A new report outlines trends in jail bookings and argues that the data shows that a punitive response to social and economic needs isn't working. | Getty Images

A recently released Prison Policy Initiative report, using data from the Jail Data Initiative, reveals that in 2023 there were 7.6 million admissions to jail, but that 1 in 4 admissions were for people previously booked in the last year, with Indigenous people/Native Americans the most likely to be booked again.

“Based on the Jail Data Initiative data, we estimate that over 5.6 million unique individuals are booked into jail annually and about 1.2 million are jailed multiple times in a given year,” the report found.  “Further analysis reveals patterns of bookings — and repeat bookings in particular — across the country: The jail experience disproportionately impacts Black and Indigenous people, and law enforcement continues to use jailing as a response to poverty and low-level ‘public order’ offenses.”

The report, prepared by Emily Widra and Wendy Sawyer, is titled “Who is jailed, how often and why: Our Jail Data Initiative collaboration offers a fresh look at the misuse of local jails.”

The Jail Data Initiative gathered information from 1,000 jails in the U.S. daily that included online jail rosters. The 1,000 jails represent approximately a third of 2,850 jails in America.

Of the 1,000 jails, 648 offered jail rosters available for a two-year window (July 1, 2021-June 30, 2023) and an additional year (out to June 30, 2024) to document those who had been booked again.

Previously, back in 2019, the Prison Policy Initiative released a report titled “Arrest, Release, Repeat: How police and jails are misused to respond to social problems.” That 2019 report reflects a survey from the National Survey of Drug Use and Health while the 2024 report reflects data collected directly from jails.

The 2024 report notes that more than 1 in 5, or 22%, in the study were booked more than once within 12 months.

Black people, who represent 14% of the population, were booked on unique charges at 32% of the total cases. 

Indigenous people, who represent 1% of the U.S. population, but are 3% of the incarcerated population, were rebooked back in jail within one year at 33%, contrasted with 23% for whites booked a second time within one year, 20% for Blacks, 19% for other people of color, and 18% for Asian American or Pacific Islanders.

The 2024 report notes that while the rates of booking and rebooking for women are similar to men in their demographic there is a growing trend of more women being incarcerated in jail.

“From 2021 to 2022, the number of women in jail increased 9% while the number of men in jail increased only 3%. The jailing of women has a devastating ‘ripple effect’ on families: At least 80% of women booked into jail are mothers, including over 55,000 women who are pregnant when they are admitted. Beyond having to leave their children in someone else’s care, these women are impacted by the brutal side effects of going to jail: aggravation of mental health problems, a greater risk of suicide, and a much higher likelihood of ending up homeless or deprived of essential support and benefits. So while women may account for a relatively small share of people booked into jails, those jail admissions have serious and long lasting consequences for the women, their families, and their communities.”

The report notes that 1 in 10 booked were older adults and roughly 7% of those older adults were rebooked within a year.

The report also notes, from 1999 to 2021, there was a growing trend of those 55 years old and older being arrested.

“Considering most older adults are arrested for low-level, non-violent offenses like trespassing, driving offenses, and disorderly conduct, it is likely that the older adults admitted to jail are in need of other systems of support outside of the criminal legal system, like substance use treatment, accessible medical care, and behavioral health services,” the report states.

In the Jail Data Initiative, there were 140 jails that shared the housing status of inmates, whether residents were homeless/unhoused or not: 4% reported they were unhoused and 42% of those unhoused were booked again within a year compared to 20% of those who had housing.

“This finding adds to the existing evidence of law enforcement’s ineffective but disproportionate and deliberate targeting of people experiencing homelessness,” the report states.

The 2024 report also compared recent charges reflected to  data collected in a 2002 Bureau of Justice Statistics  survey of inmates in local jails, based on self-reporting by inmates, and concluded there had been a noticeable decrease in drug charges since 2002 (from 25% to 14%), a smaller decrease for property charges, very little variation for violent offense charges, but a 6% increase in public order charges, such as disorderly conduct, loitering or public intoxication.

The report notes its findings support a widely accepted conclusion: “People who are arrested and booked more than once per year often have other vulnerabilities, including homelessness, in addition to the serious medical and mental health needs …”

This report has been updated to clarify how the jail admission and readmission data was reported and calculated.

A Milwaukee police squad in front of the Municipal Court downtown. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)

Wisconsin’s municipal courts issued more than 27,000 arrest warrants and writs of commitment against people who failed to pay local ticket fines between January 2023 and August 2024, according to a report from ACLU of Wisconsin.

