Photo: EXPO of Wisconsin
Dant'e Cottingham
Dant'e Cottingham
The topic of prison reform has spawned many debates over the past decades including whether prison time can be replaced with things like house arrest or what changes can be made within the system. One of the main concepts at the center of these debates is mass incarceration. According to a 2023 report from the Sentencing Project, there was a 66 percent increase in life sentences without parole between 1984 and 2020.
To make matters worse, the stigma of incarceration influences employment and the ability to purchase a home. The organization EXPO (Ex-Incarcerated People Organizing) has been working to ensure former prisoners have basic rights, advocate for restorative justice (a process that focuses on healing between the perpetrators and victims), and work toward ultimate goal of ending mass incarceration itself.
Racine activist Dant'e Cottingham, a formerly incarcerated member of the organization, took time to discuss how incarceration impacts society, the wider implication of the organization’s activism, and what they hope to accomplish in the future.
Explain how EXPO got started.
EXPO Wisconsin stands for Ex Incarcerated People Organizing and consists of directly impacted men and women. It started as an affiliate of WISDOM, a statewide organization that centers on reducing mass incarceration. There were 12 or 13 affiliates at the time, another example being the Racine Interfaith Coalition. EXPO began because of the belief that directly impacted people who are closest to the problem are the closest to the solution.
Define mass incarceration and its affect on society from your perspective.
This country has incarcerated over a million people. In the state of Wisconsin, it’s over 23,000 people and most of those people are disproportionally men and women of color or poor people. In Green Bay Prison, it’s supposed to be built for 500 to 700 people, but it has nearly a thousand people. Over incarceration to me is the over incarceration of citizens. The impact of that is, take me for example, I was gone at 17 years old and came home at 44. I had a daughter when I left and had a family when I left; me being gone so long destroyed those relationships and put me in a position where I couldn’t play role in helping my family build and grow. If you compound that by thousands of people in one community alone, the destructive impact of that is enormous. You have thousands of people and thousands of families destroyed, thousands of kids without fathers or mothers, thousands of mothers without sons; it impacts every element of the community when you think about it that way and it’s even more substantial in black and brown communities.
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What were you most in need of during your time in prison and also during your transition out of prison?
One of the most important and profound qualities in prison is hope. There’s a lot of people in prison right now hopeless for many different reasons, such as their sentence structure. I have a friend of mine who went to prison back in 1996, he was a juvenile at the time, and he’s not eligible for parole until 2098. He’s up north away from home so part of it is that your hope is impacted because of sentence structure and being miles away from home.
The other part is how tremendous the oppression is inside, the culture is extremely oppressive, the staff is extremely oppressive, and the rules are extremely oppressive. It is constant, there’s no relief whatsoever. To answer the question, one of the main things I needed was hope, to not be in a system that’s designed to not rehabilitate, but to beat you down. Then, one of the main things I needed with my transition was housing and employment to the point where I could obtain a livable wage. I did everything I was supposed to do—I took college courses, got a high school diploma, I took every vocational opportunity that I could, so I was educated and had skills, but it was difficult to obtain a job. I could get a job for minimum wage, but to acquire employment with a livable wage was extremely daunting. Housing was so horrible; I kept running into landlords who kept telling me because I had no rental history, they wouldn’t rent to me or because I had a felony on my record, they wouldn’t rent to me. I was willing to pay six month’s rent, I told them that and they still wouldn’t rent to me.
How does restorative justice aid in the fight against mass incarceration?
Restorative justice changes a crime from a crime against the law to a crime against an individual. When you do that, it changes. I took restorative justice in the inside and was introduced to a different level of empathy. I remember sitting in a circle and a woman was sitting next to me. Her name was Laura, and she was telling a story about being inside her home with her toddler daughter while her home was being burglarized. The burglars didn’t know she was in there, they were up in the attic, and they were hiding. While she was telling that story, she was shaking and I remember looking at her, thinking “I did this to somebody, I made somebody feel this way.” I think that’s the power of restorative justice; it introduces people in a completely different way to the impact of their actions.
When you’re in a restorative circle, everybody is on the same level, there are no “big Is” or “little Us,” everybody’s words and positions and feelings are equal. That’s extremely important when you’re working with people and trying to get people to think about something differently. Punishing people into seeing things differently does not work, seeing people works, acknowledging people’s struggle works, engaging people works. Beating or breaking people into submission doesn’t work if you want the person to grow.
What challenges have you seen with restorative justice?
The only challenge I’ve had is men who are at different levels of their development. everybody who goes through any program, some men may not be ready for it. If you’re not ready for it, it won’t resonate. Restorative justice is fallible in that way, but nothing is absolute. Everything is an odds game, so you want to create a system that has the best odds of reaching the most people. Other than that, the only other problem I can mention is not having the correct facilitators. You’ve got to have the right facilitators to facilitate a program like restorative justice because there’s a lot of nuances involved.
Has your outlook on the fight against mass incarceration developed over the past decade?
Absolutely. I’ve only been out for 17 months. While I was on the inside, I became an advocate and I was telling stories. I was telling stories based on what I was seeing. If I saw something I knew was wrong, I’d write it up and get it out there. I also had a podcast while I was on the inside, it was calledIncarcerate U.S. Podcast, and the whole mission of it was to tell the story of mass incarceration from every possible angle. It’s changed since I’ve been home; on the inside, I was telling the personal stories of people as I was seeing them. On the outside, my focus has been changing the policies, changing the polices that restrict, reform changing the policies that make mass incarceration possible, and helping the brothers and sisters as they come home so that the mass impact of incarceration on the transitional side are not as lethal.
Where do you see your organization headed in the future? What do you hope to accomplish?
There’s three main agendas for EXPOWisconsin. One is unlock the vote, which is our mission to restore the voting rights of men and women who are on probation or parole. You can do 25 years of prison, maintain good conduct and come home after serving your time and you’re still unable to vote if you are still on probation or parole. In my case, I can’t vote for the rest of my life because I’m on parole for life. The other mission is to cap the amount of time you receive on probation and parole. We lead the region and the nation on how much time we give men and women on probation and parole. We have a bill to cap that. There’s also transitional living: our mission is to supply men and women with safe housing upon release. In ten years, I’d like to be in a position where we have reached those three goals and are able to provide safe and secure housing all across the state, with no one being homeless when they come home from prison and the judges are capped on how much time they give probation or parole. To add to this, I hope in 10 years that we substantially reduce the prison population in the state of Wisconsin.
