Several state lawmakers are working on a bill that would keep immigration officers out of “safe havens” throughout Wisconsin.
Their move comes as members of immigrant communities can no longer rely on places to be free from immigration enforcement, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the department that oversees U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
Reversing policy from the Biden administration, ICE officers can detain or arrest people for immigration violations inside churches, schools and hospitals.
“Given the recent executive orders and initiatives that the Trump administration has put forth, it is very harmful for our immigrant and migrant communities in various ways,” said state Sen. Dora Drake, D-Milwaukee, one of the co-authors of the bill.
“I’m a firm believer that families should be strengthened and not pulled apart.”
Federal policy
In 2021, the administration of former President Joe Biden issued guidelines about where immigration enforcement should be restricted — places referred to as “protected areas” — including schools, medical and mental health facilities, places of worship or religious study, locations where children gather, social service establishments, sites providing emergency or disaster relief, and venues for funerals, weddings, parades, demonstrations and rallies.
The guidelines stated that enforcement should be restricted in, or even near, these spaces so as not to discourage people from accessing essential services or participating in essential activities.
On Jan. 21, the day after President Donald Trump took office, the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement about the cancelation of this Biden-era policy, effectively eliminating safe havens and allowing immigration enforcement, such as raids and arrests, to take place in these areas.
“We are protecting our schools, places of worship and Americans who attend by preventing criminal aliens and gang members from exploiting these locations and taking safe haven there because these criminals knew law enforcement couldn’t go inside under the previous administration,” said Tricia McLaughlin, the Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary of public affairs, in an email.
Local response
The sorts of places identified by the proposed bill overlap with but are not identical to the ones in the policy of the Biden administration.
It identifies schools, places providing child care, places of worship, places providing medical or health care services, and state and local government buildings.
State Sen. Tim Carpenter, D-Milwaukee, another co-author of the bill, said that he and his colleagues “wanted to hit the main ones right away that we were hearing from people.”
However, Carpenter, whose Senate district has the highest percentage of Hispanic residents in the state – more than 45% – said that he is open to amending the bill to include more places.
The sorts of spaces in Milwaukee currently mentioned in the bill are responding in varied ways.
Milwaukee Public Schools has taken quite a clear stance, reaffirming in January its own “safe haven” resolution adopted in 2017.
The resolution vows to oppose actions by ICE on school grounds by “all legal means available.”
The union representing MPS teachers, Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, fully supports the resolution as well.
In other types of places, the response is less clear-cut.
A spokesperson for Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin, one of the largest hospital systems in the state, said in an email that staff is “closely reviewing recent federal policy changes and discussing their potential impacts,” adding that they “remain focused on our commitments to delivering exceptional care with dignity and respect while achieving the best possible health outcomes.”
Places not identified in the initial version of the bill also are grappling with the changes in immigration policy.
Milwaukee Christian Center, for example, which provides social services such as housing support and violence prevention, intends to comply with the law in terms of a judicial warrant and would confer with counsel about what to do regarding an administrative warrant, said Karen Higgins, executive director of the organization.
Difference between warrants
This difference between types of warrants is crucial for the authors of the bill.
A judicial warrant is issued and signed by a judge, while an administrative warrant is issued by a federal agency specifically for immigration violations.
Unlike judicial warrants, administrative warrants do not require compliance from local law enforcement or private entities, including schools, churches and hospitals, unless they choose to comply.
The state bill, if it became law, would apply to administrative warrants rather than judicial ones.
No one is trying, Drake said, to provide havens for people who are being detained or arrested on a judicial warrant.
“We’re not saying that there aren’t individuals that are causing harm out there,” she said.
McLaughlin, of the Department of Homeland Security, described a thoughtful process when a safe haven is involved in immigration enforcement.
“Our agents use discretion. Officers would need secondary supervisor approval before any action can be taken in locations such as a church or a school.”
“We expect these to be extremely rare,” she added.
‘I am asking them to follow the law’
Rep. Sylvia Velez-Ortiz, D-Milwaukee, the main author of the bill, frames the issue in basic constitutional terms.
“I’ve never said the word ‘safe haven’ or ‘sanctuary,’” she said. “I am asking them (the federal government) to follow the law. I expect them not to do illegal searches and seizures.”
“And,” she added, “I expect them to pay for their own operations.”
What’s next?
Velez-Ortiz said that the bill has about 20 co-sponsors and was expected to be handed to the clerk Tuesday and posted online.
Unless things change soon, it appears unlikely that the city of Milwaukee and Milwaukee Public Schools will meet the Feb. 17 deadline to place at least 25 student resource officers in schools.
Wisconsin Act 12, a law enacted in summer 2023, mandated that police officers be placed in MPS and stipulated that they must first complete 40 hours of training through the National Association of School Resource Officers.
This has yet to happen.
A school resource officer is a law enforcement officer who works full time in collaboration with a school district, according to Act 12.
