Resources & Ways to Get Involved

Built on partnerships within Marquette and across Milwaukee, Marquette University’s Center for Urban Research, Teaching and Outreach (CURTO) houses the Educational Preparedness Program (EPP) to provide pathways to higher learning, academic advising and career services for the currently and formerly incarcerated.

The Last Mile prepares incarcerated individuals for successful reentry through business and technology training.

The Last Mile prepares incarcerated individuals for successful reentry through business and technology training.

Homeboy Industries provides hope, training, and support to formerly gang-involved and previously incarcerated people, allowing them to redirect their lives and become contributing members of our community.

Project RETURN (Returning Ex-incarcerated people To Urban Realities and Neighborhoods) exists to help men and women make a positive, permanent return to community, family and friends.

The Way Out‘s anti-bias employment platform specializes in matching employers and justice involved job seekers. They also provide a comprehensive list of support services and technologies to help returning citizens succeed upon release.

Partners in Hope is a faith-based prisoner re-entry program, run by Community Warehouse which helps formerly incarcerated prisoners become productive citizens.

WDP is a one-stop shop for the resources and events regarding the reentry, system reform, and decarceration ecosystem in Wisconsin.

To provide return­ing cit­izens in Bal­timore with a cent­ral hub of resources and inform­a­tion.

Fair Shake

Fair Shake is a free, self-serve reentry community development center with more than 15,000 resources and more than 400 reentry guides for food, clothes, housing and medical, education, support for loved ones, and more. Fair Shake offers diverse ideas and information to help you maintain and grow your mental and physical health, even through change. And the entire website is available as a free software application, too, for use in prisons and jails around the US. 

Story Medicine is a collection of slow portraits expressed through raw, vulnerable, unscripted short documentaries created with love and care to provide a very real notion that you are not alone in your suffering.

Represent Justice’s mission is to turn stories into action to change the justice system, while building the capacity of system-impacted communities.

1) Promoting greater communication and collaboration in reentry/reform/decarceration efforts in Wisconsin.

2) Showcasing the successes, humanity, and agency of people with criminal records.

Kim Malone has seen and heard it all from her personal to professional life.  She will give the view from the side of the fence about the law and the Department Of Corrections, even though she does not always agree on how things are done. Jamie DeJesus will bring the inside prospective of a man who was once a number on the inside and is now learning how to be a better man on the outside of the fence.  He was taught and believes that “Learning is an inner process.” At one point in his supervision Kim became Jamie’s supervising Agent.  They built a trusting relationship, while each one learned about the other side of the fence!

Orlando Peña is a Singer/Songwriter from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was there that he cut his teeth in various local acts before moving to Rochelle, Illinois. In his new home, he found solace on a family farm which proved to be exactly what he needed to nurture his craft. His style contains the beautiful imagery and storytelling qualities of traditional folk and country music, but with modern instrumentation and rhythms that come from his eclectic background.

National Fatherhood Initiative works to increase father involvement by equipping communities and human service organizations with the father-engagement training, programs, and resources they need to be father-inclusive.

In 1980, at the age of 19, Victor Barnett saw many of the young people of Milwaukee being pulled into the street life of gangs, crime, and violence. He used basketball as the tool to engage, mentor and guide youth towards an alternative path that would ensure their future success. From this vision and action, Running Rebels Community Organization was born. Today Running Rebels is a mentoring organization that serves 2,500 youth annually.

Through peaceful demonstrations, civic forums, media programs, personal accounts and political events, we will attempt to educate society about the severe cost and complete beneficial void of maintaining federal, state, county, and municipal registries across this nation.

NARSOL opposes dehumanizing registries and works to eliminate discrimination, banishment, and vigilantism against persons accused or convicted of sexual offenses through the use of impact litigation, public education, legislative advocacy, and media outreach in order to reintegrate and reconcile affected individuals and restore their constitutional rights.

Story Medicine is a collection of slow portraits expressed through raw, vulnerable, unscripted short documentaries created with love and care to provide a very real notion that you are not alone in your suffering.

The Alma Center works to heal, transform and evolve the unresolved pain of trauma that fuels the continuation of cycles of violence, abuse and dysfunction in families and community. We work primarily with men at-risk or involved in the criminal justice system, with a particular focus on men who have a history of domestic violence.

