Lincoln Hills, a detention facility the state had ordered closed by 2021. (Photo courtesy of the Wisconsin Department of Corrections)
When Randy Forsterling went to the Lincoln Hills juvenile prison at 16, he learned skills he still uses today, he told the Examiner.
The Wisconsin Examiner’s Criminal Justice Reporting Project shines a light on incarceration, law enforcement and criminal justice issues with support from the Public Welfare Foundation
“I’m a machine operator,” Forsterling said. “I die cast, I make transmission casings and engine blocks for one of the largest corporations in the world. A lot of the metallurgy that I learned when I was in the foundry in Lincoln Hills, I use it now — 25 years later.”
While Forsterling doesn’t believe Lincoln Hills still has a foundry, a Wisconsin initiative is aiming to better prepare incarcerated youth with disabilities for the workforce.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction released a statement about a collaboration with the Departments of Corrections and Workforce Development that is “the first of its kind in Wisconsin.”
“By providing these young individuals with the guidance, education and opportunities they need, we empower them to break the cycle and contribute positively to society,” State Superintendent Jill Underly said in the statement. “Supporting these kids is not only a step toward healing, it is an investment in their future and will save future taxpayer expenses.”
The U.S. Department of Education awarded the DPI a 5-year, $10 million grant. The program aims to help youth with disabilities transition from correctional facilities into their communities, according to a DPI statement released in September. Funds will also be used for work rehabilitation training and for dyslexia screening for all youth during intake at state correctional facilities.
The project provides three different levels of support, with some youth falling into more than one level.
Randy Forsterling told the Examiner he made an eagle with a wingspan of about four feet out of aluminum at a foundry at Lincoln Hills. The eagle is mounted on the front of a cottage. Photo courtesy of Randy Forsterling
The program intends to support all justice-involved youth with disabilities and the adults who care about them, according to an abstract on the federal Rehabilitation Services Administration’s website. They will receive support through social media campaigns and an app-based reentry toolkit. This is the broadest level of support, for 8,000 participants, the abstract says.
The second level will support a “targeted group” of students made up of Wisconsin youth under 18 in state correctional facilities. This level involves dyslexia screening and “related intervention services” and is for 1,500 participants.
The smallest group will receive the highest level of care, or intensive supports, the abstract says. These are students “most marginalized at the intersection of disability and justice and, often, race.” They will receive care under a model that is “trauma-informed, community-based” and facilitated by mentors. This level is for 250 participants, who will begin receiving care while incarcerated.
Young people have a higher risk of returning to incarceration in Wisconsin
The Department of Public Instruction’s statement compared youth to older age groups for a three-year period after release, citing an August 2021 DOC report. The report found that for a 2016 cohort, 20-24 year-olds were reincarcerated about twice as often as people aged 45 or older.
According to the DOC’s website, of 45 people aged 19 and younger released in 2020, 33 were reincarcerated in Wisconsin within three years after release due to a new sentence or a revocation. This data is based only on readmissions to DOC prisons, so it wouldn’t include reincarceration in another state.
Forsterling said he committed crimes when he was 20 and went into adult prison at 21; he was released to extended supervision last year. He hopes the program will take the experiences of formerly incarcerated people and staff into account.
Good job training is important for getting a good job, Forsterling said, which helps people avoid a desperate situation that may lead to a return to crime.
“And that’s where mentors come in very handy,” he said.
Forsterling said he received helpful mentoring at Lincoln Hills. He mentors and supports several friends who are still incarcerated.
Cost to incarcerate per child rises as enrollment falls
The cost of incarceration at Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake has “ballooned” to nearly $463,000 per child per year, as enrollment has “plummeted,” Wisconsin Watch and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service reported last week. Fewer youth means fixed infrastructure and staffing costs are spread across fewer individuals.
A new Department of Corrections budget request would nearly double that amount, they reported. That would raise the cost to 58 times what taxpayers spend on the average K-12 public school student.
Wisconsin’s Division of Juvenile Corrections had a population of 81 people as of a monthly report for September, including 40 at Lincoln Hills and 14 at Copper Lake. The campus was designed for more than 500 youth, the news organizations reported.
The juvenile prisons, which have been troubled for many years and are slated for closure, received renewed scrutiny after youth counselor Corey Proulx died from injuries received in an assault in late June. Lawmakers on the 2023 Senate Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety heard testimony about safety concerns at a hearing in August.
The DOC is under a court-ordered consent decree mandating changes at Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake after a 2018 lawsuit challenged practices such as the use of pepper spray and punitive solitary confinement.
