Human Powered Season 2, Episode 6 Transcript
"It's Not Just a Vote"
Shannon: I got locked up when I was 19, and so I don’t think I’ve ever voted. I wanna say whether there was one time before I got locked up, but I can't remember for sure. So I just say no 'cause I'm not confident I've ever voted.
Robert: You know, I did 38 plus years in the state of Wisconsin. And before I got out, I had to sign a piece of paper that stated that I will not register or vote.
Josh: Currently, I cannot vote in Wisconsin. In Indiana I could actually vote. Coming back to, uh, to Wisconsin wasn't really, there wasn't a lot of options for me, but to do it.
And when I did come back to the state like that, and know that this is what I'm walking into, there was a little bit of that sense of, well, that particular freedom's gone for a while.
Andron: I have done 26 years of my life incarcerated or on probation and parole. I recently just got out of prison, August 28, 2018. I received my citizen rights to vote January 14 of 2024. For the first time ever in my life, I'm able to vote, able to be considered a citizen in society.
Adam: I’m Adam Carr, and this is Human Powered, the podcast from Wisconsin Humanities and Field Noise Soundworks. We’ve spent the last five episodes thinking about the importance of the humanities as tools for searching for meaning and understanding — and how things like writing, poetry, storytelling, and art can help incarcerated people feel human again.
And we met people like Shannon, Robert, Josh, and Andron, who you just heard. They are four of the thousands of people in our state who have lost, and in some cases regained, their right to vote. And you’ll be hearing their voices and others throughout this episode.
When people get out of prison in Wisconsin, they are basically told that they can’t vote. That they can’t participate in one of the foundational aspects of our democracy, even though their prison sentence has been served. Last year, there were over 63,000 people “on papers” in Wisconsin — meaning they are on parole, probation, or extended supervision. And if you are on papers with a felony conviction, you can’t cast a ballot.
Jerome Dillard is the director of an organization called EXPO.
Jerome: Ex-Incarcerated People Organizing
Adam: And as Jerome knows from working with ex-incarcerated people – and his own experience – being released doesn’t mean the constraints of the system are behind you.
Jerome: We have a campaign called “Locked up on the Outside.” “Locked up on the Outside” is looking at the terms of supervision that individuals are under correctional control. And it has grown and it has grown and it has grown. And now it is not outrageous to hear someone not being able to vote for 10-15 years. And I'm witnessing so many individuals, 50, 60 years old, voting for the first time in their life. Not that they didn't want to vote, but that's how long they've been under the system in this state.
Adam: Wisconsin is not the only state where this is the case. Across the country, around 4.6 million people are barred from voting due to a felony conviction.
But it varies from state to state. There are states where you can vote while in prison. States where your voting rights are automatically restored the day you walk out.
Not here in Wisconsin.
So people like Jerome and his colleagues are working on changing that.
He works closely with Tamra Oman.
Tamra: Hi I’m Tamra Oman and I am the housing and program administrator for EXPO, Ex Incarcerated People Organizing
Adam: Tamra’s work, and really her life’s mission, is to help folks not feel the way she felt.
Tamra: Every human being knows what it's like, for a moment at least, to not belong or to not matter or to not be heard. And I thought I just didn’t belong. Right? Like I was never going to be enough in a world that would always say overweight, you know, gay, whatever it is, right? Felon. It was never gonna be enough for the world. And I bought it, I really bought that.
Adam: Voting is part of that but it is not the only part. It’s giving people space to discover who they are when they leave prison.
Tamra: As much as I wanted to be a different human being before I ever went to prison, I didn't have the capacity or space or invitation to heal. And I, and so getting out, you have this huge like, Oh my God, will I ever be able to become who I was created to be? Will I ever be enough?
But the way that people see the pathways to changing is using the narrative that this is bad people and they do bad things. Actually, they're often wounded people who haven't had a chance to heal that end up wounding more people. So if we wanna stop the wounding and the harm, we have to consider a different approach.