Our vision is that healing-focused care becomes a leading approach for re-imagining the criminal justice system, particularly in regard to intervention and prevention of family violence, and moves the system toward more restorative and effective models.

TransformHarm.org is a resource hub about ending violence. We are not an organization. This site offers an introduction to transformative justice. Created by Mariame Kaba and designed by Lu Design Studio, the site includes selected articles, audio-visual resources, curricula, and more.

You can use what is here, and submit recommendations to be added to the focus areas listed here. We hope you will use these materials to foster your own education and also share them with your communities to build something new. Only together can we transform our relationships to each other and society. We hope that this site helps in this effort.

The Transitions Clinic Network (TCN) is a national network of medical homes for individuals with chronic health conditions recently released from incarceration. Founded on the idea that the people closest to the problem are also closest to the solution, each clinic that adopts the TCN program employs a community health worker (CHW) with a history of incarceration as part of the clinical team.

Entrepreneurship has been a proven strategy for mentoring, training, and preparing for the workforce. We introduce every student to a curriculum that was designed by our founder, Marcus Bullock (CEO/Flikshop), to build confidence, learn strategy and communication skills, and how to plan for a life of entrepreneurship.

Defy’s entrepreneurial programs enable one of America’s largest forgotten communities to defy the odds. We equip them with new skills, new connections, and a new belief to match their new purpose, and succeed in their new life of economic independence.

Commissary Club is a free app that connects people with records with one another. Find a job, watch live events, hear music and take a class.

ConConnect provides the justice-impacted community with resources and tools to make a successful Reentry plan and create a pathway towards professional employment or opportunities through networking and building professional connections.

We Adapt is a movement. Established in 2020, our mission was formed in response to worldwide pandemic, racial inequity, and political divide. Adaptation occurs when a challenge presents itself. Our objective is to provide peer support and mentorship to individuals that helps them find the intervention suitable for their lives so that they can reach the most sustainable, healthy, and productive adaptation possible.

Helping organizations understand the full potential of people with criminal records and employing personal attention and innovative presentations to guide organizations to a successful partnership with system-impacted employees, students, and clients.

To empower professionals to recognize their own leadership and use their voices to mobilize individuals and teams to create the change society needs.

Designing Justice + Designing Spaces is an Oakland-based nonprofit architecture and real estate development firm with a mission to end mass incarceration and structural inequity. We have specific expertise in community engagement, evidence-based design research, and designing for peacemaking and reparation. We engage communities in the design and development of new buildings, spaces, and tools to address the root causes of mass incarceration. Our work seeks to counter the societal inequities evident in the dominant architectural models of courthouses and prisons, and we do so through the creation of new prototypes such as peacemaking centers, transitional housing, and mobile villages.

Led by people who are directly impacted, EXPO is committed to dismantling all systems that support mass incarceration and excessive supervision. We are dedicated to creating just systems with policies that build healthy families and safe communities.

The Badger Institute has published reports and stories suggesting alternatives that will keep Wisconsin safe but rein in expenditures and help former inmates rejoin society.

Americans for Prosperity (AFP) exists to recruit, educate, and mobilize citizens in support of the policies and goals of a free society at the local, state, and federal level, helping every American live their dream – especially the least fortunate.

Wisconsin Alliance for Youth Justice is for families and advocates of justice involved youth. We support, inform and advocate.

Our mission is to empower women and girls to create sustainable lives post-incarceration. We drive change in the social justice movement by connecting them to housing, food, healthcare, living wage employment, and entrepreneurship opportunities, education, and advocacy that amplifies the voices of those who have been impacted by the criminal legal system.

The FREE Campaign was founded in 2016 by women who are members of EXPO Wisconsin, when they began to notice the lack of discussion of women’s particular incarceration challenges. FREE has developed networks of directly impacted women from around the state, with particularly strong chapters in Eau Claire and Milwaukee. 

POW! Partnership of Women is a community of women that seeks to transform lives in the Henderson County area through high-impact and lifelong giving.

The CRC was founded in 2004 serving justice-involved women and human trafficking survivors. CRC supports women as they turn their lives around, through their trademark programs that have been recognized internationally. 

Justice Arts Coalition (JAC) unites teaching artists, arts advocates, artists who are or have been incarcerated and their allies, harnessing the transformative power of the arts to reimagine justice.

Finding Prison Artists is easy by searching our trusted network of top-rated Prison Artists.