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When I first entered Wisconsin’s prison system in 2013, I did not understand how much of the punishment extended outside the walls. One part can trap people long after release: extended supervision and the rule that erases progress when supervision is revoked.

Under Wisconsin’s truth-in-sentencing law, a judge sets an initial confinement term and a separate term of extended supervision, which requires following at least 18 standard rules, including regular reports to a supervision agent and blanket consent to searches. You serve the confinement. Then you serve the supervision. If your supervision is revoked, you return to prison with no credit for the years you spent. People call that lost “street time.”

Here is the math in plain terms. Say someone gets 10 years of initial confinement and 10 years of extended supervision. They get out, stay incident-free for eight years, then get revoked for a supervision violation or after being charged with a new charge. Those eight years do not count as sentencing credit. They go back to prison, and they can still walk out facing the same years of supervision they already lived. Progress on the street does not count the way many people assume it should.

I lived a version of that trap. After opioid addiction and drug charges in my early 20s, I left prison on strict extended supervision. A relapse put me on a hold. An administrative process, not the original sentencing judge, determined whether to revoke my supervision. I went back behind bars. Freedom on paper felt temporary because one slip could restart the clock on my extended supervision.

Thousands of people are revoked from post-prison supervision in Wisconsin each year. At the end of 2024, Wisconsin had 22,240 adults on parole or other forms of post-prison supervision, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics — 473 people per 100,000 adults, compared with 250 nationally. During 2024, 5,770 people exited post-prison supervision in Wisconsin. Of those, 1,720 — nearly 30% — returned to prison after having their supervision revoked, compared with 18.5% nationally. The BJS data doesn’t show why each revocation occurred. It does show how many people move through the system. 

Wisconsin’s Department of Corrections has said it wants fewer revocations for technical violations. That goal matters. So did Gov. Tony Evers’s August 2025 veto of Assembly Bill 85, which would have required the DOC to recommend revocation for people charged with a new crime. The Legislative Reference Bureau estimated that the bill would have sent thousands of people back into prison each year at a projected cost of more than $330 million in the first two years, with hundreds of millions in additional ongoing annual costs. While the veto kept agents’ discretion intact, it did not fix street-time forfeiture.

And revocation is only part of the picture. A federally funded Wisconsin data snapshot found that people released from prison in 2020 after serving time for violent offenses had spent an average of 6.3 years incarcerated, compared with 5 years nationally. That excludes later returns on the same sentence. We should know how much prison time a judgment of conviction actually produces from beginning to end.

Other states handle street time differently. Minnesota cuts one month from active supervision for every two compliant months, subject to its rules and a public-safety review. Michigan counts time on parole as time serving the sentence, except for certain violation periods. Both systems distinguish between time spent following the rules in the community and time connected to a violation.

A fairer rule is not soft on crime. It is honest about time already served in the community without a new conviction. Wisconsin should credit street time on revocation for technical violations, and it should require a clear, public accounting when street time is stripped after a new conviction. Agents should keep their discretion. Lawmakers should stop proposing automatic-revocation shortcuts that fill prison cells without making neighborhoods safer.

Wisconsin once led on rehabilitation: early parole, the Huber Law and belief that people could return as neighbors. Street-time erasure pulls the other way. It turns supervision into a revolving door with a disappearing calendar. If the state wants successful reentry after prison, it must stop erasing the years people already spent trying to rebuild their lives.

Andrew Drasen is the author of “A Vision of Hope: A Story of Redemption and Purpose” and the founder of ReturnPath, a reentry curriculum. He lives in Franklin.

Guest opinion: Wisconsin should stop erasing ‘street time’ after prison is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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On Aug. 28, Milwaukee County Judge David Borowski, during a hearing for a defendant charged with triple homicide, learned the defendant had used a county jail-issued tablet to discuss threatening witnesses. 