Adam: Today, EXPO is leading a campaign to restore voting rights for formerly incarcerated people in Wisconsin. But the organization is also a model for what happens when people get together and find their voice — individually and collectively.
Here with me to talk about this work and these issues is my amazing co-host, Dasha Kelly Hamilton.
Adam: So Dasha, We've been making a podcast about humanities: poetry, history, philosophy in the carceral system, and now we're talking about belonging and voting. How do those things all connect?
Dasha: It's all connected. We participate in the activity of voting and politics to belong to a nation, to belong to a democracy, to belong to a set of systems that are supposed to be for all of our greatest good. And so on an output level that makes sense, but connecting to why that's important is just basic humanity.
Adam: Serving your sentence, there's an idea that we can overcome the dehumanization of it, of incarceration, right?
You served your sentence, you're back. But still for folks, they're not coming back whole in the eyes of the government because there's a right they still don't have,
Dasha: It's remarkable to witness someone coming home after being incarcerated for any length of time, but especially if you’re talking 10, 15, 20, 30 type years, long bits of time.
That person and all their best of intentions and all of their best focus is still gonna have to process through the fact that they've been institutionalized. From things as small as reminding themselves that they don't have to stay in their one bedroom all the time; as reminding themselves that they don't have to ask for permission to go to the bathroom; reminding themselves that they are able to go to the other side of town and visit a relative. So, that's gonna take time.
And then the second layer is how they get to interact with society around them. The box they have to check on their employment status. Whether or not they get a job. Whether or not they're able to apply for loans and go back to school, and whether they're not able to get an apartment. How they're going to reenter their children's lives. The parts of their story that they kind of tuck under their tongue when they're meeting new people.
So, when we ask these folks to be engaged civically and we haven't attended to their human parts, their human experience of having been incarcerated and expected to come home with a label of being formally incarcerated, but somehow still navigate, like their Monday is like our Monday, we are doing a disservice to all of us.
Adam: Yeah, I've been thinking about lately, I went to public schools, grew up playing in public parks. , the way my parents raised me and felt connected to Milwaukee, where I grew up, voting just was an expectation. It didn't seem like something extra. It's just something you do.
Dasha: I've had a similar expectation. Voting is something that you're going to get to do when you turn this, you know, magical 18 age, but all of a sudden you're a mature adult and you're not.
Adam: You're like a caterpillar with a, with a blue ribbon. Not a butterfly.
Dasha: Not a butterfly, still gooey.
But voting was something that you just were going to do. Like, you're going to get an apartment and you're going to pay taxes. You're going to do these things. You're going to vote
And, I would say it's only been in recent years that, not that I've considered, not voting, but it's much easier to have a conversation about how voting feels pointless. And to be vigilant about not feeding into that, as much as it can feel that way. So this is me, someone who's has the right to vote, comes from a long line of people who had voted, and I can have these opinions, free speech and all that wonderful stuff.
So one, as a person who's able to vote. Second, you add the layer of being a Black person in America, watching your voting rights be attacked and undermined and swallowed up. And then you've got gerrymandering, and there's so many examples of how this, this privilege, excuse me, this right is being assaulted.
But in the meantime, I'm holding fast the faith and the hope and the vision that the work that's being done by some activists across the country to change these laws and these systems, there's gonna be a tsunami crash of change. I mean, just look at the number of people whose votes and voices have been taken away. What shift that would take, how much more representative that would be of the country we actually live in?
Adam: And, and Dasha I am here in this conversation as a person who cares about our community, our state, our city of Milwaukee. And what I've found is, I have faith in myself, but there are incredible ideas that are generated from the people that are most impacted by any system.
And in this case, they're incredible folks who are advocating before they get out and are on fire and really care about this work. This episode, we're hearing from those folks, specifically Tamra and Jerome, from EXPO.
Over the course of reporting this episode, we had two conversations with Tamra. The first one took place about two years ago — when we met up with Tamra in Fond du Lac. In some ways, Tamra’s story is a remarkable one. But in others, it’s an ordinary story. The story of thousands of people who end up incarcerated.
