Good Good Good · 2 hours ago

Formerly Incarcerated Men Lead Reforms in Wisconsin

Frank Davis and Aaron Hicks know something that no university degree can teach: that the most powerful thing a person can offer someone who is suffering is proof that survival is possible. Both formerly incarcerated, they returned voluntarily to the institution they had left behind - stepping, as one participant noted, "into an environment they swore to never come to again" - to lead ECHO, a nine-week program at Racine Correctional Institution built around the premise that people in prison can begin remaking their lives before they ever walk out the door. Where outside facilitators had spoken the same words and watched them fall flat, Davis and Hicks walked in and the men "started leaning in," because the messenger carried the message in his bones. What emerged wasn't just a curriculum on accountability and reentry skills, but something rarer: a room where men labeled by a system as offenders were asked, quietly and seriously, "who do you say that you are?" The story of ECHO is ultimately a story about what becomes possible when those who have been most harmed by a broken system are trusted to help repair it.