Borowski revoked the defendant’s tablet access and ordered him confined to his cell around the clock. The judge also pointed to two other recent instances in which tablets and laptops had been used in ways detrimental to personal and public safety.

“Why is the sheriff’s department handing laptops or iPads to defendants?” Borowski asked.

The comments soon went viral, picked up by candidates, public relations firms and political influencers. Few explained why tablets and laptops exist in correctional facilities, how common they are across the country or what actually happened in the security lapse. Instead, a nuanced issue was reduced to a single alarming anecdote.

The sheriff’s office would later note that it does not hand out iPads, but rather “pre-programmed devices with limited capabilities.”

Tablets have been used in jails and prisons nationally for well over a decade. They are now used in 48 state prison systems, the Federal Bureau of Prisons and numerous county jails throughout Wisconsin. They were introduced to help incarcerated people communicate with loved ones and access educational programming. Yes, the companies that provide them also profited from poor, disproportionately Black and brown families in the process. See Worth Rises for more information on this issue.

This is how the model works in Milwaukee County: Incarcerated users and their families pay the cost, not taxpayers. Over time, better vendors entered the market, prices dropped and some services became free. What has never changed is that these tablets do not provide internet access. They operate on a controlled intranet system. These cost and access dynamics are why tablets were requested in the first place.

Correctional officials have credited tablets with reducing violence and disturbances inside correctional facilities. Some jurisdictions have reported declines of up to 40%, and the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons described the agency’s tablet program as reducing administrative burdens and allowing staff to focus more on institutional safety, not as a security risk it was forced to accept.

This is not a partisan issue. Some of the nation’s most conservative states have rolled out tablets to every person in custody, regardless of charges or convictions. Sheriffs, who as a group tend to skew conservative, have widely approved their use because those who actually work with incarcerated people understand the benefits they provide.

Responding to the misuse of a few by eliminating a beneficial service for everyone mistakes the appearance of action for the work of actually solving the problem.

Tablets do not inherently create greater opportunities for witness intimidation. They simply create a more visible story when they happen to be the tool used. If tablets disappeared tomorrow, people could still call home, write letters or find other ways to intimidate witnesses.

We do not even know the full story of how this breach occurred. 

But tablet security features are more than capable of preventing situations like it. A more useful conversation would focus on identifying and closing the security gap that allowed it.

While I was incarcerated, I had access to a tablet during the final two years of my 17-year sentence. The growth, efficiency and preparation for the real world it gave me as a writer, student, researcher and future employee were light-years beyond what I achieved during the previous 15 years.

Most people do not realize that 90% to 95% of incarcerated people will eventually return home. The only question is who we want them to be when they do.

The nonprofit I founded while incarcerated, The Community, publishes rehabilitative videos, newsletters and podcast episodes that reach more than one million incarcerated people each month through these tablets. The positive feedback and outcomes have been considerable.

But what technology builds, fear can still take away.

I once tried to pay for the language-learning software Rosetta Stone so people inside could learn Spanish. Instead, all of the existing language tapes and CDs were removed because someone unfamiliar with the fact that they had been available for years worried that people might learn another language to plan something illegal.

That episode illustrates how easily a single anecdote — or even a hypothetical possibility — can define the entire conversation, producing a hammer where a screwdriver would do.

As a national advocate for criminal legal system reform, I have many concerns about tablets in jails and prisons, so I do not defend them uncritically. But many outlets covering this incident stopped at the sensational headline instead of doing the reporting the story required. Political candidates and influencers with their own agendas were then given free rein to use the incident as content.

Half a story, told quickly and left uncorrected, leaves the public further from understanding a system it pays dearly for every day.

Wisconsin deserves a justice system more worthy of that name. This episode demonstrates how far we remain from that goal — but also that we know exactly how to get there, if decision-makers take the problem seriously.

