Gov. Tony Evers this week will propose a significant overhaul of Wisconsin’s corrections system, pushing a plan that would close one of the state’s two oldest prisons, renovate the other and convert the state’s youth prison into a facility for adult men. 

The proposal, which totals just shy of $500 million, will be included in the governor’s budget proposal, which he will unveil on Tuesday night. The governor shared details of the plan with reporters Friday morning.

The “domino series of facility changes, improvements and modernization efforts,” as Evers described them, would take place between approval of the budget and 2031. The proposal is the solution to the state’s skyrocketing prison population, Evers said, adding there is “not an alternative to my plan that is safer, faster and cheaper.”

The first step would be building a facility for youth offenders in Dane County, allowing the state to close its current beleaguered juvenile prison complex in Irma, home to Lincoln Hills School for boys and Copper Lake School for girls. The cost would be $130.7 million.

Completing the juvenile Dane County facility would be the latest step in a years-long effort to shutter Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake. A similar facility opened in Racine County earlier this month, with another juvenile facility in Milwaukee poised to open next year. With the addition of the Dane County facility, the state would be able to move youth offenders out of Lincoln Hills in early 2029, according to the Evers administration.

The Lincoln County complex would then undergo $9 million in renovations to be converted into a 500-bed, medium-security institution for men.

Another key piece of Evers’ plan would be converting Stanley Correctional Institution into a maximum-security facility for $8.8 million. That would allow the state to renovate Waupun Correctional Institution, the state’s oldest facility, where at times inmates were confined to their cells for months and denied medical care, according to an investigation by Wisconsin Watch and The New York Times. Waupun staff also have faced criminal charges following the deaths of five inmates. 

The estimated $245 million renovation would involve demolishing the prison’s existing cell halls and replacing them with new, medium-security facilities known as a “vocational village” — the first in Wisconsin based on a model used in other states. The facility would be “designed to expand job and workforce training to help make sure folks can be stable, gainfully employed and can positively contribute to our communities when they are released,” Evers said.

Under the plan, the John Burke Correctional Center in Waupun would also be converted to a 300-bed facility for women “with little to no capital cost,” said Jared Hoy, secretary of the Department of Corrections.

Green Bay Correctional Institution, constructed in 1898, would close under the proposal sometime in spring 2029 at a cost of $6.3 million. Many have pushed for the closure of the prison due to overcrowding, poor conditions and staffing issues.

To compensate for the lost beds, the last project in the “domino” series would add 200 beds to Sanger B. Powers Correctional Center in Brown County.

The governor’s budget will guarantee Green Bay staffers a role at another DOC facility to account for the prison’s closure, the Evers administration said. The facility would likely then be sold, the governor told reporters.

In totality, the plan aims to avoid building a new prison in Wisconsin, which the governor’s administration estimates would cost $1.2 billion and take a decade to construct. Evers said Friday that he had not discussed the plan with Republican lawmakers, but implied he was slated to meet with them over the weekend.

The state’s adult institutions were locking up more than 23,000 people as of Feb. 7. That’s more than 5,000 above the design capacity of Wisconsin’s prisons and more than 3,000 above levels four years ago when COVID-19 actions shrunk prisoner ranks.

Justice reform advocates have argued that Wisconsin can’t substantially improve conditions without decarceration, including releasing more inmates and diverting others to programs rather than prisons. 

Other states — some led by Republicans and some by Democrats — have managed to close prisons by adopting rehabilitation-focused reforms that cut thousands from the population. 

The governor is also seeking some policy changes that could trim the population. For example, he wants to expand the capacity of the state’s existing earned release program for nonviolent offenders with less than 48 months remaining on their sentences, allowing more inmates to access vocational training and treatment for substance use disorders.

Evers noted there are 12,000 inmates on a waiting list to access vocational programming, and expanding the earned release program would likely make another 1,000 inmates eligible for the program.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Tony Evers to propose $500 million prison overhaul, closing Green Bay facility by 2029 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.

Forcing county sheriffs to cooperate with federal immigration officials or risk losing state funding. A tax cut for service industry worker cash tips. Banning “foreign adversaries” from owning Wisconsin farmland. The GOAT committee. 

The first few weeks of the Legislature’s new session have been dominated by ideas inspired, at least in part, by President Donald Trump, as Wisconsin Republicans bring ideas pushed in Washington to Madison.

The localization of Trump’s agenda — which helped the president secure a slim but significant victory in November — comes as Republican lawmakers continue to set the legislative agenda in Wisconsin.

But Democratic legislative leaders are pushing back on that agenda, unlike many of their counterparts at the national level.

“These are not serious proposals,” said Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer, D-Racine. “They are political; they are for the right-wing base. But they are simply not addressing the problems that the people of Wisconsin are facing.”