School resource officers typically carry firearms, according to the National Association of School Resource Officers.
No trainings scheduled
Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said no Milwaukee Police Department officers have completed or are scheduled to take the weeklong training before Feb. 17.
“We are never going to recommend that an officer start working in a school without first being put through this training,” Canady said. “We’re talking about the most unique assignment in law enforcement: putting men and women in schools and trusting them to do good work with adolescents in the school environment.”
MPD did not confirm its timeline for training or whether it has enough officers who have completed the training in the past.
Even if there were officers with past training, though, that wouldn’t necessarily be the best or safest option, Canady said.
“We don’t have a timeline on when you should retake the training,” but “there have been massive changes” in the past five years, Canady said.
Subjects that have been updated or added include training on how adolescent brains develop, forms of bias and how to understand trauma, he said.
A spokesperson for MPD deferred all questions to the City Attorney’s Office, stating the department is “unaware of the status of the agreement.”
Several attempts to speak with the City Attorney’s Office were unsuccessful as were attempts to speak with every member of the Milwaukee Board of School Directors except one.
Training is the most important concern when it comes to officers in schools for Henry Leonard, Milwaukee Public Schools board director of District 7.
Without this training, Leonard said he fears “a haphazard approach to this and it turns into a disaster.”
Next steps
There are no consequences for having not met the 2024 deadline stipulated by Act 12, according to an analyst with the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau, a nonpartisan agency that provides research and legal services to lawmakers.
An additional hearing has been scheduled if the Feb. 17 deadline is not met.
Jeff Fleming, a spokesman for Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, said there have been some productive meetings between the city and MPS.
“The Mayor is optimistic the outstanding issues can be resolved,” he wrote in an email to NNS.
How we got here
In 2016, MPS pulled officers from inside its schools and, four years later, ended a contract with MPD for patrols outside its buildings.
Act 12 required the city to beef up its police force by 2034 and ordered officers back into MPS by Jan. 1, 2024. That deadline came and passed as the school district and city jostled over who would pay the estimated $2 million cost to fund the officers.
Pressure to bring officers back into schools picked up after a mother of an MPS student who was bullied sued the city and school district for not meeting Act 12 requirements.
Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge David Borowski decided in favor of the mother, ruling that the city of Milwaukee and MPS are responsible for getting officers in schools by Feb. 17.
Impact on current officer shortage
NNS reported in December about hiring challenges within MPD as the number of new recruits wasn’t enough to offset the retirement and departure of other officers or potentially the new requirements of Act 12.
Leon Todd, executive director of the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission, said officers placed at MPS would come from the current ranks of the MPD, which could stretch the department’s already thin ranks.
“One of our top priorities is to grow the size of MPD, and we obviously want to limit the strain,” Todd said. “While these officers would be placed in MPS and wouldn’t be available to take other calls for service, the number of calls are going to be reduced as they won’t need to respond because they will already have officers in schools.”
According to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article, there were 40,643 calls to police from MPS-associated addresses from 2013 to 2024, although 7% of those calls were during nighttime hours.
The Fire and Police Commission is typically in charge of hiring all new officers. But because the school resource officers are going to be current officers, Todd said, the police chief or the department’s executive command staff will decide who is sent into schools.
Canady emphasized the importance of carefully selecting those officers.
“There should be input from the school community,” Canady said. “These should be officers who are veterans, who have been with the department at least three years, so we know something about their character. They should be officers who have shown sincere interest in working with youth.”
Leaders Igniting Transformation, a youth-led nonprofit in Milwaukee, doesn’t want officers back in schools at all.
“We are angry and terrified at the thought of placing armed police officers back in Milwaukee classrooms, who have shown time and time again that they are unfit to work with students and have no place in our schools,” a recent statement from the group said.
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Milwaukee County is among dozens of U.S. counties where drugs are disproportionately killing Black men born between 1951 and 1970.
Black men of the generation accounted for 12.5% of all drug deaths between 2018 and 2022. That’s despite making up just 2.3% of the total population. The trend has only accelerated in more recent years.
Most of the men who died used cocaine that was cut with stronger fentanyl — the faster-acting drug has fueled the national opioid epidemic. Most had a history of incarceration.
Limited options and lingering stigma prevent a generation of Black men from accessing drug treatment.
In many ways, Hamid Abd-Al-Jabbar’s life story involved redemption. A victim of abuse who was exposed to alcohol and drugs while growing up on Milwaukee’s North Side, he made dangerous choices as a teenager. By age 19, he landed in prison after shooting and killing a man during a 1988 drug house robbery.
But he worked on himself while incarcerated, his wife Desilynn Smith recalled. After he walked out of prison for good, he found a calling as a peace activist. He became a violence interrupter for Milwaukee’s 414 Life program, aiming to prevent gun violence through de-escalation and intervention.