Shannon Ross is the founder of The Community and a founding member of the Justice Forward Wisconsin coalition, which prepares incarcerated people for healthier futures, creates opportunities for them and their loved ones and advocates for positive systems change for everyone impacted by the criminal legal system.

Editor’s note: This column was updated to correctly describe the facility where the defendant accused of using a tablet to intimidate witnesses was held.

Guest opinion: The debate over jail tablets is missing the point is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Meta agreed Wednesday to pay $17 billion and add stronger child-safety measures to its Facebook and Instagram platforms as part of a landmark legal settlement that ended a trial over teen social media addiction and settled claims filed by 47 states.

Wisconsin would receive at least $219 million and up to $313 million if conditions involving other social media companies are met, through what state Attorney General Josh Kaul called the “largest Big Tech settlement in the history of the country.”

The settlement resolved a pivotal case years in the making that sought to hold the tech giant accountable for the role its platforms played in undermining children’s mental health. The effort targeted features designed to hook young people’s attention.

“For years, Meta intentionally deceived the public about the addictive and harmful design features that have wreaked havoc on youth mental health,” Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones said. The settlement “will put an end to these dangerous practices and deliver meaningful relief that will protect children from online harm.”

“This resolution provides for several changes that prioritize kids’ well-being over Meta’s profits — as it should have been all along,” Kaul said in a statement. “This is a monumental step in changing the role of social media in kids’ lives for the better.”

Speaking at a Wednesday press conference, Kaul listed a variety of potential uses for the money, including school district grants for mental health programs, youth crisis intervention, after-school programs, digital wellness instruction or training for medical providers on the effects of interactive media use and body dysmorphia.

If approved by the court, the deal will stop an avalanche of litigation by states against Meta, although the company still faces lawsuits from individuals and school districts across the U.S. For the states, the settlement delivers money for programs to benefit kids’ mental health, including after-school or summer activities and digital literacy counselors.

Advocates cheered the new protections, including default time limits and the disabling of features such as “like” counts.

But “we cannot truly protect all children and teens until these protections are required on every platform and are permanent — that’s something only Congress can do,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of The Tech Oversight Project.

The settlement also includes payments resolving claims arising from Meta’s sharing of nonpublic Facebook user information with third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, ahead of the 2016 election.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the money would be paid out over 10 years, with the state getting at least $1.5 billion. New Jersey expects to receive at least $525 million. Massachusetts said it was in line for at least $366 million. Virginia’s share is worth $353 million.

Meta urges rivals to adopt similar safety measures

Meta said in a blog post that it was “building on our longstanding efforts to empower parents and support teens.”

“Ensuring teens have a safe and productive experience on our platforms is an absolute imperative for Meta,” the company said. “We want to get this right for parents and teens, and that’s why we partnered with state attorneys general to set a new industry standard.”

The company urged rivals TikTok and YouTube to adopt similar safety measures.

The $17 billion settlement is a fraction of Meta’s 2025 revenue of $201 billion.

The agreement cuts short an ongoing court case involving California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, which were among 29 states that sued Meta in 2023. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was among those expected to take the stand before a jury in federal court in California.

The lawsuit accused Meta of contributing to the youth mental health crisis by deliberately designing features that addict children to its platforms and hiding them from the public. The case also argued that Meta violated federal laws by routinely collecting data on children under 13 without their parents’ consent.

The trial kicked off last week in Oakland, California, with U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers overseeing the proceedings. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, began his testimony late Tuesday and defended Meta’s record and progress on child safety and privacy.

The cases in other states had been expected to go to trial later. In addition, nine attorneys general filed lawsuits in their respective states.

New features to include time limits and curbs on push notifications

Under the proposed settlement, Meta agreed to adopt a series of safety features, including a “hard cap” on daily time limits and pauses for children using Instagram and Facebook.

It will eliminate push notifications during weekday school hours and bring in “robust” age-assurance measures and “age-appropriate” content controls to prevent bullying and harmful material about eating disorders and self-harm.