The extensive use of these tools, which include jailing people for failing to pay fines or forcing them to appear at a court date in 173 of the state’s 219 municipal courts (reflecting the number of courts which responded to the ACLU’s open records requests for data)  create a tiered local justice system, the report found. People who can afford a fine simply pay it and move on while those who can’t afford the fine must deal with the shockwaves a stint in jail can send through their lives. 

In 2023, the report states, Wisconsin municipal courts collected more than $35 million in fines. 

“Carceral sanctions for failure to pay municipal forfeitures create an unequal system of punishment: one for those with financial means and one for those without,” Dr. Emma Shakeshaft, the ACLU attorney who wrote the report, said in a statement. “People who are able to pay a municipal court ticket can address the citation without ever having to step in court or think about the ticket again. People who cannot pay the citation amount in full experience increased court and law enforcement involvement and a long series of harmful consequences that create barriers to well-being, employment, and community involvement.”

The report found that during the time period the ACLU assessed, Wisconsin municipal courts had more than 50,000 active warrants and commitments for people failing to pay fines. The data also showed the punitive actions were disproportionately used against people of color. In Milwaukee, which houses the state’s largest municipal court and employs three full-time judges, 71% of warrants and 49% of commitments issued between January 2023 and August 2024 were issued against Black residents. 

Even a short time in jail can have huge consequences for a person’s life, the report states, causing people to miss work or to be unable to care for family members over something as trivial as a municipal fine. 

“Monetary sanctions harm individuals and their families,” the report states. “Not only do these fines, fees, surcharges, and forfeitures have a more severe and disproportionate impact on those without access to financial resources, but they also cause harmful short- and long-term collateral consequences.”

Among the consequences of jail time for unpaid tickets are  driver’s license suspensions, caregiving emergencies, loss of employment, loss of housing and detrimental health impacts, the report found. “Overall, this leads to less household resources, limited social mobility, and negative financial consequences.”

The report also notes that using incarceration as the “teeth” of enforcement against minor violations is more expensive in the long term because of the expense to law enforcement and local jail staff.

Municipalities have a number of other tools available to collect these debts under state law, including the ability to “intercept taxes, garnish wages and levy bank accounts via the state debt collection agency, use a private debt collection agency, issue a civil judgment, transfer unclaimed property, issue a driver’s license suspension, or issue an arrest warrant for incarceration.”

A number of recommendations for municipal courts are made in the report, including eliminating the use of commitments and warrants in these cases, appointing legal counsel to people during hearings, reviewing and removing old warrants that are still active in local systems and improving data collection.

Transfr, a New York company, seeks to put virtual reality technology in the hands of people who are incarcerated in Wisconsin, hoping they can overcome barriers to employment once released. 

“It’s life-changing for an individual to be able to come out of incarceration with actual career pathways,” said Ruben Gaona, executive director of My Way Out, an organization that supports people who are leaving reincarceration and one of Transfr’s local collaborators. 

“They’d be able to go out into the community and say, ‘OK, you know what: I’m not only here to get a job, I’m out here to get a career.’” 

Avoiding reincarceration

Research has found that a criminal record leads to a 50% reduction in callbacks and job offers. 

The Wisconsin Department of Corrections, among others, reports that the more likely someone with a criminal record is employed, the less likely the person is to return to incarceration. 

According to the department’s 2022 report, people who “completed vocational programming had lower rearrest, reconviction and reincarceration rates … compared to their peers who were identified as having a vocational programming need but who did not receive programming.” 

“From a personal and professional standpoint, I can tell you that a good-paying, career-supporting job is very essential to someone staying out and keeping that recidivism rate down,” said Andre Brown, employment specialist with Project RETURN, a reentry nonprofit established nearly 50 years ago.

For all the talk about pipelines into prison, Brown and his colleagues are trying to create a pipeline out of prison.

“If one can support themselves, pay their bills, take care of their family and have some fulfillment, one has no time to think of crime,” Brown said. 

Inside and outside

My Way Out provides six weeks of training and education to people inside Milwaukee County Community Reintegration Center, a county-run correctional facility. This support is designed to help people with job searches, including résumé writing and interviewing skills. 

With Transfr, Gaona and his team see an opportunity to expand their support by adding four weeks of virtual reality training for in-demand vocations, in fields such as construction, manufacturing,  hospitality and health care.

My Way Out staff also want to bring these resources to state prisons overseen by the Department of Corrections. 

“People will be able to come out (of incarceration) and take apprenticeship tests, so they’d start getting placement in apprenticeship programs and secure living-wage jobs,” said Gaona. 