The DPI received the grant to assist minors with disabilities as part of the U.S. Department of Education’s Disability Innovation Fund program. The program seeks to ensure people with disabilities receive “in-demand, good-paying jobs.” Out of over 800 organizations, Wisconsin was one of 27 projects to receive the grant.
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Wisconsin budgets nearly $463,000 a year to incarcerate each child at the state’s beleaguered Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake schools, a figure that has ballooned over a decade as enrollment has plummeted.
A new Department of Corrections budget request would nearly double that figure to about $862,000 a year — 58 times what taxpayers spend on the average K-12 public school student.
Experts attribute the enrollment trends and costs to demographic changes, a paradigm shift from large youth prisons to smaller regional facilities and scandals on the campus that made judges hesitant to send teens to Lincoln Hills.
Wisconsin budgets nearly $463,000 a year to incarcerate each child at the state’s beleaguered juvenile prison complex in the North Woods, a figure that has ballooned over a decade as enrollment has plummeted.
A new Department of Corrections budget request would nearly double that figure to about $862,000 a year — 58 times what taxpayers spend on the average K-12 public school student.
It comes as efforts to close the Lincoln County complex — home to Lincoln Hills School for boys and Copper Lake School for girls — and build a new youth prison in Milwaukee have slowed to a crawl.
Six years after the Legislature approved the closure plan, Republican lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers are blaming each other during funding and policy disagreements that have delayed the closure.
A 2018 legal settlement restricted how guards could discipline youth. That followed a series of scandals involving allegations of inhumane conditions, such as frequent use of pepper spray, strip searches and mechanical restraints and solitary confinement.
Republicans earlier this year pushed to lift pepper spray restrictions after a 16-year-old incarcerated at Lincoln Hills struck a counselor in the face, resulting in his death. A judge denied requests to alter the settlement in a dispute that has added to closure delays, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
A memorial to Corey Proulx, a Lincoln Hills School counselor who died in June 2024 following an assault by a 16-year-old prisoner, is shown on Nov. 1, 2024, in Irma, Wis. Proulx’s death prompted calls from Republican lawmakers to lift restrictions on pepper spray use at the youth prison. (Drake White-Bergey for Wisconsin Watch)
Meanwhile, the facility’s population is dwindling. As of late November, it served just 41 boys and 18 girls on a campus designed for more than 500 youth.
Wisconsin Watch and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service spoke to judges, lawmakers, former prison staff and researchers about the eye-popping price tag to incarcerate fewer young people. They attributed the trends to demographic changes, a paradigm shift from large youth prisons to smaller regional facilities and scandals on the campus that made judges hesitant to send teens to Lincoln Hills.
“No judge wants to send a kid to Lincoln Hills,” said Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Laura Crivello, who has presided over juvenile cases. “You feel like you’re damning the kid. And if you look at the recidivism rates that come out of Lincoln Hills, you pretty much are damning a kid.”
Here’s a closer look at the numbers.
Who sets budgets for youth prisons?
Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake schools are the state’s only youth prisons, but they are among four main state facilities for young people convicted of serious juvenile offenses. The others are Mendota Mental Health Institute, a psychiatric hospital in Madison that treats youth involved in the juvenile justice system, and Grow Academy, a residential incarceration-alternative program outside of Madison.
The Legislature sets uniform daily rates that counties pay to send youth to any of the locations — spreading costs across all facilities.
In 2015, lawmakers approved a daily rate of $284 per juvenile across all four facilities, or nearly $104,000 a year. This year’s rate is $1,268 a day, or nearly $463,000 annually.
The annual per-student rate would jump to about $841,000 in 2025 and nearly $862,000 in 2026 if the Legislature approves the latest Department of Corrections funding request.
By contrast, Wisconsin spent an annual average of $14,882 per student in K-12 public schools in 2023, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
Why have costs ballooned?
A campus built for more than 500 is mostly underused as enrollment declines, but taxpayers must still pay to maintain the same large space. It affects county budgets since they pay for youth they send to state juvenile correctional facilities.
Fixed infrastructure and staffing costs account for the largest share of expenses, said department spokesperson Beth Hardtke. Spreading the costs among fewer juveniles inflates the per capita price tag.
But taxpayers haven’t seen overall savings from the steep drop in enrollment either. The state in 2015 budgeted about $25.9 million for the Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake complex. That number climbed to about $31.3 million by 2023 with the addition of staff — a cost increase nearly in line with inflation during that period.
Driving requests to further hike rates: The Department of Corrections seeks $19.4 million in 2026 and $19.8 million in 2027 to expand Mendota Mental Health Institute’s capacity from 29 beds for boys to 93 beds serving girls or boys — an expansion required by state law.