There will be stronger and more user-friendly parental controls and limits on social comparison features such as “like” counts.

An independent auditor will assess how Meta is implementing the safety features and how effective they are.

Meta put the settlement at $18 billion, a figure that apparently includes a large award for Texas.

The company said 30% of that amount — about $5.3 billion — will be released to states only if rivals YouTube and TikTok meet two conditions: implementing similar safety features, including a one-hour daily time limit, a nighttime block and age-assurance measures; and paying the same amount, split between the two companies.

Neither YouTube owner Google nor TikTok responded immediately to requests for comments.

Wisconsin part of bipartisan coalition

The federal lawsuit was the result of an investigation led by a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general. It followed newspaper reports, first by The Wall Street Journal in 2021, that found that the company knew about the harm Instagram can cause teenagers — especially teen girls — when it comes to mental health and body image issues.

Meta has since added a host of safety features to Instagram, including separate accounts for teenagers with stronger protections around messaging and privacy, along with content restrictions.

But child safety experts, along with some former Meta employees, have long contended that the features are little more than window dressing.

Arturo Béjar, a former Meta engineering director, said during his testimony last week that Meta consistently prioritized profits over safety in designing its products, focusing on how often and for how long people used them, even if it was detrimental to their mental well-being.

“If you step away from the product, they are not going to make any money,” he said.

While the four states in the Oakland trial did not officially say how much they had been seeking, Meta said in a court filing that financial penalties in the case could amount to as much as $1.4 trillion — a figure legal experts said was unlikely, if not impossible.

Jim Malewitz of Wisconsin Watch contributed reporting.

Wisconsin to receive up to $313 million in landmark Meta settlement is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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After reading Wisconsin Watch’s preview about the upcoming commutation hearings — and learning that people convicted of serious crimes, including murder, are among the first cases to be heard — I find it mind-boggling.

I understand that Gov. Tony Evers’ executive order establishing Wisconsin’s commutation process specifically excluded people convicted of any offense on a broad list of disqualifying sex offenses. Yet the order allows someone who took another person’s life to potentially receive early release. That contrast deserves serious discussion.

Wisconsin’s prison system also faces significant capacity and financial pressures, with more than 23,000 people incarcerated in facilities not designed for today’s prison population. 

Taxpayers are paying to incarcerate people who have spent two or three decades behind bars, including some whose offenses did not involve death or physical injury.

The commutation conversation cannot be only about the people we all agree should not be released. Where is the conversation — and the support — for those who have demonstrated that they should be considered for release?

This debate also raises questions about forgiveness and second chances. Our federal government has demonstrated that clemency can be used for serious offenses. Shouldn’t our elected state officials at least be willing to have an honest conversation about who has earned a second chance?

When I read about Wisconsin’s commutation bill in Wisconsin Right Now and came across the stories of two men who received decades-long, de facto life sentences for armed robbery — despite no one suffering bodily injuries — I was stunned. One of the men later saved the life of a correctional officer during an attack by another inmate. And both the court and the district attorney agreed that he had served enough time.

There are always two sides to every story. But perhaps elected officials should look more closely at people who didn’t get a fair shake in life, who have paid their debt to society and who are now in their 50s and capable of becoming productive members of their communities.

This isn’t about being soft on crime. It’s about recognizing rehabilitation, proportionality and redemption while confronting the enormous financial cost of keeping people incarcerated indefinitely when they have demonstrated that they are no longer the same people who entered prison decades ago.

Wisconsin has an opportunity to address both a massive taxpayer burden and one of the state’s most difficult ethical questions. The question is whether our elected officials are willing to look beyond the headlines, examine individual cases and support people who have genuinely earned a second chance.

The commutation conversation should be about all of these people — not just the cases that generate the strongest opposition.

Tonia Thornhill is a Milwaukee resident.

Guest opinion: Wisconsin’s commutation debate should look beyond the toughest cases is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.