within and outside the prisons, and to offer trauma therapy, not solitary confinement!
Ron Stief talked about the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT), which started 20 years ago out of concern about U.S.-run prisons in Iraq and of Iraqis, e.g. Guantanamo. Five years in, the campaign began to also address the torture in stateside prisons. There have been some successes, e.g. in Maine, where the head of the Maine Department of Corrections (DOC) rewrote its policies. Rick Raemisch, who moved from heading the Wisconsin DOC to directing its parallel in Colorado, spent a few hours in a solitary-cell replica and ended up eliminating solitary confinement in Colorado prisons.
NRCAT has legislative campaigns in 23 states. Michigan has made some progress. Illinois has passed the Nelson Mandela Act: no more than 10 days in solitary, and no more than 20 hours/day. California has passed the Mandela Act, but the governor has threatened to veto it. That happened in New York, too, so the legislature assembled a veto-proof majority. From written legislation to passage took eight years! In New Jersey, there was a confluence of state legislators, faith communities, and activists. Legislators sat in a solitary cell replica, wrote a bill, and had it signed into law in 2022.
There are lots of people in solitary in city jails, too, Stief said, adding that 60-90% of those in solitary would do fine in the general prison/jail population. We have a fear-based system, he said.
The role of the faith community? Working to end torture is a moral absolute, he said. The fight will be long, but it’s worth it. We need the voices of all of us working together.
Legislators respond
“I never thought I’d be legislating [the right of] ‘seeing the sky,’” Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-Milwaukee) said. “The standard is so incredibly low in Wisconsin.”
What gives him hope, said Rep. Darrin Madison (D-Milwaukee), is that advocacy is breaking through, and other states are passing legislation. “When I see advocacy by people who’ve been transitioning back [from prison], with so much pain and such lack of resources, in a world that tells them they’re worth nothing – it gives me the will to sit in this space, which can be one of the most toxic in the state. I know that it can happen here [too], in a state that has a perverse relationship with incarceration.”
“A lot of folks just don’t know,” he added. “They buy into building more prisons, giving more money to the police … The real solution is safety nets … ‘Know that we have your backs,’” he added, addressing those who are system-impacted.
Rev. Willy Brisco of MICAH gave the closing blessing, starting with a little story about God looking down on our institutions of slavery, prisons, and war and saying, “’That’s not what I meant!’”
“Tell someone what you heard today, and don’t be silent again,” Rev. Brisco admonished everyone. The crowd responded with a firm “Amen!”
WISDOM members delivered informational packets to all legislators’ offices after the event.
What is the “23” Campaign?
Since May 23, 2024, MOSES members have been gathering on the Capitol’s State Street steps once a month at noon on the 23rd to draw attention to the fact that hundreds of people are being subjected to solitary confinement in Wisconsin’s prisons and jails, and to demand that the state put an end to this practice. The 23rd was chosen to draw attention to the fact that people in solitary spend 23+ hours/day alone in their tiny cells. They may spend the other hour someplace else, but still alone.
The United Nations has declared that solitary confinement for more than 15 days is torture. By that measure, we are torturing hundreds of people in Wisconsin’s prisons and jails. Said WISDOM’s David Liners: “Wisconsin needs to join the states that have adopted the ‘Mandela rule’ that limits the practice to 15 days, and that for only in extraordinary circumstances.”
by MOSES Publications | Oct 30, 2024 | Information, Newsletter, Prisons, Resources
The Sentencing Project Provides Data and Other Resources for Reform Advocates,
by Sherry Reames
I have become a big fan of the Sentencing Project, a national nonprofit that describes its mission as “advocat[ing] for effective and humane responses to crime that minimize imprisonment and criminalization of youth and adults by promoting racial, ethnic, economic, and gender justice.” Although it is best known for recommending an end to extremely long sentences, the Sentencing Project (hereafter SP) also advocates for a universal “second look” review process after the first decade of incarceration, for the restoration of voting rights to citizens with felony convictions, and for laws and programs to keep youth out of the adult criminal-legal system.
As their website explains, the SP works toward these goals in partnership with dozens of national and state-level organizations. What the SP provides to all of them, and to us in MOSES and WISDOM, is a wealth of free resources that can easily be downloaded from that website: detailed research reports on various aspects of the U.S. criminal-legal system, data and fact sheets, press releases on recent developments, informational videos, and current calls to action. Among the latter, to my surprise, is a campaign to “End the Ban of Food Stamps for People with Drug Convictions” (an issue I thought had been resolved long ago), as well as one to “Support the Safer Detention Act,” seeking compassionate relief for elderly and sick people in federal prisons.
Besides exploring the wonderful SP website – www.sentencingproject.org – MOSES members might want to sign up to receive their emails, which include links to new reports and press releases as they are published. It is not necessary to donate, but after doing so I also started receiving invitations to some inspiring webinars about the work being done by some of SP’s partner organizations in other states.
