Republicans on the Legislature’s budget-writing committee canceled last Thursday’s Joint Finance Committee meeting after two GOP senators voiced discontent and Gov. Tony Evers called a possible $87 million cut to the Universities of Wisconsin system a “nonstarter.”
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, and JFC co-chair Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam, said they had chosen to return to negotiations with Evers to guarantee tax cuts in the final budget and shared hope that Senate Republicans “will come back to the table to finish fighting for these reforms.”
Sen. Chris Kapenga, R-Delafield, and Sen. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, indicated they are unlikely to vote for the budget in its current form.
Senate Republicans have an 18-15 majority, so they can only lose one Republican vote without picking up a vote from a Democrat. To pass the budget, both the Assembly and the Senate must vote for it, and Evers must sign off. Evers can use his partial line-item veto or veto the whole budget.
Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, said conversations were heading in an unaffordable direction and Senate Republicans were ready to pass a budget “that cuts taxes and responsibly invests in core priorities.”
Negotiations initially broke down on June 4 when Republicans walked out of conversations with the Evers administration, failing to agree on tax cuts and education spending.
With delays and cancellations in approving the budget, it has become increasingly likely the next biennial budget will not be approved by the July 1 deadline. If it is not approved by the end of the month, the 2023-25 budget would carry over into the next fiscal year.
That’s not entirely unusual, though the latest Evers signed his first three budgets was July 8. In 2017, under former Gov. Scott Walker, the budget was not signed into law until September.
Democrats said if the budget is not approved before July 1, local school districts and municipalities will have to delay hiring because they won’t know how much funding they will receive from the state.
Also, the looming federal budget puts Wisconsin at risk of losing out on federal dollars and programs if a budget is not passed soon.
“We see a horrible budget bill being debated in Washington that could contain really, really significant cuts for services that all Wisconsinites rely on, thinking about, obviously health care, but certainly things like education, transportation, natural resources, agriculture,” Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, said.
Rep. Tip McGuire, D-Kenosha, also criticized Republicans for “allowing extremists within their caucus to hijack this budget and go against the will of the people.”
Vos told reporters Wednesday afternoon the Republican caucus supports an $87 million cut to the UW system budget, yet an Evers spokesperson said any cut to the UW system would be a “nonstarter.”
The UW system requested a record $856 million funding increase, which was scheduled for action on Tuesday and then removed from the agenda. Last budget cycle, Republicans withheld pay raises from the system and approval of UW-Madison’s new engineering building, eventually signing a deal to freeze diversity, equity and inclusion spending in exchange for the release of the funding.
Vos signaled the potential cuts to the UW system are also about leverage over campus culture. The Trump administration has similarly threatened to withhold and ultimately cut federal grants from universities unless they comply with demands aimed at reshaping campus culture and combating antisemitism.
“It’s not about cutting money. What it is, is about getting some kind of reforms to the broken process that we currently have,” Vos said. “There is still too much political correctness on campus. We don’t have enough respect for political diversity.”
Democrats decry prison budget as ‘kicking the can down the road’
The budget committee voted 11-3 along party lines to increase funding for prisons by $148 million over the biennium, though Evers had requested $185 million.
Some of the key differences included the Legislature providing about $20 million less for community reentry programs and 50 fewer contract beds in county jails than Evers proposed.
During the budget committee meeting, Democrats accused their colleagues of “kicking the can down the road” by not funding programs that reduce recidivism in the approved motion.
Republicans said that their budget motion is “realistic” and that it expands on “huge improvements” in prison guard vacancies made by the 2023-25 budget.
Upper middle income earners get bulk of GOP tax cut
The Wisconsin Republican tax cut plan will give middle to upper income earners the largest tax cut, while taxpayers earning under $40,000 will receive less than 1% of the total, according to a report last week from the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
Wisconsin taxpayers earning $100,000 to $200,000 would receive 58.5% of the tax decrease, with an average cut of $242 for tax year 2025. In Wisconsin, those making between $100,000 and $200,000 account for a third of tax filers, according to the fiscal bureau.
Some lost federal disaster assistance gets state support
The committee passed a motion to provide additional funding for the Department of Military Affairs for emergency planning — a sign of some bipartisan agreement on alleviating the effects of federal funding cuts.
While the bill included most of Evers’ requests, the approved motion, introduced by Republicans, did not include Emergency Management Programs Sustainment funding, which would have replaced $1.13 million over the biennium in revenue lost as a result of federal cuts.
Previously, FEMA awarded $54 million in grants to Wisconsin to address environmental risks in the state, but federal cuts have canceled $43 million, reducing federal funding for natural disaster prevention by nearly 80%.