Funding obstacle

Funding is the main obstacle to getting this technology into the hands of people who are incarcerated. 

The Department of Corrections does not have a budget for this type of technology but suggested that Transfr reach out to Wisconsin Workforce Development Boards, which partner with the department in reentry work, Beth Hardtke, director of communications for the Department of Corrections, said in an email. 

Ryan Leonhardt, state workforce manager for Transfr, said the company has had conversations with these boards but, for the most part, has heard that funding is not currently available from them as well.  

My Way Out applied for a grant that would help provide funding to work with Transfr, but its request was denied. 

Opportunities

Transfr offers more than 350 trainings, all 12 to 20 minutes, which teach foundational skills within various fields, Leonhardt said.

“If somebody is learning how to use calipers, they pick up calipers in the virtual environment. They set the calipers using the controls. They actually do the measurements,” said Leonhardt, explaining how Transfr users learn about this measurement tool common in engineering, metalworking and woodworking. “And then the final thing is they get step-by-step instruction from a digital coach, who then turns around and gives them an assessment.” 

Transfr also provides career explorations. Like the trainings, these are hands-on and guided by a coach but are five- to eight-minute experiences of a day in the life of a job “so people can get an idea of what it’s like,” Leonhardt said. 

Better trained workers are beneficial not just for the people getting trained but for the wider economy as well because of nationwide workforce shortages, Leonhardt said.

“Right now, the labor markets are such a way that if someone can come in and they have foundational skills … they’re going to have better chances for employment because they’re going to be able to meet their (employers’) needs right away,” he said. 

News414 is a service journalism collaboration between Wisconsin Watch and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service that addresses the specific issues, interests, perspectives and information needs identified by residents of central city Milwaukee neighborhoods. Learn more at our website or sign up for our texting service here.

Virtual reality technology connects people who are incarcerated to a new type of job training 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.

Humanity Unlocked podcast series logo | Courtesy Wisconsin Humanities

“There was something happening that was bigger than anything, any one of us or any group of us was doing. It was just too big to be just about poetry. It was a voice restored,” said  Joshua Wells, a formerly incarcerated person, speaking on the Wisconsin Humanities podcast series “Humanity Unlocked.”  

Now in its second season, the podcast offers listeners the stories of those who have been through the prison system and engaged with the humanities – poetry, writing, art and college classes  – discovering not only ways to express themselves but also an identity that’s larger than their criminal records.

The goal of the series is to “focus on amplifying the human stories of incarceration and lived experiences of individuals impacted by the justice system.” A thread through the series is that the humanities matter, especially in some of the darkest places where one’s humanity seems diminished the most.

The podcasts are hosted by Adam Carr, a Milwaukee storyteller, filmmaker, radio producer and historian who sets the narrative and places interviewees’ comments in a larger context. Co-host Dasha Kelly Hamilton is a writer, performance artist and creative change agent and 2021-22 Poet Laureate of Wisconsin.

In Episode 5, “Bead by Bead,” college student James Price talks about gaining discipline from practicing Native American beading at the Stanley Correctional Institute, a discipline he draws on in his college studies. 

Commenting on the story, Hamilton said that, contrary to reductive stereotypes, people who have been incarcerated are “philosophers. There are filmmakers. There are all brands of humans in those buildings (prisons) the same way there are all brands of humans walking around free, so finding a way to feed and fuel those parts of the people in those places is essential.” 

The idea for the podcasts grew out of Hamilton’s work in a poetry exchange with people inside and outside of prison, and producer Jen Rubin’s involvement with the University of Wisconsin’s Odyssey Beyond Bars Project conducting storytelling workshops in prisons.

“I think partly things like art, poetry and storytelling and history are ways that all of us can help find meaning in our life,” said Rubin. “I think Rob (Dr. Robert S. Smith, Director of the Center for Urban Research, Teaching & Outreach, Marquette University) from Episode Five says it really well – ‘If there’s any place we need help finding meaning in our lives, it’s in mass incarceration.’”

Over two years, interviews were conducted with residents inside and out of the prison system and with those who engaged them with poetry and writing courses, publishing newspapers and newsletters, offering space for art shows and teaching college classes.

Very little time is given to why the persons are or were in prison. Most of the podcast recounts their engagement with the humanities. Robert Taliaferro, who is mainly featured in Episode 3: “Three convicts, twenty dollars and a newspaper,” spent 38 years behind bars, but the podcast focuses on his path to become editor of the leading prison newspapers in America, The Prison Mirror.