Abd-Al-Jabbar may have looked healed on the outside, but he never moved past the trauma that shaped much of his life, Smith said. He wouldn’t ask for help.
That’s why Smith still grieves. Her husband died in February 2021 after ingesting a drug mixture that included fentanyl and cocaine. He was 51.
Smith now wears his fingerprint on a charm bracelet as a physical reminder of the man she knew and loved for most of her life.
“He never learned how to cope with things in a healthy way,” said Smith, executive director of Uniting Garden Homes, Inc., an organization that provides mental health and substance use services on Milwaukee’s North Side. “In our communities addiction is frowned upon, so people don’t get the help they need.”
Desilynn Smith is still grieving the loss of her husband Hamid Abd-Al-Jabbar, who died in 2021 after ingesting a mixture of cocaine and fentanyl. She is shown Jan. 23, 2025, in her office at Uniting Garden Homes, Inc., in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Abd-Al-Jabbar is part of a generation of Milwaukee’s older Black men who are disproportionately dying from drug poisonings and overdoses, even as the opioid epidemic slows for others.
Times and Banner reporters initially identified the pattern in Baltimore. They later found the same effect in dozens of counties nationwide.
In Milwaukee, Black men of the generation accounted for 12.5% of all drug deaths between 2018 and 2022. That’s despite making up just 2.3% of the total population.
The county’s older Black men were lost to drugs at rates 14.2 times higher than all people nationally and 5.5 times higher than all other Milwaukee County residents.
Six other Wisconsin counties — Brown, Dane, Kenosha, Racine, Rock and Waukesha — ranked among the top 408 nationally in drug deaths during the years analyzed. But Milwaukee was the only one in Wisconsin where this generation of Black men died at such staggering rates.
Hamid Abd-Al-Jabbar, right, helps distribute masks in Milwaukee during the pandemic-impacted April 2020 elections. After spending years in prison, Abd-Al-Jabbar found a calling as a peace activist. (Courtesy of City of Milwaukee Office of Violence Prevention)
Milwaukee trend accelerates
The trend in Milwaukee County has only accelerated since 2022, the last year of the Times and Banner analysis, even as the county’s total drug deaths decline, Milwaukee NNS and Wisconsin Watch found.
Drugs killed 74 of the county’s older Black men in 2024. The group made up 17.3% of all drug deaths — up from 16.2% in 2023 and 14.1% the previous year, medical examiner data shows.
Abd-Al-Jabbar’s story shares similarities with many of those men. Most used cocaine that was cut with stronger fentanyl — the faster-acting drug has fueled the national opioid epidemic. Most had a history of incarceration.
Boxes of Narcan are stored in the Uniting Garden Homes, Inc., office, Jan. 23, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Marc Levine, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researcher, concluded in 2020 that “Black Milwaukee is generally worse off today than it was 40 or 50 years ago” when considering dozens of quality of life indicators.
Meanwhile, limited options and lingering stigma prevent a generation of Black men from accessing drug treatment, local experts told Milwaukee NNS and Wisconsin Watch.
“Black men experience higher rates of community violence, are often untreated for mental health issues and experience greater levels of systemic racism than other groups,” said Lia Knox, a Milwaukee mental wellness consultant. “These all elevate their risk of incarceration, addiction and also death.”
A network of organizations providing comprehensive treatment offers hope, but these resources fall far short of meeting community needs.
A silent struggle
Smith and Abd-Al-Jabbar first started dating at 14, and they had a child together at 16. But as their relationship blossomed, Smith said, Abd-Al-Jabbar silently struggled with what she suspects was an undiagnosed mental health illness linked to childhood trauma.
“A lot of the bad behaviors he had were learned behaviors,” Smith said.
Desilynn Smith, executive director of Uniting Garden Homes, Inc., wears a bracelet bearing the fingerprint of her late husband Hamid Abd-Al-Jabbar at Uniting Garden Homes, Inc., in Milwaukee. “I keep that with me at all times,” Smith says. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Abd-Al-Jabbar became suicidal as a teen and began robbing drug dealers.
When he entered prison, Abd-Al-Jabbar read and wrote at a fifth grade level and coped like a 10-year-old, Smith said. By age 21, she said, he’d already spent two years in solitary confinement. But he had the resolve to change. He began to read voraciously and converted to Islam.
He was released from prison after 11 years, but returned multiple times before leaving for good in 2018. Smith and Abd-Al-Jabbar married, and he started earning praise for preventing bloodshed as a violence interrupter.
Still, he struggled under the pressures of his new calling. The work added weight to the trauma he carried into and out of prison. His mental health only worsened, Smith said, and he turned back to drugs as a coping mechanism.
“The main thing he learned in prison was how to survive,” she said.
Most men lost were formerly incarcerated
At least half of Milwaukee’s older Black men lost to drugs in 2024 served time in state prison, Milwaukee NNS and Wisconsin Watch found by cross-referencing Department of Corrections and medical examiner records. More than a dozen other men on that list interacted with the criminal justice system in some way. Some served time in jail. For others, full records weren’t available.