Tamra is the daughter of an alcoholic and abusive father, and she grew up trying to protect her mother from the violence in their home. Eventually, Tamra ended up on her own path of self destruction and addiction.
Tamra: I never wanted to hurt anybody. I neve wanted to not have the skills to manage life. I grew up in trauma and domestic violence and sexual assault and generations of that right in our families. So I wasn't taught healthy skills of dealing with that.
Adam: At a low point in her battle with addiction, Tamra was arrested and sentenced to prison. And her family was dealing with other devastating losses.
Tamra: Right before I was sentenced, my brother killed himself, both my grandmas died, and then I was looking at 87 years in prison.
Adam: Tamra was 99% sure the sentence wouldn’t be that long, but the magnitude of that potential time was overwhelming.
Tamra: I just wanted to die. I didn't wanna live anymore. Cause I didn't wanna hurt anybody. I've never been, I'm a big SAP.
I thought I was a badass, turns out I'm a big old sap, a big humanitarian, big whatever. And you know, I walked into that courtroom and all those people that said, I”ve got your back or people I'd been involved with said, I'll be there for you, and the only one sitting in the back of the courtroom was my mother and she just buried her only son, her only mother and the only person in our family to ever go to college was leaving her when she needed me the most. You know, she was the only person who cared if I lived or died in the end.
Adam: Tamra is taken out of the courtroom and gets on a bus to prison. That’s when she realizes she has to come to terms with herself.
Tamra: I'm shackled at my ankle, my waist, and who I'm shackled to is the person I can't stand the most. And then, on top of it all, they transfer you to this place and you're stuck in a room and there's this, you know, really thick steel door. I'm a big girl, right? I can get through a lot of stuff. I've survived that way. And it dawns on me. I'm sitting on this bed and I'm thinking there's no more running from me. Cuz I can't get that door open. Nobody's open. I'm not gonna push it no matter how far, I can't run from me anymore. I'm either gonna learn how to love me and reconcile those pieces or I'm gonna die, cuz you can't not take yourself everywhere you go.
Adam: So while she was inside, Tamra did that work. She started to process the trauma underlying her addiction, which is something that never came up in all of the previous times she tried to get clean.
Tamra: So I've been in 15 treatments, and all of those treatments were about here's what's wrong with you. Healthcare, it's all about, what's wrong with you. It's not about what's right with you. We just talk about here's your problem rather than what your possibilities are.
Adam: So Tamra started to think about these possibilities. When she got out of prison, she realized that one way she could make an impact is by sharing her story with others.
Tamra: I can walk into a room of people who are incarcerated or been incarcerated. And the statement that I'm there in my life is different, says a lot, right? It says clearly maybe all the thoughts and beliefs you have about your possibilities could be challenged by the fact that we exist.
Adam: She started working as a substance abuse counselor at a place called Rock Valley Community Programs.
But people keep telling her about this other job: it’s called the “Recovery Support Specialist,” and at the time it was a brand new position at the Wisconsin Resource Center. Which is essentially a mental health treatment facility for people in the state prison population.
Tamra: So I was like, eh, no damn way am I going to work in a mental health prison? No way.
Adam: But Tamra is a spiritual person, and she keeps getting what she calls spiritual nudges towards this job. She knew she could have an impact there. So she decided to apply.
Tamra: The last day to apply for the job, I didn't fill out the application and get it sent till 11:59, cuz I was like, if you want me to be here, you better smack me in the face, cuz I’m not going. And then I get this call back.
Adam: She gets a call to interview for the job. She had just gotten married and was on the last day of her honeymoon….camping…. when the call came. And she drives straight from the campsite to the interview.
Tamra: I have to show up to the state of Wisconsin's institution stinking, dirty and funky. Again I said, if this is meant to be, slap me. And I walked into the meeting and the way that the state interviews is there's three people. It's very serious. They have serious questions, no deviating from those questions. You know, people are looking over their glasses at you. And I'm stinky coming off my last day. And it’s like… (sigh) In the middle of the interview, the woman that was interviewing me started crying. And I was like, oh shit, I know this is gonna be where I'm going.