Episodes

Episode 1: “Death-defying Feats,” takes excerpts from Hamilton’s poetry seminar in the Racine Correctional Institution. She sets up the writing prompts and then we hear commentary of the residents and excerpts of their work.

Episode 2: “A Mic and Five Minutes,” is about the Wisconsin Odyssey Beyond Bars project at Oakhill Correctional Facility where incarcerated students take an English 100 story and then tell  their stories in their own voices in a five-minute presentation.

Episode 3: “Three Convicts, Twenty Dollars, and a Newspaper” tells the history of a prison newspaper from the 1880s started by members of the Jessie James Gang, and the experience of Taliaferro to become an award-winning writer, and also about Shannon Ross, who started a newsletter that reaches 30,000, including those inside and out of prison.

Episode 4: “Art Against the Odds,” details the art-making journey of residents who struggled to find both the resources and encouragement to make art in prison, and the 2023  “Art Against the Odds” show in Milwaukee featuring 250 works by those who are or were incarcerated.

Episode 5: “Bead by Bead,” is a look at the Educational Preparedness Program (EPP) at Marquette University that integrates students enrolled at the Milwaukee campus with those who have been incarcerated or are still in the system.

Episode 6: “It’s Not Just a Vote,” explores those disenfranchised from voting because of their criminal record. Convicted felons in Wisconsin cannot vote until they have served their sentence and probation and parole. There are approximately 45,000 people in the state who are waiting to be allowed to vote.

There’s also more information with each episode, including profiles and information about the criminal justice system.

The first five episodes explore how humanities have affected people’s  lives both inside and outside the system. The  sixth explores  how the legacy of being in prison continues to affect  one’s humanity by witholding the right to vote.

“If your government’s telling you that you don’t count, you know, then how are you supposed to feel like you belong in your community?” said Rubin.

Carr said the sixth episode came out of the larger discussion of recognizing people’s  humanity.“I don’t know that most people would connect this specifically with a humanities curriculum,” he said of voting. In the larger conversation about how people survive the prison system and how they recover a sense of their own humanity when they get out, he said,  “it made sense for the arc of the season.” 

Inside the podcasts

The first five episodes illuminate why engaging with the humanities is more than just a feel-good  exercise.

Peter Moreno, featured in Episode 2: “A Mic and Five Minutes,” is the director of Odyssey Beyond Bars and an attorney and former law professor, who touts the merits of bringing writing classes to inmates to tell their stories.

“When people are given a platform to express themselves and are able to convey their personal story from inside prison in a way that other people can hear and understand, boy that humanizes things in a hurry,” he said.

Mark Español recently served a nine-year prison sentence, and talked about the impact of writing a story from his life and delivering a 5-minute presentation as part of a class he took from Kevin Mullen, an assistant professor of Continuing Studies at UW-Madison and director of  adult education for the UW-Odyssey Project, the larger campaign to bring higher education to low-income adult students.

“It made me feel human again,” Español said. “It made me feel human that class, that environment that he created allows us as inmates to not only be vulnerable, but to get to know each other personally.”

Students in Odyssey Beyond Bars can write about any subject. Español chose to write about one day in his life as a 5-year-old in his apartment and walking into a room where his sister was holding her boyfriend who had been shot.

“You know for almost a decade I’ve sat in prison just wondering where I went wrong, you know, how did I get here?” he said. “It all went back to that apartment. Things that I witnessed, that I was exposed to as a child that I should have never been exposed to, and that story was one day. It sucked that I had to go through that as a 5-year-old.”

Presenting a story has a deep effect, Hamilton said. 

“It shifts the skill sets and the calculation,” she said, describing a way of calculating how to survive that is different from the skills involved in storytelling. Instead of staying in “survival mode,” being able to  able to “process a story,”  to  “convert that memory into a five-minute presentation that is engaging to someone who doesn’t know you and wasn’t at that memory – it is not a small thing.”

Carr said those in the system are often reminded that what counts most about them is their crime or “the biggest mistake you’ve ever made and nothing else,” but engaging with the humanities opens another conversation.

Much of what is offered in prison under the umbrella of rehabilitation, Hamilton said, is premised on the assumption that a  resident has a “deficit” that is addressed with counseling or parenting or financial literacy classes. The humanities operates from a different assumption.

“It’s meeting people where they’re already full,” she said. “It’s giving people an opportunity to lean into that part that doesn’t deplete, that doesn’t diminish their humanity, their creativity.” 

A touching moment in Episode 4: “Art Against the Odds” comes when former incarcerated resident, Sarah Demerath, who missed years with her 14-year-old daughter while in prison, has the opportunity to see her daughter’s reaction to Demerath’s art featured in a large gallery show.