Most of the men left prison decades or years before they died. But three died within about a year of their release. A 55-year-old North Side man died just 22 days after release.
In Wisconsin, DOC officials and prisoners say drugs are routinely entering prisons, putting prisoners and staff at risk and increasing challenges for people facing addiction.
Thousands wait for treatment in prison
The DOC as of last December enrolled 815 people in substance abuse treatment programs, but its waitlist for such services was far higher: more than 11,700.
“You don’t really get the treatment you need in prison,” said Randy Mack, a 66-year-old Black man who served time in Wisconsin’s Columbia, Fox Lake, Green Bay and Kettle Moraine correctional institutions.
Randy Mack, a resident of Serenity Inns, talks with Ken Ginlack, executive director, in the facility’s library on Dec. 19, 2024. Expanding on its original outpatient treatment center on Milwaukee’s North Side, Serenity Inns also runs a residential treatment facility and a transitional living program and opened a drop-in clinic in January. (Andy Manis for Wisconsin Watch)
Leaving prison can be a particularly vulnerable time for relapse, Mack said. Some men manage to stop using drugs while incarcerated. They think they are safe, only to struggle when they leave.
“You get back out on the streets and you see the same people and fall into the same traps,” Mack said.
Knox, the wellness consultant, agrees. After being disconnected from their communities, many men, especially older ones, leave prison feeling isolated and unable to ask for help. They turn to drugs.
“Now with the opioids, they’re overdosing and dying more often,” she said.
Access to the program is uneven across the state. Corrections officials have sought to expand it using settlement money from national opioids litigation. In its latest two-year budget request the department set a goal for hiring more vendors to administer the program.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers plans to release his full budget proposal next month. His past proposals have sought millions of dollars for treatment and other rehabilitation programs. The Republican-controlled Legislature has rejected or reduced funding in most cases.
Mack said he received some help while in prison, but it wasn’t intense enough to make a breakthrough. Now he’s getting more holistic treatment from Serenity Inns, a North Side recovery program for men.
Executive Director Kenneth Ginlack said the organization helps men through up to 20 hours of mental health and substance use treatment each week.
What’s key, Ginlack said, is that most of his staff, including himself, are in recovery.
“We understand them not just from a recovery standpoint, but we were able to go back to our own experiences and talk to them about that,” he said. “That’s how we build trust in the community.”
Fentanyl catches cocaine users unaware
Many of the older men dying were longtime users of stimulants, like crack cocaine, Ginlack said, adding they had “no idea that the stimulants are cut with fentanyl.”
They don’t feel the need to use test strips to check for fentanyl or carry Narcan to reverse the effects of opioid poisoning, he said.
A group discussion is shown at Serenity Inns in Milwaukee on Dec. 19, 2024. (Andy Manis for Wisconsin Watch)
Last year, 84% of older Black men killed by drugs had cocaine in their system, and 61% had fentanyl, Milwaukee NNS and Wisconsin Watch found. More than half ingested both drugs.
Months after relapsing, Alfred Carter, 61, decided he was ready to kick his cocaine habit.
When he showed up to a Milwaukee detox center in October, he was shocked to learn he had fentanyl in his system.
“What made it so bad is that I hear all the stories about people putting fentanyl in cocaine, but I said not my people,” Carter said. “It puts a healthy fear in my life, because at any time I can overdose — not even knowing that I’m taking it.”
Awareness is slowly increasing, Ginlack said, as more men in his program share stories about losing loved ones.
Milwaukee’s need outpaces resources
Expanding on its original outpatient treatment center on West Brown Street, Serenity Inns now also runs a residential treatment facility and a transitional living program and opened a drop-in clinic in January.
Still, those don’t come close to meeting demands for its services.
“We’re the only treatment center in Milwaukee County that takes people without insurance, so a lot of other centers send people our way,” said Ginlack, who said the county typically runs about 200 beds short of meeting demand.
“My biggest fear is someone calls for that bed and the next day they have a fatal overdose because one wasn’t available.”
‘I don’t want to lose hope’
Carter and Mack each intend to complete their programs soon. It’s Mack’s fourth time in treatment and his second stint at Serenity Inns. This time, he expects to succeed. He wants to move into Serenity Inns’ apartment building — continuing his recovery and working toward becoming a drug counselor.
“My thinking pattern has changed,” Mack said. “I’m going to use the tools we learned in treatment and avoid high-risk situations.”
Butterfly stickers adorn the windows of Desilynn Smith’s office at Milwaukee’s Uniting Garden Homes, Inc., on Jan. 23, 2025. They remind her of her late mother. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Carter wants to restore his life to what it was before. He spent years as a carpenter before his life unraveled and he ended up in prison. He knows he can’t take that life back if he returns to drugs.