The expansion requires adding 123 positions at the facility. Such additions affect calculations for the rates of all state facilities for incarcerated juveniles, including Lincoln Hills.
Why are there fewer incarcerated students?
The trends driving high costs at Lincoln Hills started more than 20 years ago, said Jason Stein, president of the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
First, Wisconsin is home to increasingly fewer young people.
The state’s population of youth under 18 has been shrinking. The state saw a 3.2% dip between 2012 and 2021 — from 1,317,004 juveniles to 1,274,605 juveniles, according to a Legislative Fiscal Bureau report.
Juvenile arrests in Wisconsin dropped by 66% during the same period.
Meanwhile, judges became reluctant to sentence juveniles to Lincoln Hills — even before abuse allegations escalated and prompted authorities to raid the campus in 2015.
“I was the presiding judge at Children’s Court, when we blew open the fact that kids weren’t getting an education and they were having their arms broken,” said Mary Triggiano, an adjunct professor at Marquette University Law School and former District 1 Circuit Court chief judge.
“But we knew before that there were problems with Lincoln Hills because we watched the recidivism rates. We would bring in DOC and say: ‘Tell me what kind of services you’re going to give. Tell me why they’re not in school. Tell me why you’re keeping them in segregation for hours and hours and hours’ — when we know that’s awful for kids who experience trauma.”
This aerial view shows the Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake schools, the state’s youth prison in Irma in northern Wisconsin. (Google Earth)
Enrollment dropped and costs increased, but outcomes didn’t improve.
More than 61% of the 131 boys who left Lincoln Hills in 2018 committed a new offense within three years, while about 47% of the 15 girls who left Copper Lake reoffended. The recidivism rate for boys during that period was roughly the same as it was for those released in 2014. The rate for girls was worse than the nearly 42% it was four years earlier.
Stein compared Lincoln Hills to a restaurant that tries to compensate for lost customers by raising meal prices. If prices keep rising, customers will look for a different restaurant, he said.
“That, in a nutshell, is how you get into this spiral where you’re seeing fewer residents, higher rates, and greater costs for counties,” Stein said. “Then it’s just rinse and repeat.”
How much do other states spend to incarcerate youth?
Wisconsin is not the only state spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per juvenile it incarcerates.
A 2020 Justice Policy Institute report showed Wisconsin spent less than the national average in 2020. But Wisconsin’s per-juvenile costs have since more than tripled as Lincoln Hills remains open and incarcerates fewer young people.
Incarcerating juveniles is generally more expensive than it is for adults, said Ryan King, director of research and policy at Justice Policy Institute. Rehabilitation plays a bigger role in juvenile corrections, and those programs cost more. Incarcerated children typically access more counseling, education and case management programs.
States nationwide are rethinking their approach to youth incarceration as crime rates fall and more research shows how prison damages children, King said.
“There was an acknowledgement that locking kids up was not only failing to make communities safer, but it was making kids worse, and really just putting them in a position where they were more likely to end up in the adult system,” he said.
How is Wisconsin trying to reshape juvenile justice?
In 2018, then-Gov. Scott Walker signed Act 185, designed to restructure the state’s juvenile justice system. The law kicked off plans for a new state youth prison in Milwaukee and authorized counties to build their own secure, residential care centers.
Milwaukee and Racine counties are moving forward on such plans to build these centers. The centers function similarly to county jails: County officials operate them under Department of Corrections oversight. Officials hope keeping youth closer to home will help them maintain family connections.
“We have always pushed smaller is better. You can’t warehouse young people like you do adults,” said Sharlen Moore, a Milwaukee alderwoman and co-founder of Youth Justice Milwaukee. “Their brain just doesn’t comprehend things in that way.”
The law aimed to close troubled Lincoln Hills and give judges more options at sentencing while balancing the needs of juvenile offenders and the public. But those options have yet to fully develop.
Today’s alternative programs typically have limited space and extensive waitlists. That won’t be fixed until more regional facilities go online.
How else could Wisconsin spend on troubled youth?
Triggiano, now director of the Marquette Law School’s Andrew Center for Restorative Justice, was astounded to learn youth incarceration costs could nearly double next year.
“You just want to drop to your knees because if I had that money, we had that money, what could we do differently?” she said.
She quickly offered ideas: programs that recognize how traumatic experiences shape behavior, violence prevention outreach in schools, community mentorship programs — evidence-based practices shown to help children and teens. Milwaukee County had worked to create some of those programs before funding was pulled, Triggiano said.
