ON Newsletter - Summer 2023
The Humanities Beyond Bars
PHOTO CREDIT: NICOLE ACOSTA
This summer a second season of our Human Powered podcast will be ready for your ears! This time, we teamed up former Wisconsin Poet Laureate, performance artist, and change agent Dasha Kelly Hamilton with public historian Adam Carr to bring you remarkable stories of people inside and outside Wisconsin prisons who are using the humanities to overcome the dehumanization of incarceration. The resulting stories challenge us to imagine a more just system—one that is good for all of us.
“We were expecting that day to have our meeting in an attorney visiting room, a sort of small private room…[but] for whatever reason, they didn’t have the room available,” recalls Peter Moreno who, in 2018 was still studying to become an attorney. In an interview with Dasha Kelly Hamilton and Adam Carr, hosts of Wisconsin Humanities’ podcast Human Powered, Peter recalls for Dasha and Adam the first time he ever visited a prison:
“We were put in the general visitation area for the prison where all the family and friend visits happen…I noticed in the corner, they had a Fisher-Price kitchen…with little plastic pots and pans, and the plastic food and stuff. At the time, I had a new daughter at home, [and I realized that] it was the same Fisher-Price kitchen that I had in my living room…All of a sudden, it just hit me that these were human beings in here. We were the first people to visit my client in six years. And I walked out of the prison with my clinic partner and just wept.”
Peter didn’t just weep, he changed his life. He left his work as an attorney and founded Odyssey Beyond Bars, a humanities-based educational program in Wisconsin prisons. The program, which Peter started in 2018, was the first for-credit course offered in any state prison in the U.S. since 1917.
Peter’s story and those of OBB students, as shared with Human Powered, reveal so much about the experience of incarcerated people who have few opportunities to learn and reflect on their lives or connect with a larger community. They also reveal that, when given access to literature, stories, and human connection, new understandings can happen even behind bars. And along with powerful personal change, that work behind bars can cause public narratives about incarceration to start to shift.
“It made me feel human again…The environment that he created allowed us as inmates to not only be vulnerable, but to get to know each other personally. Inmates spend so much time putting on a front, getting into character, because they feel that this is what they need to do to get through a day…They never tell somebody like, man, I’m hurting or this is what I gone through as a kid.”
—Mark Español
Peter Moreno, director of Odyssey Beyond Bars, speaking with Mark Español during an OBB English class at Oak Hill Correctional Facility.
PHOTO CREDIT: ODYSSEY BEHIND BARS
From the Human Powered episode about Peter and his students to one about an exhibit featuring art by incarcerated artists, our hosts Dasha and Adam take Human Powered listeners on a six-part journey driven by the question: can the humanities transform individual lives and help us all imagine a state and a country without the mass incarceration that exists today? Rather than a blizzard of statistics or policy debates—though these are important too!—these six stories let us hear directly from people like Peter and like Dasha herself who dedicate themselves to bringing the humanities to incarcerated Wisconsinites. And above all, they bring you the voices of people like Mark Español and Robert Taliaferro, who have a crucial role to play in helping all of us re-think mass incarceration.
While in prison, Mark began working towards his associate degrees and earned over thirty educational certificates along the way. One of the courses, and the first credit-bearing one that Mark took, was Odyssey Behind Bar’s English class. He recalled:
“It made me feel human again…The environment that he created allowed us as inmates to not only be vulnerable, but to get to know each other personally. Inmates spend so much time putting on a front, getting into character, because they feel that this is what they need to do to get through a day…They never tell somebody like, man, I’m hurting or this is what I gone through as a kid. When you learned that about a person, you, you even greet them differently… Some of us, like myself, had no writing experience. I mean, I’ve taken some classes and I was working towards my associate’s degree, but as far as engaging into creative writing, it opened my eyes to the purpose, the bigger meaning of why I went through this…Being in prison does a lot to you, man…Your faith goes up, your faith goes down, you believe in a higher power. You know, you pray to God, you stop praying to God. You get mad, you get sad.”
For some incarcerated people this frustration can be fuel to effect change, something that Robert Taliaferro experienced first-hand. During his long incarceration, Robert became active in prison journalism and served as the editor of The Prison Mirror newspaper in Stillwater Correctional Facility in Minnesota. “They physically confine you. I mean, you’re confined physically, but your mind is not locked up.Guys would ask me, ‘T, how did you do 38 years, man, and not lose your mind?’ I say, ‘Well, first of all, man, my body’s locked up. My mind is not locked up.’”
Robert has thought a lot about the public narrative about incarceration and worked to change it through his nationally award-winning prison journalism. “If a guy wins a blue ribbon for a bonsai tree in prison at Stillwater State Penitentiary, those are the people we want to talk about…We made the connections while we were inside…and the only people that can really make changes in the system are people like us. We’ve done that time. We’ve seen the system, we’ve seen the good parts of the system, such as they are. We’ve seen the bad parts of the system, which are more than the good parts, but we have the answers. And if, if there’s gonna be any real viable changes in the correctional system in this country, it is people like [fellow prison journalist Shannon], myself, and others who are coming out…who have the skill set, who have that personality, where people, we can talk to people.”
Since statistics are part of the story, we’ll end with just a few. Today, over 41,000 residents of Wisconsin are serving time in prisons and jails, a portion of the 1.8 million people incarcerated nationwide. The United States has 5% of the world’s population, but 20% of the world’s prison population. Since 1970, the total incarcerated population in the United States has increased by 553%. In Wisconsin, Black people make up just 7% of the general population but 29% of people in jail and 41% of people in prison. Nearly half of the inmates at the Vilas County Jail from 2015 to 2020 were Native American, yet Native people only make up 11% of the county’s population.
These are some important numbers, but we need stories to make sense of it all. We hope you’ll find in these stories new potential to change Wisconsin for the better for all of us.
Check wisconsinhumanities.com/podcast for news about this summer’s launch. Subscribe to Human Powered wherever you get your podcasts!
Grant Spotlight: Art Against the Odds
Can the creative process transform individual lives and help us understand more about the more than 41,000 people who are living in Wisconsin’s prisons and jails? Debra Brehmer, the curator of an exhibition called Art Against the Odds, notes there are more incarcerated people making art than you might think, often without support, formal programs, materials, or instruction.
Continuing Grassroots Initiatives
As the first year of Community Powered, Wisconsin Humanities’ new grassroots community resilience initiative, wraps up this May, we are excited to share more about the community-led projects that grew from the community engagement work of WH’s local staff.