“I have to be able to say no and not get high. It doesn’t do me any good, and it could kill me,” he said. “I have to associate myself with being clean. I don’t want to lose hope.”
As Smith reflects on her partner’s life and death, she recognizes his journey taught her plenty, too. “I was hit hard with the reality that I was too embarrassed to ask for help for my husband and best friend,” she said. “I shouldn’t have had that fear.”
Milwaukee Alderwoman Larresa Taylor said at a news conference Wednesday that she is confident of two things: that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants to move its Milwaukee-based facility to the northwest side of the city and that she is going to fight any such move.
“We are a district that has tremendous potential, but that doesn’t mean that we’re going to accept any and everything, and it certainly doesn’t mean that we’re going to allow someone to just come into our district without warning or without knowledge,” she said.
She is not alone in her opposition.
Many officials and activists stood in solidarity with Taylor, including other alderpeople, Milwaukee County Board supervisors, community organizers, business improvement district representatives and state lawmakers.
“People are scared. Kids are scared. This is the time to push back hard,” said Milwaukee Common Council President José Pérez at the news conference. “Whether here or somewhere else in the city, my role as council president is to assure that the laws are followed, and those laws are to protect our families, our most vulnerable.”
What might happen?
The current building ICE is using downtown as a processing center is being sold, said Taylor, who said her office received a request on Dec. 9 regarding the modification of a building at 11925 W. Lake Park Drive on Milwaukee’s northwest side.
These modifications include a sally port, a type of secured entryway and a chain link fence with privacy slats.
Taylor said that these modifications are consistent with the use of the building as an ICE processing center, where ICE could transport and temporarily hold people.
Nuts and bolts
As far as zoning goes, the West Lake Park Drive location is designated as planned development, rather than traditional zoning.
With traditional zoning, there are clearly delineated uses, but, with planned development, “Everything done gets either approved or denied by the (city of Milwaukee) Department of City Development,’ said Tyler Hamelink, plan examiner from the city of Milwaukee’s Permit and Development Center.
Taylor said that her office is “definitely in communication with the Department of City Development.”
“That is where our information is coming from,” she added.
Taylor also is planning to meet with the owner of the building to discuss possibilities.
What happens next?
Pérez said that options to fight back include “legal appeal or by the screaming of our voices.”
Milwaukee County Board Supervisor Juan Miguel Martínez announced the formation of a coalition to oppose an ICE facility at this District 9 location.
The coalition is currently solidifying support and mulling its options, said Eddie Cullen, spokesperson for the county board.
“The mayor has not publicly opined about a plan to replace the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility currently located at Broadway and Knapp Street,” said Jeff Fleming, spokesperson for Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson. “The contact the city has had about the proposed northwest side location has come only from private sector building owners.”
Newly elected Milwaukee County District Attorney Kent Lovern has made it a priority to listen to residents on the north and south sides of Milwaukee.
“What I have heard loudly and clearly is everyone wants to feel safe, and everyone wants that safety in their daily lives, and they want that for their children,” Lovern said.
With nearly 30 years of experience as a prosecutor, he’s recognized for his collaborative approach to systemic issues.
Lovern focuses on collaborations outside his office, in part, because he believes these collaborations are necessary to sustainably reduce violence and increase public safety in Milwaukee.
“I just feel like we need to better connect into one another and develop our own system of public safety – one that is really framed up as community development, economic development, educational development and the public safety comes with that,” he said.
Among Milwaukee’s large network of criminal justice advocates, many say they feel heard by Lovern.
“Kent has always been thoughtful and responsive to me,” said Emilio De Torre, executive director of Milwaukee Turners, which advocates for various criminal justice initiatives as well as those impacted by the criminal justice system.
Working together
“We can’t unring the bell of a crime, right? If somebody commits a crime, like myself, they need to be prosecuted,” said Adam Procell, who coordinates the monthly resource fair Home to Stay, for formerly incarcerated individuals reentering society. “But after that time period, when somebody gets out, he (Lovern) also understands that if we don’t provide the person with an opportunity to lead an optimal lifestyle, they’re going to have to prosecute them again for another crime.”
For Lovern, people reentering have a unique ability to lead others away from crime.
“People returning back to communities, looking to be proactive members of their community, looking for ways to help mentor young people and help instruct young people about the pitfalls and the mistakes they made – that’s a very powerful group,” he said.
Milwaukee County has the largest population of people on parole, probation or extended supervision in the state. At the end of October, nearly 13,000 people were under supervision, state correctional data show.
“On the whole, I have heard more interest in reentry across the board … than I have heard at any time in my career,” Lovern said.
Causes of crime
Lovern’s support of reentry is consistent with an overall preventive approach to crime.
He cites the relationship between drug addiction and crime as a good example.
“We’ve had a strong approach to this for some time because right after John (Chisholm) was elected, 18 years ago, we created an early intervention unit, and that was immediately designed to offer opportunities for people to work through a criminal charge … and we’ve seen a lot of success with that.”