Adam: She was right. She was offered the job. Tamara became the first formerly incarcerated person hired to work in a Wisconsin prison in 30 years And in 2015, she even won the state of Wisconsin's Virginia Heart Award for a woman who does exceptional work in state government.
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Jessica: Hi, I’m Jessica Becker. I”m director of communications at Wisconsin Humanities. Here, we believe that every story matters and we respect the humanity in each individual. We know that mass incarceration and systemic injustice impacts Wisconsinites in every corner of the state. But we believe that the humanities can provide tools for healing, encourage productive conversation, and create pathways for people to thrive. We hope these episode broaden the dialogue around mass incarceration and ignite your thinking about the role of the humanities in prisons. Visit wisconsinhumanities.org to learn more and get involved.
{>>end midroll break<<}
Adam: Meanwhile, Jerome Dillard had been on a similar path, looking for a place in his community and the world.
Jerome: Well I was looked over, looked through, no one acknowledged me, no one… I was invisible.
Adam: But then he met a group of men at his church in Madison.
Jerome: It's not punishment that changed me. It was the love and hope that I was given when I returned to the community, through a faith community, that really helped me realize that I was better than how I was living,
And they modeled something, not even knowing what they were modeling, and that was normalcy. You know, they were men that got up and went to work everyday who were taking care of their families, loving their wives, and I grew just being around them.
Adam: That realization laid the foundation for Jerome to offer that same kind of support to others, especially people who were just released from prison.
So a few years later, when Tamra and Jerome met, they immediately connected.
Tamra: When I think of meeting Jerome… there wasn't a space that we could go where people understood literally the barriers, the desire for something different. And so we organically grassroots like, we're like, listen, if we don't know how, and we're just kind of running through this, how do we create space for folks to find their voice, to find their truth.
Adam: Tamra and Jerome and a network of folks around them started a group called Voices Beyond Bars, which offered support and leadership development for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. And they knew that idea could work across the entire state.
Jerome: We thought, “What would it look like to have an organization of formerly incarcerated people in the state of Wisconsin, around the state of Wisconsin, working on advocacy and organizing formerly incarcerated people to do advocacy?”
Adam: That idea became EXPO. It was simple — reach out to individuals and show them that you know what they’re going through. And that they are not alone.
Jerome: We know how they're feeling, what they're going through, and how scary it is returning back to this community. Not only that, but having a hammer hanging over your head for the least little thing you can do, you know that you'll be thrown in a cage, even if it's just for seven days, 10 days, and you're released, “Oh, you can go now”. It’s, it’s an eerie feeling.
And, and we understand that. We have lived experience. We understand the bumpy road of reentry. We understand the housing crisis, the food crisis, not having finances, barely making ends meet. Many of us have been through that – most of us have been through that.
Adam: And Tamra became a bridge for reaching out to formerly incarcerated women.
Jerome: Tamra has touched many, many lives, through her lived experience. And being someone who's able to reach back and embrace women and love them and walk them through some of the issues that caused them to be incarcerated, it has just been phenomenal.
Tamra: You know, there's more men incarcerated, but we are the fastest growing population in prison.
In fact, Wisconsin's one of the worst for women. And so when you think about women already didn’t have a voice: their pathways to prison, 75% domestic violence survivors, upwards of 87% sexual assault survivors. We've been told to be quiet, behave. So to create a space that – Jerome in all of his wisdom and love, you know, he put up with a lot of stuff with me – He really wanted to make sure that we all were welcomed in a safe way because of our traumatic experiences that often led to our incarceration.
Adam: But as Tamra and Jerome worked on helping people find their voices, it became clear that the next step was helping people use that voice to have an impact on their communities. And one clear way to do that is by voting.
Tamra: This idea that I have a civic responsibility, I have a social and civic responsibility to take those things that were harmful and the things that I did that harmed other people, when I heal, to use those to create a healthier, better pathway.