“When we got to the gallery, I had never seen her be so proud of me,” said Demerath. “She’s an artist and she was just as excited as me and she was like, ‘That’s my mom,’ and she was watching me do the interviews with the news and she was buzzing around the entire exhibit with this huge smile. Never in my life did I ever think that my art would be in a gallery, let alone my daughter and mom would be there with me to see it and it was beautiful.”

Listen to the podcast at wisconsinhumanities.org/podcast/.

Alternatives to incarceration drastically cut the jail population in Sawyer County, which used to have the fourth highest lock-up rate in Wisconsin | Getty Images

(This article is based on stories reported by Frank Zufall for the Sawyer County Record since 2017 and used with permission.)

In 2015 Sawyer County, a rural county in northwestern Wisconsin with a population around 18,000 at the time, had one of the highest incarceration rates in Wisconsin. 

According to a report by the Vera Institute of Justice,  Sawyer County ranked fourth in the state behind Menominee, Shawano and Forest Counties. As recently as 2019, the average number of persons in the jail each day in any month was 100.95. By August 2024, that number had fallen to 61.25. The trend is clearly downward. 

When so many county jails are bursting at the seams and struggling to recruit guards, why did Sawyer County’s jail population drop so much?

The biggest single reason is a decision made in 2017 to reconvene the county’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council (CJCC), a group representing judges and district attorneys along with law enforcement, probation and representatives of social services, with the goal of looking for alternatives to incarceration, focusing on programming and therapy.

Another factor that began around 2017 and gained momentum in 2018 was the pursuit of a second judge for the county. From 2014-16, Sawyer County Circuit Judge John Yackel had the highest caseload for one judge in the state. Because of the sheer volume of felony cases, many people who had charges pending waited weeks or months in jail for their court appearances.

A second judge was approved for Sawyer County and then a second courtroom was constructed for over $10 million. In August 2023, the second judge, Monica Isham, was sworn into office. 

Background

In March of 2017, Brenda Spurlock, Bayfield County Criminal Justice Coordinator, asked Sawyer County to participate in a Department of Justice planning grant called “Bridges to Treatment.” The program diverts inmates with mental illness or substance abuse from jail to community treatment programs.

The proposal, she said, called for the participants – including Bayfield and Ashland counties along with the Red Cliff, Bad River and Lac Courte Oreilles Tribal bands – to try new strategies to  divert eligible offenders into community treatment. 

“If you don’t start doing things differently, you are going to keep adding to your jail,” said Bayfield County Circuit Judge John Anderson months later at the May Bayfield County CJCC meeting after Spurlock made her pitch to the Sawyer County Public Safety Committee. 

Anderson said he was quoting a jail designer who had spoken at a jail-building committee 20 years previously.

Taking to heart the words of that consultant, Bayfield County leaders formed their CJCC to look for alternatives to jail. In 2017, Bayfield County’s jail population had fallen significantly enough that it had room to take the overflow from Sawyer County’s crowded jail.

Members of the local LCO Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, including two – Tweed Shuman and James Schlender, Jr. – both of whom were also Sawyer County supervisors in 2017 (Shuman is still in office), raised concerns about the high jail population, with over 70% of the residents being Native Americans.

In July 2017, then-Sawyer County Administrator Tom Hoff announced that Sawyer County would reconvene its CJCC, which had been disbanded for years. Hoff said the primary goal of the Sawyer County CJCC was to lower the daily jail population.

Schlender, who advocated for the CJCC and also for hiring a full-time coordinator, said the point of the council was to have the judge, district attorney, sheriff and jailer in the same room to look at trends, such as a high revocation rate for driver’s licenses, and see what could be done to ensure the same people don’t keep returning  to jail. Schlender also noted that many were in jail because of drug and alcohol problems.

“Rather than having them sit in jail with no services offered to them, maybe we can get a diversion program working with (Sawyer County) Health and Human Services and get them off to a treatment program and then you are going to see a reduction in the jail population,” he said.

County Supervisor Iras Humpreys, an advocate for reconvening the CJCC, pointed out at the July 2017 meeting that Sawyer County had spent $70,000 in 2017 to pay for housing jail residents in other counties, notably Bayfield County.

Humpreys also noted that among the 90 residents in the Sawyer County jail at the time, only 26 had been sentenced while 31 were sitting in jail because they were not able to pay for a cash bond as part of their bail.

