Chris Bacarella
This past fall Carl Lewis took his first college course. “It provokes you to look at things in a different way and gives you the confidence to express yourself.”
Carl Lewis sat confused in a Kenosha County courtroom as a legal team and judge negotiated his future. Then 16, Lewis couldn’t read or understand legalese, and felt unable to advocate for himself. Used to calling the shots on the street, in that courtroom he was powerless.
“I’m scared,” Lewis recalls of that day in 2007. “I come from a place where I’m this tough kid, you know, so now the table has turned on me. I don’t know what to do, I didn’t know what was going on. I felt like an unrecognized body in a seat while my life is the subject in the room.”
Lewis received a 13-year sentence that day for being a party to an armed robbery. But it was to be a turning point. With the encouragement of older inmates who urged him to “get it together,” Lewis taught himself to read and earned a GED. “I was determined to understand what was going on around me at all times,” he says.
Now 29, Lewis has served 12 years and has roughly a year left before he’s released from Oakhill Correctional Institution, a minimum security prison in Oregon, Wisconsin. The facility has provided him opportunity for intellectual growth through vocational classes and the Oakhill Humanities Project, a series of noncredit-bearing poetry, writing and philosophy classes.
And this past fall Lewis took his first steps toward obtaining a college degree. He and 14 other men were selected to participate in Odyssey Beyond Bars, the first face-to-face accredited course offered by UW-Madison inside any state corrections facility since 1917. The course is a branch of the community-based UW Odyssey Project, a free six-credit humanities course offered through the UW Department of Continuing Studies that jump-starts an educational path for economically disadvantaged adults.
One night a week the men met to read essays and to write their own. By completing the course they now have three UW credits in English, which can satisfy the communications requirement at four-year UW System schools. But for Lewis, and many of the other Oakhill students, the class was as much about community building and personal development as it was about earning college credits. Maybe more.
“It provokes something in you that makes you want to dig into who you are and question who you are,” says Lewis. “It has given me an opportunity to examine my experiences; it provokes you to look at things in a different way and gives you the confidence to express yourself.”
Transformational teaching
Kevin Mullen, co-director of the Odyssey Project, taught the pilot Odyssey Beyond Bars class. He began by customizing a textbook for his Oakhill students designed to empower them personally, with readings from a wide range of writers, including Martin Luther King Jr., Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison and James Baldwin.
Mullen, who’s been a writing instructor for 18 years, says this class has been as profound for him as for his students.
Chris Bacarella
Instructor Kevin Mullen: “I’ve taught in other countries and situations and this class will always stand out. What I’ve been most impressed by is [the students’] spirit. They want to have these conversations, they want to put everything into their essays.”
“I have been teaching for a long time. I’ve taught in other countries and situations, and this class will always stand out. What I’ve been most impressed by is their spirit,” Mullen says of his students. “They want to have these conversations, they want to put everything into their essays, they want to do first and second drafts, and over two-thirds are coming in every week to work with the tutors,” he adds, referencing the volunteers who come to Oakhill weekly to help the men with their writing. “That desire has been so strong, it’s shaped my experience. I’ve been just as transformed as they have, if not even more so.”
Mullen starts each class with a short, in-class writing assignment that students then read aloud. After, he leads a discussion about the week’s texts, giving students a chance to fully engage with the core ideas and rhetorical techniques of each piece. At the end of class, students often split into small groups where they work with each other on revising their own essays.
Over the course of the semester, the students move from writing personal essays, where they reflect on their own experiences, to argumentative writing with a focus on social issues, to narrative essays that have a performative element, including a commencement speech and live storytelling assignment.
The program was conceptualized by Peter Moreno, a former clinical law professor who worked for the Wisconsin Innocence Project and went on to become the director of the Innocence Project Northwest in Seattle. While in Washington, Moreno witnessed the transformational power of higher education in prisons through a nonprofit called University Beyond Bars. When he and his wife returned to Madison last year, he wanted to see if something similar was possible in Wisconsin.
“When I would visit legal clients in prison, I would often leave the building with a sense of loneliness and desperation,” says Moreno. “But after attending a University Beyond Bars class, and hearing students talk about what they were learning and how it impacted their vision for the future, I left with a sense of hope, and I thought to myself, my goodness, this is wonderful.”
Moreno approached Walter Dickey, a UW Law School colleague who directed the Wisconsin Department of Corrections from 1983-87, to gauge the university’s interest in providing free accredited education to inmates. Along the way he learned that the university had been active in teaching non-credit courses for nearly a decade through the Oakhill Prison Humanities Project and the UW Odyssey Project.
Odyssey’s prison-based, non-credit course, Odyssey Behind Bars, teaches Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” “The Apology” and “Crito” in an eight- to 10-week curriculum that alternates between Fox Lake Correctional Institution and the Wisconsin Resource Center in Oshkosh. The “college prep” course is taught by former Wisconsin Public Radio host Jean Feraca, and Rev. Jerry Hancock of the Prison Ministry Project.