And then the practical level is – how do I cast my best vote for the wellness of the families and communities that we're all saying we're concerned about? So that vote is so much more an investment in myself and my neighbor and my truth to the betterment of all of us. It's not just a vote.
SHORT RESPONSES (What it feels like to lose the right to vote)
Josh: When, because of a label, you start saying a person is less than, or this is in their past, so they're less than. You weren't the same person you were ten years ago. So why are you assuming they are? Anything that has that label of less than, or reduces people as less than, strips humanity away. Strips value away from that person as a person.
Shannon: If you have a record, you can't vote for a long time, in certain cases, depending on how long you are post-release, on the system. So by the time you vote again, you get this sense of like, who cares? It's like, you know, I'm not a part of society.
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Adam: Okay — crash course in US History. It's 1760s New England, where a group of colonists think it’s not fair to pay taxes to a government that they can’t participate in.
Jerome: Taxation without representation, as many of us know, is the basic groundwork for this nation forming.
Jerome: Jerome Dillard sees that happening in communities today.
Jerome: Looking at things like voting rights for individuals who are formerly incarcerated in our communities, working, paying taxes, taking care of their families, and just doing the right thing, but yet still not having a say in who's on their children's school board, who represents the neighborhood that they're living in.
Adam: Jerome is also familiar with more recent history. It was in his lifetime when the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, which finally secured the right for adult citizens of all races and genders to vote.
Jerome: I grew up during the civil rights era, and I grew up in the city of Chicago where, you know, my folks were refugees from the south, and I saw the things on black and white television of how individuals were suffering and being brutalized around the right to vote.
And my folks put emphasis on that. You know, I went to the polls long before I was able to vote with my mother and my grandmother and my grandfather. We went to the polls as a family.
And I witnessed that eroding over the years and, where we are today and why I'm putting so much emphasis on unlocking the vote. In the state of Wisconsin, at 17 years old, in the criminal legal system, you're automatically an adult. And so individuals are losing their right to vote before they can even vote.
Adam: If you are convicted of a felony in Wisconsin–that’s any crime that brings a maximum sentence of more than one year in prison–you lose some of your civil rights. Like voting, or running for public office.
Jerome: Once you're convicted, it is in your judgment and conviction, the judge has to let you know that you have lost your civil rights. Some you never get back. The right to bear arms, or purchase a firearm.
Being sentenced, the judge tells you right then and there that you will not be able to vote because you're of a felony conviction. And throughout the system, you know, when you're released from prison, there's emphasis: You can't vote, you can't vote.
Once you completed your sentence, your civil rights are reinstated. I'll never forget when I got my letter saying, your civil rights have been reinstated, You can cast a ballot.
Adam: But a lot of people Jerome and Tamra know and work with haven’t gotten that letter. And some never will.
Tamra: Some of our staff can't vote ever again if this doesn't change and some of those decisions were made as a 16-year-old kid. I am not dismissing the harm that happened. But if you want me to be a part of the community and engaged in a meaningful way, Why would you not hold me accountable to my civic duty to show up to use those rights that people fought and died for?
Adam: It's not hard to draw. It's not hard to draw a line from mass incarceration in this country to low voting rates among the black population. A 2022 report from The Sentencing Project found that one in 19 African Americans of voting age can't vote. That's more than three times the rate of non-African Americans.
As Tamra sees it, the inability to vote can lead to further marginalization.
Tamra: Y’all know that African proverb that the child who's not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth? This idea that your voice doesn't matter and that you're, you know, the marginalization of even something as simple as casting a vote seems simple, right? But people fought and died for it.
So this idea that I'm not welcomed to be a part of the democracy that this country's founded on and lifts up, the less and less I feel connected, the easier and easier it is to burn it down to feel its warmth. And I'm not excusing it. I'm just saying, if I don't matter, I guess what I do doesn't matter. And I guess what I have to say doesn't matter.
Jerome: The fact of the matter is, when you can't cast a ballot, you don't pay attention to politics and what's going on. You, I mean you're just removed from that. And oftentimes, individuals just don't feel like they're part of America. And this thing, you know, felony disenfranchisement, voter suppression, whatever we want to tag it, is not a Democrat or a Republican issue.