Judge Anderson said it took years for the Bayfield County CJCC to have a positive impact because there were some stakeholders committed to the punishment mode but others to rehabilitation, and the two sides were not working together. “At first, if you said ‘evidence-based practice’ you’d see people rolling their eyes,” he said. “It took a lot of years of saying, ‘This is what the evidence is showing.’ It took a lot of years to change people’s way of thinking.”

Anderson said there are several studies on lowering recidivism that reveal what works and what doesn’t. “Boot camps are horrible,” Anderson said. “The DARE program has made no impact on recidivism. It doesn’t mean it’s bad, but if you think the DARE program has helped reduce recidivism with people who have drug and alcohol problems — zero. There are enough studies out there to prove it.”

Another “dumb idea,” he said, is to put people who can’t pay their fines in jail and even more so to send them to another county’s jail because while they are in jail they will not be able to pay the fines.

Launch

In the first months after the new program began, instead of dropping, Sawyer County’s jail population rose, hitting a record high for daily jail population in 2019 of 101.

But Judge Yackel, a member of the CJCC, was working with the CJCC coordinator to put accountability measures in place for people convicted of drug charges, including  an aggressive schedule of drug testing as a condition of their bond and as a way to keep them out of jail. In addition, the county brought  new programming to the jail residents, offering on-the-job training in the construction trades and in-house classes. 

JusticePoint: The group that made a difference

In 2018 a non-profit with expertise in criminal justice programming, JusticePoint,  did a multi-month study of Sawyer County jail residents and offered insights into the jail population.  In particular, it highlighted the high rate of unemployment of residents prior to incarceration.

Sawyer County Sheriff Doug Mrotek said he had learned about JusticePoint while attending the 2017 Wisconsin Badgers State Sheriff’s Association meeting and hearing Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney talk about its diversion and jail programming which helped reduce incarceration in his county. 

In 2020, the CJCC asked JusticePoint to help with its application for the state’s Treatment and Diversion Grant to help pay program costs  for non-violent adult offenders as an alternative to jail.

The Sawyer County CJCC also began discussions with JusticePoint to see if it would be able to run programs for the county after the retirement of the full-time criminal justice coordinator.

In January 2021, JusticePoint opened an office in the county building and began administering the county’s pretrial and diversion programs.  It also helped with programming in the jail and eventually worked with the court as it reconvened its Recovery/Drug Court, while also helping the sheriff institute a deflection program.

Many of the key stakeholders – judge, sheriff, county administrator, and jailer – give much of the credit for the lower jail census in 2024 to the staff of JusticePoint, five individuals who work mostly through the state Treatment and Diversion  grant.

“I think they’ve done an outstanding job in the last three years,” said Sheriff Mrotek.

Keeping people out of jail as they await trial 

The biggest program JusticePoint administers for Sawyer County is a pretrial program, probably the most important factor in lowering the jail census. As of Sept. 11, there were 150 individuals in a pretrial program.

Pretrial is for those who have been arrested, charged, but not convicted and are often on a cash bond as a guarantee they will continue to make court dates and follow prescribed conduct, such as being sober while on release. It wasn’t that many years ago that on average nearly a third of the jail residents in Sawyer County were those who couldn’t make their cash bond. Pretrial supervision offers accountability without a high cash bond.

To help people qualify for the pretrial program, JusticePoint staff does a risk assessment of the person reoffending and makes a report to the judge, DA, and defense attorneys.

“The basic goal, the foundational goal of pretrial, is to ensure that clients are in the court, showing up for court and are maintaining the condition of their bond,” said JusticePoint Diversion Coordinator Kari Dussi.

Becky Barry, JusticePoint’s program manager for Sawyer County, said they often spend time reviewing specific conditions the court has ordered for a bond because often their clients are not fully aware of those conditions, yet if they violate them they could end up in jail. Clients meet with staff on a regular schedule.

For those struggling to meet a condition, such as absolute sobriety, there will be case management referrals to Alcohol and Other Drug Addiction (AODA) counselors, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), or Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meetings or peer support – meeting with a recovering addict who has been trained to help other addicts struggling. If a person isn’t meeting the conditions of a bond, it is up to the court whether to send that person to  jail or impose a cash bond or just deliver a lecture from the judge on what is expected.

Diversion programs keep people out of jail

Another Justice Point service is a diversion program, which offers services to people charged with drug offenses or other offenses stemming from their substance use. In order for the diversion plan to proceed, the applicant has to agree to plead guilty or no contest.  If the person doesn’t complete the diversion plan, her or she will be facing punishment, but if they complete the diversion agreement, the charges are dropped.