WISDOM, a statewide faith-based organization, wants Lovern to expand on this philosophy.
“There’s a lot of room for certainly expanding treatment alternatives to incarceration for people living with mental illness and with addiction issues, and there are many opportunities to divert more people from the system. I’m definitely optimistic that those types of programs will continue and will expand,” said Mark Rice, coordinator of WISDOM’s Wisconsin Transformational Justice Campaign.
Lovern is proud of Milwaukee’s mental health courts, which address cases involving mental health concerns, including assessments of competence and insanity pleas.
An intermediate goal the DA’s office is close to achieving, he said, is increasing the number of cases handled in these courts to 30 cases on an ongoing basis, compared to 10 cases previously.
“Somebody might come first through the police department or to the DA’s office, and we may be saying, ‘Look, this person isn’t really committing criminal behavior – the bigger concern here is the mental health piece,’” said Lovern.
But certain violent crimes have increased since 2022, including robberies and carjackings.
“There’s no question that there is additional work that needs to be done to drive down the level of violent crime we see in this community,” Lovern said.
The problem, he added, is not evenly spread throughout the city.
“Everyone’s concerned about crime everywhere, but we know where the concentrations of violent crime exist,” said Lovern, adding that many residents in these neighborhoods tell him that “a strong response” to crime is needed and that these “neighborhoods need to be valued.”
Limits of the office
Rice, of WISDOM, does not want fairness and justice to be lost, however.
“We still in Wisconsin incarcerate Black people at one of the highest rates in the nation,” he said. “There’s a lot of discretion up front when plea bargains are reached in terms of who gets diverted from the system and who goes in.”
Rice and others also worry about the systemic limitations of the DA’s office to address such problems.
“Jobs like the DA’s office, mayor’s office, police chief tend to be very difficult, with unforeseen pressures and inherent flaws in how they’ve been systemized over the years,” said De Torre, of Milwaukee Turners. “The real test is how a person acts and what they do within a flawed system.”
Now with less than a week before Trump’s inauguration, members of Milwaukee’s immigrant community are bracing for the next four years.
“People are taking the (future) administration at their word,” said Alexandra Guevara, communications director for Voces de la Frontera, an immigrant advocacy organization in Milwaukee.
Guevara said her organization has been fielding phone calls from worried residents.
Here are answers to five key immigration-related questions.
Unauthorized immigrants include those who enter the U.S. illegally, overstay a visa or violate terms of admission.
It is unclear how stricter immigration policies will affect those with short-term protections, such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Temporary Protective Status.
“But I think the writing is on the wall for those” protections, said Marc Christopher, managing attorney and owner of Christopher & De León Law Office, a law firm based in South Milwaukee that practices immigration law.
Trump’s first administration expanded the use of expedited removal, which allows deportation of an unauthorized individual without appearing before an immigration judge.
Many advocates worry that this expansion will happen again, making people who are unable to prove at least two years of continuous physical presence in the country eligible for expedited removal, said Cain Oulahan, attorney with Oulahan Immigration Law.
Because of the general confusion and shifting political landscape, Guevara worries that there will be an increased risk of racial profiling.
2. What can be expected from local enforcement?
ICE relies on local law enforcement to help carry out its duties, but the level of cooperation with ICE varies greatly depending on the area.
Milwaukee Police Department policy states it does not routinely inquire about immigration status during operations, emphasizing that most immigration violations are civil, not criminal.
However, Christopher thinks it is likely the Trump administration will begin to put more pressure on cities to comply with ICE.
The policy of the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Department does not completely shut the door on cooperating with ICE in certain scenarios where someone is detained for committing a crime and is also suspected of being an unauthorized immigrant.
On a practical basis, though, the nature of the crime in this scenario is likely to make a difference, said Ruby De León, staff attorney at Voces.
“It doesn’t seem like day-to-day traffic stops – I don’t believe they would prioritize contacting ICE over these incidents.”
NNS reached out to ICE for comment about its priorities and plans for Milwaukee but did not receive a response.
3. What rights do people have?
Advocates stress that constitutional protections apply regardless of citizenship status, including the right to remain silent, the right to talk to a lawyer and protection from illegal search and seizure.
If law enforcement asks people to show immigration documentation, they have the right to remain silent or refuse to answer questions.
Law enforcement must have reasonable suspicion of unauthorized presence in the country to demand proof of immigration status, said R. Timothy Muth, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin.
At the same time, if people are not citizens but have documentation that permits them to stay in the country – such as a green card – they are required to keep that documentation with them, Muth said.
If a person is approached at home, a warrant for deportation allows officers to enter a home only if it is signed by a judge.
“And you should ask to see it,” Muth said. “You ask them to slip it under the door or show it to you at your window. You have a right to see the warrant and look at the signature line.”
