A new class at the University of Wisconsin Law School aims to fill gaps in traditional legal training by letting students learn from a formerly incarcerated professor.
The class, called Criminal Justice System: A Lived Experience Perspective, aims to provide students with a real image of incarceration, from arrest to reentry.
Dant’e Cottingham is a co-instructor who served substantial time in Wisconsin’s prison system. He's now a reentry and outreach specialist for the Remington Center at the Law School.
He said students are often taught to understand what the law says on paper but lack exposure to its real-world impacts.
"I told the students, you guys bring a learned experience to the table," said Cottingham. "I bring a lived experience to the table… So, my whole hope is to connect their learned experience with my lived experience and create something new, something more potent, something more powerful."
The class is in its first semester. Cottingham said not only is it already proving to be transformational for students, but it’s also changing the narrative by showing people what’s possible during life after prison.
Law School Clinical Professor and Remington Center Director Adam Stevenson co-facilitates the class with Cottingham. He said what makes it so unique is that it centers the voices of criminal defendants.
He said their perspectives are often absent despite their lives being fundamentally changed by the criminal justice system.
"The system, for good, for bad, is a system based around humans, and has all of blessings and curses of being a human system," said Stevenson. "And the students really are demonstrating that they're understanding that and engaging with that in a way that I think I didn't even quite anticipate."
Stevenson said, to his knowledge, this is the first time a class like this has been taught. He stressed that in his 15-year teaching career, he’s never seen a more engaged class of students, and emphasizes how the experience is preparing them to be better people and lawyers.
