UW-Madison receives $300K grant for prison education program

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A UW-Madison program has received a $300,000 grant to pay for college courses for incarcerated people in Wisconsin.

The Oscar Rennebohm Foundation will give the Odyssey Beyond Bars program $100,000 over the next three years to support a pilot project to teach introductory college courses in English to inmates who are interested in post-secondary instruction but have not yet enrolled in a credential-granting program. The project will also explore the possibility of offering similar introductory courses in math.

Noble Wray, Madison chief of police, said the money means more incarcerated people will have a greater chance of succeeding following their release.

Odyssey Beyond Bars began teaching noncredit enrichment courses to students in Wisconsin prisons in 2015. In 2019, it taught the first for-credit UW-Madison course in a prison in 100 years. The program enrolls 110 incarcerated students a year — 30 from Oakhill Correctional Institution in Oregon and 80 at the Wisconsin Resource Center in Winnebago.

Odyssey Beyond Bars will work with the UW System and the Wisconsin Department of Corrections to evaluate the effectiveness of the college-course programming.

The program is part of the UW Odyssey Project, a college jump-start program for Madison-area adults that’s meant to break the cycle of generational poverty through providing access to schooling.