To be eligible for diversion one must be 18 or older, a non-violent offender, have a low-moderate risk of recidivism, and be approved by the DA’s office for the voluntary program. Dussi offers an assessment of the person’s eligibility and a recommendation for the length of the program and different terms. If the DA approves, the person is accepted into the diversion program, but if the DA doesn’t approve, the case proceeds to court. One of the standard conditions of diversion is 25 hours of community service. The rest of the conditions are individualized.

“We meet people where they are at and [assess] how it’s helping them reach their goals,” said Dussi.

“If a person has alcohol or substance abuse issues, they’re probably going to AODA,” said Barry. “If they have mental health issues, they’re going to be referred to mental health; if one of their barriers is employment, they’re going to be referred for, like, transitional job skills or training.” 

A fundamental concept driving the diversion opportunity, especially for those without prior charges, is that those first few engagements with the legal system, especially jail time, can leave a permanent, negative impression resulting in future recidivism. 

“I think, as a society, we have this tendency to think that when people have criminal behavior, the answer is to throw everybody into jails, into prisons,” said Barry. 

“I think that we need to look at what the research and evidence is telling us,” she said. “When the people working in the criminal justice system continue to get the same results over and over and over, and the recidivism is not going down, what we’re doing is not working, so we need to look at evidence and start doing what that tells us is going to work.”

Sheriff Mrotek became an advocate for diversion when attending training in Eau Claire and heard the case of a woman who had helped her boyfriend elude law enforcement and was later arrested. She entered a diversion program and the charge against her wasn’t prosecuted upon successful completion of her program. The woman ended up finishing nursing school and became a registered nurse (RN).

“She really attributed the diversion opportunity to changing her life around in a positive way,” said Mrotek who noted she wouldn’t have been hired by a hospital with a felony charge on her record. “She was able to get her life straightened around and everything worked out pretty well.”

Recovery court

JusticePoint staff also work with the Sawyer County Recovery Court that reconvened in November 2023. Recovery Court is the newer edition of what used to be known as Drug Court, a special court meant to provide accountability and encouragement for those struggling with an addiction.

 “It’s for high-risk offenders and actually treatment court is also a post-sentence option, but it’s an alternative to a felony conviction, a serious felony conviction, whereas diversion is for more low-risk individuals,” Barry explained. Those in the program have a sentence imposed on them, but that sentence is stayed pending successful completion of Recovery Court.

Pre-arrest deflection

The JusticePoint staff also wrote a grant for the sheriff’s office for a deflection program with the purpose of keeping low-risk individuals out of the criminal justice system.  “It deflects them, if you will, from the criminal justice system into supportive resources and responses to mitigate risk of recidivism or become more involved in the criminal justice system,” said Dussi. 

“Law enforcement has the option to decide if they want to deflect that person instead of arresting that person,” said Barry.

In the deflection program, there are a variety of different supervision levels and options developed by peer support specialists working under the supervision of Dussi.

The premise, said Barry, “is to try to get that person services proactively and keep them out of the criminal justice system, because statistics tell us that those low-level offenders are the ones that, you know, a year down the line, two years, five years down the line, are the ones that we’re seeing in the more high-level offense areas. And so the whole purpose is to try to get them early and get them out of that risk area.”

Improved outcomes after hiring a second  judge

Starting in 2017, Judge Yackel began raising concerns at the local, regional, and state level that Sawyer County needed a second judge and second courtroom to process cases in a timely manner. The second judge was approved on the  condition that a second courtroom be constructed.  The county bonded over $10 million and began construction in 2022. Judge Monica Isham took the bench, presiding over the new courtroom in  August 2023. 

Judge Yackel said that prior to having a second judge it might have taken him months to consider whether a person should be in the diversion program and while that person was being considered they might be waiting in jail for as long as six to nine months.  Cases “would languish because we were being crushed by the amount of cases,” he said.

With two judges, Yackel said, there is more flexibility to respond to an urgent request, such as when a defense attorney asks that a client be allowed to attend in-patient treatment at a facility that has an opening with a short window for a response. “We will modify that bond to do that,” said Yackel, “and our ability to react to that is much quicker.”

In November 2023, with two judges in the county, the Sawyer Recovery Court reconvened. A lot of what Recovery Court is about is personal accountability between the two judges – Yackel and Isham – and the offenders, along with positive feedback for little steps of sobriety and stability.

Getting through the system faster

Sawyer County Administrator Andy Albarado is also pleased to see the reduced jail population. He gives much credit to the diversion program and especially the pretrial program, as well as having a second judge 

“People are able to get through the system faster,” he said, “and we’ve only had that second courtroom for a year, and I wouldn’t say that second courtroom is fully implemented. It has taken six months just to get the court calendar balanced out, to get the new judge assigned cases and get people their court dates.”