The measure adopted Tuesday with bipartisan support would allocate $2 million in 2025-26 for pre-disaster flood resilience grants and $3 million for state disaster assistance programs. The funding would prepare Wisconsin for disasters and provide assistance to mitigate consequences if a natural disaster were to occur.
Republicans add more assistant district attorneys
The budget committee voted 11-3 to add 42 additional assistant district attorneys in counties across the state, including seven positions in Brown, six positions in Waukesha and four positions in Fond du Lac.
Each county would now have staffing levels at approximately 80%, according to a workload analysis from the Wisconsin District Attorneys Association. Currently, 15 counties are below 60% of the staffing level suggested by the WDAA workload analysis, and 33 of 71 counties are below 70%.
The state has been struggling with a shortage of rural attorneys for several years, an issue Larry J. Martin, the executive director for the State Bar of Wisconsin, has called “a crisis that policymakers in our state Capitol must address.”
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Wisconsin incarcerates more people per capita than the majority of countries in the world, including the United States.
Wisconsin Watch and other newsrooms in recent years have reported on criminal charges against staff following prison deaths, medical errors and delayed health care and lengthy prison lockdowns linked to staffing shortages in Wisconsin prisons.
The state prison population has surged past 23,000 people, with nearly triple that number on probation or parole. Meanwhile, staff vacancies are increasing again across the Department of Corrections.
A reader called this situation a “mess” and asked how we got here and what can be done to fix it.
The road to mass incarceration
The first U.S. prison was founded as a “more humane alternative” to public and capital punishment, prison reform advocate and ex-incarceree Baron Walker told Wisconsin Watch. Two years after Wisconsin built its first prison at Waupun in 1851, the state abolished the death penalty.
For the next century, Wisconsin’s prison population rarely climbed above 3,000, even as the state population grew. But as America declared the “War on Drugs” in the 1970s and set laws cracking down on crime in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Wisconsin’s prison population began to explode.
“In the early 1970s … the rise in incarceration corresponded fairly closely with increases in crime,” said Michael O’Hear, a Marquette University criminal law professor. “The interesting thing that happened in both Wisconsin and the nation as a whole in the ‘90s is that crime rates started to fall, but imprisonment rates kept going up and up.”
According to O’Hear, Wisconsin was late to adopt the “tough-on-crime” laws popular in other states during that era. But by the mid-1990s, the state began to target drug-related crime and reverse leniency policies like parole.
Green Bay Correctional Institution’s front door reads “WISCONSIN STATE REFORMATORY,” a nod to its original name, in Allouez, Wis., on June 23, 2024. Many have pushed for the closure of the prison, constructed in 1898, due to overcrowding, poor conditions and staffing issues. (Julius Shieh / Wisconsin Watch)
“There was a period of time in which Milwaukee was just shipping bazillions of people into prison on … the presumption of being a dealer with the possession of very small amounts of crack cocaine,” UW-Madison sociology Professor Emerita Pamela Oliver said. She cited this practice as one of the reasons Wisconsin’s racial disparities in imprisonment are the worst in the nation.
Starting in the late 1990s and 2000s, Wisconsin’s “truth-in-sentencing” law, which requires people convicted of crimes to serve their full prison sentences with longer paroles, resulted in both a cycle of reincarceration and a large prison population full of aging inmates with low risk of reoffending.
Then in 2011, the anti-public union law known as Act 10 caused a mass exodus of correctional officers as working conditions in the state’s aging prisons continued to deteriorate.
Extended supervision
Along with mandating judges impose fixed prison sentences on people convicted of crimes, truth-in-sentencing requires sentences to include an inflexible period of “extended supervision” after a prison term ends. This is different from parole, which is a flexible, early release for good behavior and rehabilitation.
Judges often give out “extraordinarily long periods of extended supervision,” according to Oliver, at least 25% of the incarceration itself by law and often multiple times that in practice. To her, it is simply a “huge engine in reincarceration.”
According to DOC data, of the 8,000 people admitted to Wisconsin prisons in 2024 more than 60% involved some kind of extended supervision violation, known as a “revocation.” Half of those cases involved only revocation.
Extended periods of supervision after release from prison do little to improve public safety, research suggests. The long terms “may interfere with the ability of those on supervision to sustain work, family life and other pro-social connections to their communities,” Cecelia Klingele, a University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School professor of criminal law, wrote in a 2019 study examining 200 revocation cases.
Substance abuse problems contributed to technical revocations in an “overwhelming majority” of cases, Klingele wrote, because “agents have few options to impose meaningful sanctions other than imprisonment.”