It's a bipartisan issue because people have a tendency of voting with the demographics from which they come. There's a lot of individuals who would probably vote Democrat or Republican who are barred from voting.
Tamra: In this state, we've got roughly 21,000 incarcerated and roughly 60,000 on supervision. And not saying that we would all agree, but that’s 80,000 votes that don't impact what the outcome is.
We all have our own political views, our own values, and some of them are so starkly different. But we could come together in this conversation. Come to the table, no judgment. I'm not angry at you for not knowing what you don't know. Please don't be angry at me for not knowing what I don't know. But what could we do together?
Jerome: We have to continue to tell our stories and be a voice for those who feel they don't have a voice.
I can remember a time, we were in Milwaukee on election day and this was 2021 I believe it was. You know, we had the parking lot on Third Street, blocked off and food going and individuals would come and say, Hey, have you voted yet? And we started taking people to the polls to vote. And it'll never leave my mind. People coming back saying, hanging out the window saying I voted, I voted the first time. And I, you know. It's normal to see individuals 50, 55, 60 years old voting for the very first time.
Adam: So Dasha…At the beginning of every episode we say, I'm a local historian, and yeah, in, in Milwaukee I care a lot about our history, but I've done other things. And, in 2008 actually, when I was looking for work, I found myself canvassing for the election that year, and I went door to door. You know, they give you a turf sheet and you knock on doors.
And it didn't occur to me that whole time. We were all over actually, Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin and other parts of the state. It didn't occur to me how many doors I'd be knocking on where a person could answer and I had nothing for them because they're in the circumstances that we're talking about right now.
Dasha: You know how you have an idea that like stands in the doorway, and ll the other really great ideas can't get past because this one stubborn idea has got its hands akimbo on its theoretical hips and won't get out of the way? What comes to my mind, and I won't shake it, is all the lonely people. Eleanor Rigby. I learned that song in choir in elementary school, middle school perhaps, and I can remember as a young person how sad the song was.
And it's, look at all the lonely people. Where do they go? There's a story in one of the verses about the woman who sits in the church in the dark and darns the socks. There's people who no one visits and no one came to the funeral. And I mean, lovely song. As a grownup, I hear that, and someone made an incredible remake of it too recently, but that's what I think of right now. Just the idea of the number of people who float through their days having been told that they're less than. And we've had the privilege of working and talking to some folks through this series who had the resilience to know better, or at least to discover better and determine differently for themselves. But it makes me think of right now, the number of our neighbors who have that ringing in their heads, you're less than, you're not important. Your voice doesn't matter. And it makes me that much more celebrate and cherish the folks that we get to talk to who know different and we're able to build up the strength to continue to be different. And different being living in the truth that they do matter.
Their voice is important and there is no less than/more than me.
And that's for all of you. There is no one less than or greater than you. You are a thousand percent you. And the people who do come home and push through, in spite of it all, just for them to continue to be a light for, sadly, the hundreds of thousands of others who are gonna come behind them. We need them to be their whole selves. They get to be their whole selves.
Credits
Human Powered is a podcast from Wisconsin Humanities and Field Noise Soundworks. It is produced by Craig Eley, Jade Isiri-Ramos, and Jen Rubin. Craig also edits and mixes the show. Executive producers are Dena Wortzel and Jessica Becker. Our voice recording engineer is Andrew Jambura at Silver City Studios.
The outro music is by the band, Upheaval, they were a prison band at the Waupan Correctional Institution in the 1970s.
Mass incarceration is a really complex topic. So I hope you will explore the extras on our Human Powered podcast episode pages. They shed more light on the people and projects that bring dignity and humanity to the problems in our carcel system.
Find more at wisconsinhumanities.org/podcast. Thanks for listening to this episode of Human Powered, Humanity Unlocked. If you like what you heard, share it with a friend.
I’m your host Adam Carr with the poetic Dasha Kelly Hamilton.