With potential immigration violations, people have the right to speak to an attorney. But unlike with criminal arrests, the government does not have to provide the lawyer, De León said.
Additionally, individuals with a legitimate fear of persecution or torture in their home country have a right to seek asylum or asylum-type protection, Oulahan said.
4. What should be avoided if approached by law enforcement?
Voces and the ACLU advise against signing documents without a lawyer, running away or lying.
Running away and lying can be separate criminal acts, Muth said.
If people suspect their rights are being violated, such as being unlawfully searched, then they should not physically intervene, Muth added. They should instead document what they can and clearly state that they do not consent.
Voces and the ACLU also suggest taking photos or videos of agents, noting names and badge numbers.
Advocates recommend ensuring documentation is current, applying for passports for U.S.-born children and pursuing citizenship or legal status if eligible, perhaps through an employer or family member.
A city of Milwaukee municipal ID can serve as a form of identification for city residents who cannot get state identification.
Muth recommends carrying documentation showing continuous presence in the country for more than two years, such as a lease agreement, pay stubs or utility bill in a person’s name.
Voces also suggests completing power-of-attorney forms to plan for potential family separation.
Vacancies for community corrections staff in Milwaukee County, including probation and parole officers, have nearly tripled since before the pandemic, Wisconsin Department of Corrections data shows.
Some people are worried that fewer officers will make it harder to stabilize their lives after incarceration.
“With fewer agents, it can affect the way individuals can participate in programs while in the community and … in the right path to have sustained and continued success,” said Wilfredo Diaz, who is incarcerated at Stanley Correctional Institution.
Gaps in essential services
“The biggest effect is less service to people who need it the most,” said Peggy West-Schroder, former executive director of FREE, a statewide organization that addresses the needs of women and girls who are incarcerated, formerly incarcerated or otherwise affected by the criminal justice system.
Community corrections staff monitor people on parole, probation and extended supervision – with the goal of enhancing public safety and reducing the likelihood the person will reoffend, according to the Department of Corrections.
Those under supervision are supposed to be monitored for compliance with standard supervision rules concerning their activities and whereabouts. Depending on the type of conviction, such as sex crimes, there are additional supervision rules.
This is consistent with the needs of people who are leaving incarceration. Housing and employment are two of the most common needs among those who are reentering, said Conor Williams, who serves as facilitator of the Milwaukee Reentry Council.
Another major need for people post-incarceration is substance abuse treatment, and community corrections staff can help connect people to such resources as well.
According to a report by the Wisconsin Policy Forum, 72% of people on supervision in Wisconsin in 2022 had a “substantial need” for some kind of substance abuse treatment.
Unfilled positions
Around March 2020, the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the percentage of vacancies among security staff and correctional officers inside prisons began to increase, according to data from the Department of Corrections.
While staffing levels for security positions within prisons have rebounded since the pandemic, the shortage of community-based staff continues.
At the start of the pandemic, the percentage of unfilled community corrections staff serving Milwaukee County was just over 11%, according to Department of Corrections data. By the end of October, it shot up to more than 29% – the highest of any other correctional region in the state, DOC data also shows.
Milwaukee’s adult probation and parole office is located at 1300 N. 7th St., Suite 300. Since the pandemic, vacancies among community corrections staff, which includes probation and parole officers, have nearly tripled. (Devin Blake / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service)
At the same time, the county has the highest number of individuals who require supervision, noted Rep. Darrin Madison, D-Milwaukee, who serves on the state’s Assembly Committee on Corrections.
At the end of August, there were just about 13,000 individuals in the county who were under some form of supervision, correctional data also shows.
The Department of Corrections did not respond to several requests for comment about vacancy rates among community corrections staff.
Unmet needs
“I think a lot of people are just falling through the cracks, honestly,” said Juliann Bliefnick, administrative coordinator for FREE, who also is under supervision.
Bliefnick moved to a different part of Wisconsin in 2018 because she was not able to get her needs met in Milwaukee, she said.
The continued rise in unfilled community corrections positions has made the situation worse, Bliefnick said.
“I know people who have been on probation for three years and had seven different agents in those three years,” she said. “You can’t even get anything done when there’s that much turnover.”
West-Schroder and Bliefnick said there is a much higher risk of people being reincarcerated when they do not get the support they need.
Over 30% of people released from prison in 2020 were reincarcerated in Wisconsin within three years of release, according to publicly available correctional data.
Solutions
Lawmakers and advocates are offering their ideas for attracting more supervision staff.
“We must raise the wages and restore labor rights of community corrections staff in order to fill positions and retain workers for longer,” said Madison.
For the latest state budget, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers requested more money to do just this.
In October 2023, base pay for new probation and parole staff went from $21.21 to $22.06 per hour. In June, it increased again, to $22.51 per hour.
So far, the pay changes have not resulted in a decrease in the number of unfilled community corrections positions.