“Fewer, more safety-focused conditions will lead to fewer unnecessary revocations and more consistency in revocation for people whose behavior poses a serious threat to public safety,” Klingele added.
Streamlining the standard supervision rules would require the Legislature to act.
Oliver attributes Wisconsin’s high rates of revocations to parole officers failing to reintegrate people into society in favor of playing “catch-somebody-offending.”
“You get reincarcerated, (and) all that time (in prison) doesn’t count,” Oliver said. “You can stay on a revolving door of incarceration and extended supervision for five times longer than your original sentence.”
People behind the statistics
The factors behind both crime and incarceration are complex, with socioeconomic factors relating to poverty, race, location and more increasing the chances of contact with the judicial system.
According to O’Hear, overall crime rates began increasing in the ‘90s during the War on Drugs in part due to prosecutors “charging cases and plea bargaining more aggressively.”
A study by the Equal Justice Initiative found that plea bargaining perpetuates racial inequality in Wisconsin prisons. White defendants are 25% more likely than Black defendants to have charges dropped or reduced during plea bargaining, and Black defendants are more likely than whites to be convicted of their “highest initial charge(s).”
Prison reform advocate Beverly Walker, whose husband, Baron, was formerly incarcerated and is now a reform advocate, speaks in 2016 at a gathering organized by the faith-based advocacy group WISDOM to raise awareness about poor water quality at Fox Lake Correctional Institution. (Gilman Halsted / WPR)
In the 53206 Milwaukee ZIP code where Baron Walker grew up, nearly two-thirds of Black men are incarcerated before they turn 34. Recalling his youth, Walker said “it seemed like almost all the males in my family were incarcerated at one point in time.”
During his time in the prison system, which included stints at Waupun, Columbia and Fox Lake correctional institutions, Walker struggled with accessing his basic needs.
“Their water came out black, dirty. It had a stench,” Walker said. “It sinks into your clothing, even when you wash them … you consume this water, it’s what they cook the food with.”
Water quality in Wisconsin prisons has been a consistent concern of inmates and activists in the past 15 years. Despite multiple investigations into lead, copper and radium contamination at these maximum- and medium-security prisons, recent reports found unhealthy radium levels in the drinking water — with no free alternatives.
“They would microwave the water (at Fox Lake) and the microwaves would spark up and blow out,” WISDOM advocate Beverly Walker, Baron’s wife, told Wisconsin Watch. “The water at the time was $16 to just get a case of six bottles of water … it so ridiculously high.”
EX-incarcerated People Organizing (EXPO) of Wisconsin peer support specialist Vernell Cauley’s issues within Wisconsin prisons were more personal. His daughter died during his intake into Dodge Correctional Institution, and Cauley wasn’t allowed a temporary release to attend her funeral.
“It had some deep effects on me,” he said. “Some of the things I didn’t realize I had until I was actually released, when you understand that you didn’t get the proper time to grieve.”
Cauley was put in solitary confinement during that time, and for three months total over the course of his prison stay. According to DOC data, the average stay in solitary confinement across Wisconsin prisons is 28 days, though that’s down from 40 days in 2019.
Furthermore, inmates who struggle with mental illness are overrepresented in solitary confinement across U.S. prisons. Multiple inmates have committed suicide due to long stints of solitary, particularly during recent prison lockdowns.
Working conditions
A Wisconsin Department of Corrections advertisement of open prison staffing positions is seen near Green Bay Correctional Institution in Allouez, Wis., on June 23, 2024. Chronic staffing shortages have played a role in lengthy lockdowns and deteriorating conditions within Wisconsin prisons. (Julius Shieh / Wisconsin Watch)
Joe Verdegan, a former Green Bay correctional officer of nearly 27 years, said he and most of his coworkers “conducted (them)selves pretty professionally” and “always had a lot of respect” for inmates. This respect went both ways, he said, because guards built relationships with inmates for decades at their post.
According to Verdegan, being a correctional officer used to be a “career job” where “nobody left.” Despite the dangers and odd work hours of the post, the guards had a strong union and good benefits and could climb up the ladder as they gained seniority.
But it “all went to hell” after Act 10 was passed.
Senior staff left in droves, leaving remaining guards with 16-hour shifts and “bad attitudes” that perpetuated the worsening work culture, Verdegan said. Religious, medical and recreational time was cut for inmates due to staffing shortages, and the respect between correctional officers and prisoners dwindled.
“When you’re not getting out for chapel passes or any of that kind of stuff, it just builds that hostility,” he said.