Immigration crackdown

Last week, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, and Sen. Julian Bradley, R-New Berlin, unveiled legislation to mandate cooperation between Wisconsin law enforcement and federal immigration authorities.

The bill would require “sheriffs to request proof of legal presence status from individuals held in a county jail for an offense punishable as a felony,” according to analysis from the Legislative Reference Bureau. It also compels sheriffs to “comply with detainers and administrative warrants received from the federal department of homeland security regarding individuals held in the county jail for a criminal offense.”

If a sheriff shrugs the law, the sheriff’s county would face a 15% cut in state aid in the following year, according to a draft of the bill. But the bill isn’t about targeting places like Dane and Milwaukee counties — where leaders have pledged not to cooperate with federal authorities — said Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August, R-Lake Geneva. “It’s about just ensuring that every county is operating the same and that there isn’t a refuge for these violent criminals.”

While introducing the bill, flanked by two dozen of his GOP colleagues, Bradley said the legislation should garner bipartisan support, pointing to the Laken Riley Act — a similar crackdown on theft and violent crime committed by unauthorized immigrants — that received some Democratic support in Congress. It was the first bill signed into law under the new Trump administration.

“Only far-left extremists in this country believe that someone here illegally that commits a felony should be allowed to stay,” Bradley said.

No tax on tips 

State Sen. Andre Jacque, R-De Pere, is one of four Republican lawmakers circulating a bill that would eliminate taxes on cash tips earned by service workers — a proposal Trump heavily touted on the campaign trail. Then-Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, later announced support for the policy as well. 

Jacque and a group of bipartisan lawmakers last introduced the bill in 2019, but it never became law. He said it’s heavily favored by those in the hospitality industry.

Trump’s push to enact a similar policy at the federal level made this the ideal time to reintroduce the bill in Wisconsin, Jacque said.

“Having a federal administration that is putting some political capital towards making that part of the equation happen certainly adds a lot of fire to being ready to be aligned at the state level,” Jacque said.

In 2019, the bill, which only would have exempted cash tips from taxation, was estimated to reduce the state’s revenue by nearly $4.7 million annually. A fiscal estimate of the current bill has not yet been released. It would not exempt the majority of tips, which are left on a credit card. 

Banning ‘foreign adversaries’ from owning land

Another state bill introduced by Republicans last month would prevent “foreign adversaries” from “countries of concern” from acquiring forestry and agricultural land in the state. 

The legislation mimics Trump’s campaign promises in January 2023 to ban Chinese nationals from buying farmland and owning other “vital infrastructure,” citing national security concerns. Jacque, an author of the bill, said he wasn’t aware of Trump’s previous support for a similar proposal. 

Jacque introduced similar legislation in 2023 that never became law. He pointed to bipartisan congressional support for similar “foreign adversary” bills introduced at the federal level. It’s a “common-sense concern” that “resonates with the public,” Jacque said. 

GOAT Committee

The Government Operations, Accountability and Transparency Committee is new to the Assembly this legislative session. Like DOGE, the federal Department of Government Efficiency led by Elon Musk, it’s named after a pop culture meme (GOAT is shorthand for greatest of all time; DOGE is named after a meme turned cryptocurrency).

The committee’s chair, Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie, said the committee will work “to identify opportunities to increase state government efficiency and to decrease spending.” 

“The people of Wisconsin want to see their hard-earned tax dollars being spent on services that directly affect them, not on the expansion of programs that benefit only select groups of people,” she said in a written response to questions from Wisconsin Watch. “GOAT will investigate ways in which the state can reallocate revenues away from excessive wants and funnel them more into critical needs without increasing spending.”

One motivating factor for her 2022 Assembly run was “to bring my professional experience in process improvement to the public sector because so many glaring inefficiencies in state agencies were exposed during the pandemic,” Nedweski said, noting she wanted to improve “fiscal accountability” for the state long before DOGE was a concept.

The committee was created in response “to an outpouring of demand from the people,” Nedweski said, adding that “DOGE is making fiscal conservatism cool and accessible to more people.”

“The performance of state agencies under the current administration has often been subpar under this administration relative to the tax dollars invested,” she said. “If the (state) agencies are not going to take honest looks in the mirror as to how they can better serve Wisconsinites, GOAT will. Whether or not the Governor chooses to work with us is up to him.”

GOAT serves a different role than the Legislative Audit Bureau, Nedweski said, noting that a “top objective of GOAT is to be responsive to real people facing everyday challenges with state government.” 

While the committee may work with LAB and the Joint Audit Committee, “the function of GOAT will be less technical than Audit and more directly responsive to a wide range of stakeholder concerns,” she said.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Trump policies come to Wisconsin in first weeks of new session 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.