But Moreno found a near total absence of credit-bearing courses in prison throughout the UW System since former President Bill Clinton signed legislation in 1994 that ended federal Pell Grant funding for incarcerated students. He dug up a 1922 article documenting a credit-bearing class offered by UW-Madison in 1917 as the only evidence that a class of this type was ever taught by UW-Madison faculty. He was determined to forge ahead, based on what he had witnessed in Washington.
“During my time in Seattle I visited classes in prison and saw students performing at a high level. At the same time I had a law student, a remarkable student, who had spent 10 years in prison for a bank robbery. He was a great writer, thoughtful, and had a lens of experience that improved the work of everyone around him, including me. He was an inspiration.”
Moreno’s student went on to get a coveted clerkship with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and is now a tenured faculty member at Georgetown Law. Between Moreno’s experience with this student and the hundreds of legal interviews he conducted with men and women in prison, he came to one conclusion: “The intellectual capacity of people in prison matches the intellectual capacity of people on the outside. So that begs the question, why are we not affording them the same educational opportunities?”
Why fund felons?
There are approximately 2.2 million people incarcerated in the United States, currently the highest incarceration rate in the world. And statistics show that many of these people are likely to reoffend once released from prison. According to a major study by the United States Sentencing Commission, released in 2017, about half of 25,000 federal offenders followed over an eight-year period were rearrested (49.3 percent) after release from prison. Almost one-third (31.7 percent) were reconvicted, and one-quarter (24.6 percent) were reincarcerated.
But prison education programs do appear to offer hope. Studies by the Rand Corporation on the effectiveness of prison education show that inmates who participate in skills-based courses are 43 percent less likely to return to prison.
Wisconsin Department of Corrections Secretary Kevin Carr says higher education levels reduce the recidivism rate and help alleviate public safety concerns. He says he’s “extremely excited” to have Odyssey programming, not just in Oakhill, but potentially in corrections facilities around the state.
“Research shows that the higher the educational level that a person in custody achieves, on average, that will increase not only the safety of the staff at those facilities, but helps the [inmate’s] personal growth and ability to reenter society with better skills,” says Carr.
Jerome Dillard, director of Ex-Incarcerated People Organizing, is also a fan. He is well known in criminal justice reform circles for encouraging incarcerated people to “turn their cells into a classroom.”
“It is proven that formerly incarcerated people who seek post-secondary education have a low recidivism rate,” says Dillard. “I have known dozens of formerly incarcerated people who have graduated from the community Odyssey program who have not gone back [to prison]. Being incarcerated is a time for these people to sit down and plan their lives. Education, especially accredited education, gives them hope for a successful future.”
To that end, Pell Grants are once again available to incarcerated students for education at designated schools. The U.S. Department of Education will be evaluating these programs to see the impact education has on the lives of participants.
Moreno, in conjunction with UW-Madison, has applied for the university to become a Second Chance Pell Experimental Site, which would allow it to offer bachelor’s degree programs to students in prison. Moreno says Odyssey Beyond Bars would “expand substantially” if the university is selected as a site. “The application alone is an important step forward for the university and our efforts to support this group of learners.”
Carr is on board. He sees UW-Madison becoming a Second Chance Pell Experimental Site as an opportunity for Odyssey Beyond Bars to expand its program statewide.
Meanwhile, Odyssey Beyond Bars is committed to offering two more English 100 courses at Oakhill over the next two years. And Moreno says the Odyssey team is working with university leaders to plan additional courses at Oakhill, including a potential African American studies course this summer.
“Willing to reach out”
Emily Auerbach, co-director of the Odyssey Project, was one of Mullen’s guest instructors. She used her time to lead a discussion on men’s attitudes toward women. Auerbach paired female feminist authors like Kate Chopin, Maya Angelou and Alice Waters with the writings of Aristotle, Seneca and Napoleon — all men who put down women as inferior and child-like. After sharing examples of how her own mother and grandmother used their domestic roles for creative undertakings, she challenged the men to find examples of women in their own lives who might have been overlooked artistically.
“If you read something from the standpoint of a woman who’s oppressed, you’re going to enter her head and life and come out feeling differently, and that is what I was trying to do,” says Auerbach in an interview. “Each of the men had something they could point to, someone’s cooking or a lullaby or a quilt, to get to thinking about women who were never given the opportunity to become famous for this or that, but had within them those artistic gifts. One talked about how he needed to start seeing the world from his ex-wife’s point of view.”
Auerbach says she left Oakhill “feeling the weight of lives that should have gone in a different direction.”
Chris Bacarella
Jacob Raglin says that when he is released, Odyssey Beyond Bars will be the reason he’ll fulfill a dream of going to college.
Like Jacob Raglin, 33, who has spent the past eight years either incarcerated or running from law enforcement due to drug-related offenses and parole jumping.
