Former Warden Starts Scholarship Fund For Children Of Incarcerated Parents

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The former warden of the Oxford Federal Prison in Wisconsin has launched a national college scholarship program for children of prison inmates.

He says educating these children can help stop them from following in their parents’ footsteps.

Percy Pitzer is a native of Boscobel and spent his professional life as a warden in the federal prison system, including two years running Wisconsin’s only federal prison in Oxford in the late ’90s. In retirement, he’s spending his time raising money to help the children of prison inmates go to college and avoid the path their parents took.

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“As a correctional professional I can walk through any visiting room and almost tell you who our next client’s going to be,” says Pitzer. “If we can keep one kid from going to prison, we’ve done our job.”

Studies have found that the children of inmates stand a good chance of winding up in prison themselves. Pitzer says his foundation recently launched an effort to get inmates involved.

“If inmates contribute the cost of a candy bar a month, we can actually send hundreds if not thousands of their kids to school. Our saying is, ‘It’s cheaper to send a kid to Yale than it is to jail.’”

The program gets praise from Linda Ketcham of Madison Urban Ministry, which runs several programs that help the families of inmates.

“I think it’s a great way of engaging … dads who are incarcerated, who are often disconnected from their kids, who often have not been as responsible as we culturally would expect them to be,” said Ketcham. “This is a great way for them to give back.”

The foundation hasn’t made a big dent in the problem yet. So far, it has awarded 23 $1,000 college scholarships, including two to the children of Wisconsin inmates.