“Teaching in prison has been the most democratizing experience of my life,” says award-winning journalist and Odyssey cofounder Jean Feraca. She adds, “It cuts me down to size while it equalizes and exalts me. It is humbling to observe how much raw talent, human potential, and untapped humanity lie fallow in our grotesquely punitive prison system.”
Read on to discover how teaching the humanities behind bars led to the creation of Odyssey Beyond Bars and how Jean’s innovative approach opened up new opportunities, transforming lives wherever her students happened to be.
Three years before Peter Moreno moved from Seattle to Madison and began directing Odyssey’s credit-bearing prison program, Jean Feraca joined Rev. Jerry Hancock in doing restorative justice work in several Wisconsin prisons through the Prison Ministry Project. A volunteer at the men’s Fox Lake Correctional Institution campaigned to have Jean teach Odyssey material, too. Texts by Plato, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Walt Whitman proved as transformational in the prisons as they were in Odyssey classes.
Assigned “The Allegory of the Cave” from Plato’s Republic, incarcerated students were asked to describe how the cave they were born into led them to the cave of prison. One of Jean’s students cited over 100 caves he had lived in, beginning his essay, “Being black was a cave, being white was a cave, being Native American was a cave.” With another class, Jean discovered one man had already mastered the text on his own: “It turned out that Andre, a deep, thoughtful man who had been in and out of solitary confinement for many years, had taught The Allegory to his fellow inmates while in solitary by the ingenious method of communicating through the building’s pipes.”
While teaching in Fox Lake, Jean met a Native American elder forced in his youth to attend an infamous boarding school to be ‘de-culturated.’ He rebelled by maintaining his native language and inspiring younger members of his tribe. When Jean asked him why he had signed up twice for Odyssey, he told her, “This is a good thing you’re doing. It teaches the men to have a moral compass, an internal locus of control. Keep doing it.”
In addition to Plato, Jean brings other philosophers, essayists, and poets into the prisons. “It is especially edifying to witness, as so often happens when we expose the men to women writers such as Maya Angelou and Emily Dickinson, that they soften and begin to develop a genuine appreciation and respect for the women in their lives and for women in general. I am remembering, as an example, a moving tribute one man wrote in honor of Michelle Obama as his role model.”
During the pandemic, Jean created videos on humanities topics that were shown to incarcerated women at the Wisconsin Resource Center, a treatment facility in Oshkosh for incarcerated individuals suffering from mental illness. Last spring, she offered a successful memoir class at Ellsworth, a minimum-security prison for women in Racine. “Journaling and memoir writing are proven tools for developing self-understanding and self-transcendence,” Jean comments, and she looks forward to teaching women this fall at Taycheedah Correctional Institution, a women’s facility in Fond du Lac, WI. She likes the transcendent sound of OBB’s title now (Odyssey Beyond Bars rather than Odyssey Behind Bars) and calls the non-credit enrichment work she’s doing with both men and women “Discover Odyssey!”
Jean Feraca has championed the power of the humanities her whole career, whether as a board member for the Wisconsin Humanities Council, a host for Wisconsin Public Radio, or an instructor for Odyssey. “The humanities teach us to be human. As Socrates says, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ The humanities teach us how to examine our lives, develop a sense of self-worth, and ultimately prepare us to become citizens in a democracy, learning from one another and caring for one another. We see this happen yearly in UW-Odyssey. Teaching the humanities in prison, I have observed the same phenomenon.”
Asked why she and her husband (biochemist Alan Attie) generously support Odyssey and Odyssey Beyond Bars with their philanthropic giving, Jean’s answer is simple: “Because Odyssey transforms lives and is my most enduring legacy.”