West-Schroder has a different idea.
“We have talked to DOC (Department of Corrections) several times about implementing in-house peer support services, understanding that officers can’t take on huge caseloads while providing these resources,” she said. “Let people who have been in this position before provide support … .”
Denny Tubbs loves his new job as a community health worker, connecting people who have been incarcerated to various resources.
However, it is challenging.
“You always have to do your own research and make sure everything applies for the person and is helpful,” he said.
Tubbs, who works for a local hospital in the Milwaukee area, does not want to waste people’s time. Having left incarceration himself, he knows what it feels like to go from one place to another, trying to put all the post-incarceration pieces together.
A new website, which launched in November, aims to make the process easier by providing clear, accurate information about resources most often needed by people leaving incarceration.
‘Comprehensive and logical’
The website is an extension of the Home to Stay monthly resource fair for people who have left incarceration, or who are “reentering” the community after incarceration.
In the same spirit as the resource fair, a major function of the site is to provide a one-stop shop where people reentering can go for information, support and resources, said Adam Procell, who coordinates the resource fair and has been developing the site.
‘It’s shocking we haven’t had this yet. To me, it’s not rocket science.’
Adam Procell
The site groups resources by type, such as legal, food, housing and clothing, and can be filtered further by county.
“It will be helpful to have reentry resources organized in this comprehensive and logical way,” said Conor Williams, who facilitates the Milwaukee Reentry Council, which coordinates reentry resources on a county level.
Tubbs said that the most common thing people ask him about is employment.
“Anyone that’s getting home from prison, they’ll have a resource directory to go get help wherever they are,” said Shannon Ross, who worked with Procell on the site and is the executive director of The Community, a Milwaukee nonprofit that creates content for and about people who have been incarcerated.
Additional features
The site also includes information about activities, events and success stories.
“The success stories are powerful testimonies from peers and should help to foster hope,” said Williams.
The site will have content for the wider community of people impacted by the criminal justice system as well, including crime survivor resources and systemic reform efforts, said Ross.
Ross and Procell also are developing an app to mirror the website, which would include even more features.
“Let’s say you get out and you have ‘driver’s license’ as one of your needs that’s listed. If you’re walking past the DMV, you’ll get a text that says, ‘look to your left’ or ‘in 15 feet, you’ll see one,’” said Procell.
Ross and Procell collaborate with the Wisconsin Department of Corrections on reentry-related efforts, so another goal is to have departmental staff share the site with people who are incarcerated and reentering.
Less work, more help
After using the site for the first time, Tubbs immediately saw its value.
“The website eliminates just having to go to Google, searching and typing in something and then going to that,” Tubbs said.
“Now, you go to one website that brings to you all that information, everything you need.”
It’s also easy enough for anyone to use – not just reentry professionals but people themselves who need the resources, Tubbs said.
While it took several years to get the site up and running, that doesn’t mean it’s a complicated idea, Procell emphasized.
“It’s shocking we haven’t had this yet,” he said. “To me, it’s not rocket science.”
However, William Sulton, SDC’s attorney, said that staff doing new work is precisely how former employees are going to get paid.
“I would say … the way that those folks are going to get paid is by the organization reopening and submitting the required reporting documentation to get paid on grants,” Sulton said.
Who does SDC owe?
As of last week, 45 people have unresolved claims concerning pay from SDC, according to a spokesperson for the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, the state agency that handles employment and labor-related disputes.
Sulton also said that among these 45 employees are highly paid employees like George Hinton, SDC’s former CEO who resigned at the request of SDC’s Board of Commissioners.
The Department of Workforce Development did not provide a clear timeline for when it will make a decision about people’s claims, but the investigator assigned to these claims is actively working on them, the department’s spokesperson said.
Sulton said he believes there is a path for how former employees will be paid: new, or rehired, employees providing services.
If SDC hadn’t brought in employees to do new work, grant money couldn’t be accessed to resolve Department of Workforce Development claims, Sulton said.
The quasi-governmental community action agency provides a variety of programs and services to meet the needs of low-income residents in Milwaukee County.
Case-by-case basis
But making a claim with the Department of Workforce Development does not guarantee that person will get the full amount they say they’re owed.
Each claim is being evaluated individually, and there are some disputes, Sulton said.
“For example, there’s one employee whose time we’re unable to confirm. There’s one employee who claims that she had a conversation with their supervisor and the former supervisor promised her an increase in pay,” Sulton said.
A common theme among claims is about getting paid out for unused paid time off, Sulton said.
Department of Workforce Development staff are assisting former employees with supplying the right documentation, which can include pay stubs, records they kept or other communications, according to the spokesperson.
Woods thought ahead in this regard.
“On the last day, I just was taking screenshots and printing whatever I needed and emailing to myself,” she said.
Some progress
Since the April layoffs, SDC has paid $51,000 toward what it owes people, Sulton said.
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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.
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.
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