Dant'e Cottingham
Dant’e Cottingham is a reentry specialist, educator, restorative justice practitioner, Certified Peer Support Specialist, author, and speaker focused on criminal justice, racial equity, reentry, and transformation. After receiving a life sentence as a teenager and serving 27 years in Wisconsin’s prison system, he returned home in 2022 and now serves as Reentry and Outreach Support Specialist at the UW–Madison Law School’s Frank J. Remington Center. He created and teaches the UW–Madison Law School course, “Criminal Justice System: A Lived Experience Perspective.” He also serves as a board member of the Wisconsin Prison Project (WPP), which brings restorative justice programming inside prisons throughout Wisconsin, and is the author of the forthcoming memoir, “The Formula: From the Life You Were Given to the Life You Choose.”
In-Person | PM Session B
2:45 PM - 4:00 PM
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Facilitated By: Dant’e Cottingham
Audience: Open to Everyone
This session connects most directly to Repair while also engaging Abolition and Solidarity. Drawing from my experience of being sentenced to life at 17, serving 27 years, taking accountability for the harm I caused, and now working in reentry and legal education, the session asks what justice should make possible beyond punishment. It introduces The Formula, six interconnected capacities that helped me survive, transform, and choose a different life. Participants will examine how change and repair occur across the self, relationships, culture, and structures, and consider whether our institutions support people’s capacity for accountability, transformation, belonging, and contribution…or continue to define them by their worst act.