“I steered away from my abilities when I was in school,” says Raglin, who did train and work as a carpenter. “I thought I lacked the ability [for] reading and writing and poetry, I just didn’t do it. So that steered me in a different direction — instead of thinking, ‘Hey I’m going to read a book today,’ I was like ‘I’m going find my friends and go hang out at the bars.’ Odyssey has changed that in me.”
Raglin says when he’s released, Odyssey Beyond Bars will be the reason he’ll fulfill a dream of going to college. Before Odyssey, Raglin says he’d only read about 20 books in his life. The rigorous Odyssey coursework has changed that. He’s already applied to seven colleges and is confident he’ll attend UW-Whitewater. He has also applied to be in Madison’s community-based Odyssey Project next fall.
Much of the magic of the course seems to come from Mullen, who the students applaud for bringing an energy, authenticity and a sense of trust that “makes them want to do well in class.”
“Too few people are willing to reach out on a personal level in a vulnerable way, tell people their stories, understand other people’s stories, and even fewer are willing to reach out to places like this and recognize that there are humans who hope for a better life,” says a student who asked to be anonymous.
Mullen is one they see as “willing to reach out.” To support the students’ work beyond the classroom, Mullen collects their writings into a literary pamphlet called The Oracle. He tears up when he talks about how transferring his students’ words into the handout channeled a real connection.
“I felt a strong communion with their thoughts,” says Mullen. “People sometimes write at a level they wouldn’t normally communicate, but here they could really open up in their writing. So during that act of typing, I felt this weird communion with each of them as individuals. I found that I got overwhelmed with emotion as I was reading and typing up all of the things they’ve been through.”
The fact that he would be published in The Oracle pushed Lewis to dig deeper in his writing.
“Many times, I’ve faltered in my resolve, not because of fear — I like to think I am a reasonably courageous person — but because of the anxiety that happens,” Lewis writes in the December issue of The Oracle. “When entering upon a level of success where responsibilities become great, obligations become new factors infringing on our lives. Who really wants either of them? I don’t, because they are bothersome, tedious, needy, and cause an unnecessary amount of stress. But what kind of lives ought we lead without them? Life would be an unprincipled, unconstructed construct. Surely, we would have to depend on others to function for us. We are then crippled by stagnation and complacency. Who wants to live life in that fashion? I really don’t…”
“The Oracle makes me feel like I’m a published writer, an author, and that’s another way I feel encouraged to keep up the work,” says Lewis. “It gives you a sense of accomplishment.”
Storytelling
The final project was led by Jen Rubin, a local storyteller who co-produces The Moth StorySLAM in Madison, the open mic storytelling competition. Initially, Rubin wondered how she would fit in at Oakhill.
“When Kevin asked me to do this, I asked if people really want me to come to prison: a middle-class, middle-aged white woman,” says Rubin, who brought along volunteers, some graduates of the community-based Odyssey Project. “But he said his experience was that they are very happy with whoever wants to come and be in that space with them and share what they know, particularly if it’s helping them share their stories.”
Rubin found Mullen was right; the students were welcoming and engaging and eager to fully participate in the assignment. Their final project was to spin a life event into a five-minute story.
She spent two class periods with the men; the first was to teach them the craft of storytelling.
The second class was to refine their work. The men arrived that night with first drafts, some more polished than others; Rubin and the volunteers helped them sharpen and revise their work.
Chris Bacarella
On the final night of class, Carl Lewis and his classmates shared their finished stories with each other and invited guests.
On the final night, the men returned with their finished stories. Mullen had invited the entire Odyssey support team — Auerbach, Feraca, the four tutors who helped out on Tuesday nights, and Kevin Grahn, education director at Oakhill, who supplied cookies and coffee, something these guys seldom have access to. Before the presentations, Mullen gave high praise to the students for their “amazing honesty,” and for creating a classroom community that “made it one of the best classes I’ve ever had the pleasure of teaching.”
The first student shared a heartbreaking and prophetic account of how his parents warned him that “the streets are unforgiving and don’t know what mercy is,” and if he “keeps doing the wrong things,” he’d end up as they did, incarcerated.
Lewis went next. He recounted meeting the other Carl Lewis, the African American Olympic gold medalist, when he was living in a group home at 13. He says he didn’t know who Lewis was, and was distressed when forced by staff to take a picture with the athlete. He realizes now he was disconnected from the event and lacked curiosity.
“I felt a huge amount of discomfort telling my story,” says Lewis, “but I go after it because this class provokes you to look at things in a different way and gives you the confidence to express yourself.”
Overall, he says, the course was life changing. “Mullen made me change my mind about certain people. I’m going to go ahead and say ‘white people’ because I had bad experiences dealing with white people,” says Lewis. “I’m going to take you back to the courtroom with me and my mother, we were the only black faces, I wrote about this. Kevin, it was his genuine side I latched onto. He is always smiling — every time he showed up he greeted us, not the phony kind, it was genuine. And he always gave us feedback and encouragement. It’s constant and it’s what we need.”
[Editor's note: This story was updated to correct a typo in the cutline for Kevin Mullen's photo.]