“It all got blown up in a variety of ways at every juncture,” she said. “Now there’s going to be an attachment to the secure detention facility because that’s all people could muster up after being slammed down every time we tried to do something that we thought was going to work.”
“The cost of sending one young person to Lincoln Hills would be enough to pay several young people working jobs over summer or the span of the school year,” says Rep. Darrin Madison, D-Milwaukee. He is shown here speaking during a press conference on Sept. 10, 2024, at the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
State Rep. Darrin Madison, D-Milwaukee, echoed Triggiano and offered additional spending suggestions, such as housing resources, mental health support and summer jobs programs.
“The cost of sending one young person to Lincoln Hills would be enough to pay several young people working jobs over summer or the span of the school year,” Madison said.
Wisconsin’s disproportionate spending on incarcerating its young people runs counter to the Wisconsin Idea, its historical commitment to education, he added.
“We’re so committed to incarcerating people that we’re willing to eat the cost of doing so, as opposed to making investments in deterrence and getting at the root cause of the problems.”
Share your Lincoln Hills story
If you or someone you know has spent time in Lincoln Hills or Copper Lake schools — whether as an incarcerated juvenile or a staff member — we want to hear from you. Your perspectives could inform our follow-up coverage of these issues. Email reporter Mario Koran at mkoran@wisconsinwatch.org to get in touch.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Gov. Tony Evers asked a federal judge Wednesday not to impose any changes at Wisconsin’s youth prison after an inmate was accused of killing a counselor during a fight earlier this summer, insisting conditions at the prison have been slowly improving despite the death.
Evers, a Democrat, said in the letter to James Peterson, chief judge for the Western District of Wisconsin, that Republican lawmakers could soon ask him to give Lincoln Hills-Copper Lakes Schools more leeway in punishing incarcerated children. The governor said that it’s important to remember that brutal staff-on-inmate punishments led to tighter restrictions on what action staff can take.
Lincoln Hills-Copper Lake is Wisconsin’s only youth prison. The facility has been plagued by allegations of staff-on-inmate abuse, including excessive use of pepper spray, restraints and strip searches.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit in Madison in 2017 demanding changes at the prison. Then-Gov. Scott Walker’s administration settled the lawsuit in 2018 by agreeing to abide by a consent decree that prohibits punitive confinement, restricts confinement to 12 hours, restricts the use of mechanical restraints to handcuffs and prohibits the use of pepper spray. A court-appointed monitor has been checking the prison’s compliance ever since.
According to prosecutors, a 16-year-old boy attacked a counselor on June 24, punching her before fleeing into an outdoor courtyard. Counselor Corey Proulx confronted him, and the boy punched him in the face. Proulx fell and hit his head on concrete pavement. He was pronounced brain-dead two days later.
His death has pushed Lincoln Hills-Copper Lake staff to demand more freedom in dealing with inmates. Republican lawmakers sympathetic to their demands have been talking about asking Peterson to revise the consent decree to give them more latitude, including allowing them to use pepper spray. Sen. Van Wanggaard, chair of the Senate judiciary committee, released a letter Wednesday to state Corrections Secretary Jared Hoy signed by a host of GOP legislators demanding he ask Peterson for changes.
“Lincoln Hills staff need to get the bullseye off their back, so that they may safely and efficiently ensure the security and welfare of themselves and the residents of Lincoln Hills,” the letter said.
Asked if Hoy would comply, Evers spokesperson Britt Cudaback released Evers’ letter to Peterson. The letter was dated Wednesday, but Cudaback said the administration had been working on it before receiving the Republicans’ request.
Evers reminded Peterson in the letter of the abuse that led to the consent decree in the first place and said Republicans are refusing to acknowledge that history. The governor added that he doubts the ACLU would support any changes.
He went on to detail changes at the youth prison, saying relationships between staff and inmates have improved and that Hoy received a letter last week from the president of Council of Juvenile Justice Administrators board recognizing Wisconsin as an emerging leader in prison reforms.
Evers added that since Proulx’s death, the facility has been working to increase staff-to-inmate ratios, utilizing overtime when needed. Supervisors regularly ask staff about their comfort levels, especially when staffing levels are lower, he said.
He intends to visit the prison later this month, and Hoy has been working there at least one day a week since Proulx’s death, the governor wrote.
Emily Stedman, one of the lead attorneys for the ACLU in the 2017 lawsuit, didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment on the governor’s letter.
Wanggaard aide Scott Kelly said in a text to The Associated Press on Wednesday evening that instead of being open to balance and change, Evers was instead doubling down on policies that created the dangerous conditions at the prison.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
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