Albarado said even with two judges now available to respond to cases, there are still limiting factors such as the availability of public defenders. “People have to be represented and if it takes some time to get them a public defender assigned, they still might have to wait through the system,” he said. 

The Waupun prison sits in the middle of a residential neighborhood (Photo | Wisconsin Examiner)

Friday the 13th of September is the gloomy anniversary of the signing of the federal 1994 Crime Bill. It is also a chance to start to remedy a horrible mistake.

It seems rare that there is consensus among leaders of both of our political parties to make a significant change. Sometimes, those are great steps forward. Sometimes it is just a big bipartisan mistake. Such was the case 30 years ago when the US Congress and President Bill Clinton passed and signed the 1994 Crime Bill.  

In 1994, our leaders saw a real problem – the toll being taken by drug addiction. But they came up with the wrong solution. That mistake cost billions of dollars; it devastated entire communities; it broke up families; it ruined thousands of lives.

The 1994 Crime Bill had very little impact on crime. In the U.S., as in Wisconsin, there is almost no relationship between crime levels and prison population levels. The Crime Bill did, however, devastate many communities, especially low-income communities and communities of color.  The Crime Bill introduced extremely harsh penalties for even low-level drug crimes. Famously, it was far harder on crimes involving crack than for crimes involving powder cocaine, which resulted in more and longer incarceration for central city residents. The population of U.S. federal prisons in 1994 was less than 50,000. Today, it is more than 158,000.

The 1994 Crime Bill had a huge impact on Wisconsin and other states. The Crime Bill helped pay for new prisons.  It rewarded police departments for increasing their arrest rates as well as tougher sentencing laws, like Wisconsin’s so-called ‘Truth in Sentencing.”   Aided and encouraged by the Crime Bill, Wisconsin’s prison population went from less than 10,000 in 1994 to more than 22,000 today.   

In Wisconsin in 2024, there is a new bipartisan consensus: We need to close at least two of Wisconsin’s prisons. The Green Bay Correctional Institution (GBCI) and the Waupun Correctional Institution (WCI) were built in the 1800’s. Both have received a lot of well-deserved negative publicity recently, as people have died and as the horrid conditions in those prisons have become better known. Even with dramatic pay increases, the Department of Corrections has not been able to keep enough staff to fully run programs at GBCI and WCI. The facilities are dangerous and outdated. Even spending about $50 million for each facility every year, it is impossible to make them suitable for humans to live in, or even to want to work in.

We all, Republicans, Democrats and Independents, believe GBCI and WCI need to be closed.  The question is: How? There are those who want to spend $500 million of taxpayer money to build a new prison. We believe there is a better way.

Wisconsin can close the Waupun and Green Bay prisons by taking common sense steps to safely reduce the prison population. Consider this: the combined populations of GBCI and WCI is about 2,000 people, less than 10% of the prison population. In Wisconsin’s 38 prisons, there are about 5,000 people incarcerated for “crimeless revocations.”  These are people who served a sentence and have been sent back for a technical violation of their terms of supervision – not because of another crime. By reducing such revocations, as states like Texas have done, we could easily have 2,000 fewer people in prison in less than a year.  

Thousands of people in Wisconsin prisons are, as part of their sentence, eligible to participate in “Earned Release” programs. But, we have not funded the Earned Release program sufficiently, so that many of them wait for years to get into the program so they can go home. We have hundreds of senior citizens languishing in Wisconsin prisons, some of them in assisted living wings of prisons.  

To build a new prison would cost Wisconsin about $500 million, and would take at least 4-5 years. In the meantime, we would o force incarcerated people and staff to continue suffering in WCI and GBCI.  Common sense policies could safely reduce the population such that we could create enough space to move everybody out of the Green Bay and Waupun prisons within a year.

In 1994, we spent billions to build the incarceration infrastructure. In 2024 we can turn that around, and we can reinvest the savings in education, mental health and addiction treatment and other programs that will heal and revitalize the communities the Crime Bill helped to devastate.

After 30 years, we have a new chance to get it right. We can get it right in Wisconsin by closing our worst prisons without building new ones.  And, in 2025 our new President needs to work with the new Congress to repeal the 1994 Crime Bill, and replace it with a 2025 Justice Reinvestment Bill.

Angela Lang Robert Kraig David Liners
Black Leaders Organizing Communities (BLOC) Citizen Action of Wisconsin WISDOM