The changes caused Verdegan to retire from corrections at 51, earlier than planned. He and many of his friends took financial penalties by retiring from the Department of Corrections early and ended up working other jobs at bars, grocery stores and factories.
They also went to funerals. Many former coworkers “drank themselves to death” due to their experiences within corrections, Verdegan said.
Coming home
In 1996, when Walker was sentenced to 60 years in prison for his role in two bank robberies, no one expected him to serve more than a third of his sentence — not even the victims.
But when truth-in-sentencing passed, mandating judges to impose definite, inflexible imprisonment lengths on people convicted of crimes, Walker’s hopes for an early release quickly disintegrated.
Walker was released from prison in 2018 on probation, an alternative to incarceration offered on condition of following specific court orders. He was released after being denied parole six times in the seven years since he first became eligible.
In the aftermath of Walker’s imprisonment, he and Beverly have had their “most beautiful days,” along with some trials. Walker said he has struggled to adjust to independent living, and he would have been at a “complete loss” for adapting to 20 years of technological change if he hadn’t studied it in prison.
“You are programmed and reprogrammed to depend on someone for your anything and everything, whether it be your hygiene products, the time you shower, your mail, your bed, your bedding, your food,” Baron said. “Now, suddenly, you cross out in(to) society … and you’re told now as an adult you’re responsible for your independence, your bills, your clothing, your hygiene, your everything.”
Walker has also struggled with finding employment, despite earning “a litany of certifications and degrees” in food service, plumbing, welding, forklift operating and more while incarcerated. He said the DOC’s reentry programs need “overhaul” and more companies should be encouraged to hire formerly incarcerated people.
As of 2021, Wisconsin spent $1.35 billion per year on corrections, but only $30 million on re-entry programs. Less than a third of the re-entry funding is allocated for helping ex-prisoners find jobs — even though studies show employment significantly decreases the likelihood of reoffending.
Looking ahead
To Oliver, a significant barrier to solving issues within the prison system is changing sociopolitical attitudes.
“People imagine that if you’re punitive enough, you will have no crime,” Oliver said. “It’s really hard to get the general public to realize you ultimately reduce crime more by creating the social conditions that help people live productive lives without committing crime.”
O’Hear believes a key solution to problems within Wisconsin prisons is addressing the “mismatch” between large prison populations and available resources. He argues that “for a couple generations now, there’s been more of a focus on cutting taxes than on adequately funding public agencies” like the DOC.
O’Hear also said that judges should consider shorter prison sentences because “most people age out of their tendency to commit crimes” and that there should be “more robust mechanisms,” such as more compassionate release and parole laws for elderly inmates.
“We have people in prison in their 50s and their 60s and their 70s and even older who are really past the time when they pose a real threat to public safety,” O’Hear said. “Health care costs alone for older prisoners are a tremendous burden on the system, and they’re contributing to overcrowding.”
The Walkers are continuing their advocacy for prison reform by opening up the Integrity Center, which supports incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals with navigation, re-entry, employment assistance and more. They also advocate permanently shutting down aging prisons such as Green Bay and Waupun correctional institutions.
“All of our people who are eligible for release should be released, and people who are eligible to move into minimum facilities should be moved,” Beverly Walker said. “We don’t need any new prisons if we just utilize what we have.”
Verdegan said that he doesn’t believe the Legislature will ever pass a bill closing Green Bay in his lifetime and that “both political parties are to blame for this mess they’ve created with the Wisconsin DOC.” “Throwing money” at corrections officer positions will not fix staffing vacancies, he said, without the guarantee of eight-hour workdays and adequate job training.
He and Cauley both said supporting the mental health of prisoners before and after incarceration is key. Verdegan supports training staff to work with mentally ill prisoners. Cauley would rather see prison abolished altogether.
“Most people who end up in prisons, they have things going on mentally, these issues not getting met,” Cauley said. “Prison only makes people bitter, more angry … you know, it traumatizes them.”
Correction: This story was updated to reflect the average stay in solitary confinement is 28 days. Also 60% of the more than 8,000 people entering prison in 2024 involved a revocation, but half of those cases also involved a new crime.
Police agencies across the country have different requirements for surveilling officers on the job. While eight states require police to wear body cameras, all but one of them since the 2020 murder of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody, Wisconsin leaves the decision up to individual agencies.
Most agencies in the state use either body cameras or dashboard cameras, according to a 2021 survey conducted by the Wisconsin Department of Justice. Of the 436 agencies surveyed, 88% said they used one or the other, and 48% said they used both.
To request the body-worn or dash camera footage from a police shooting in Wisconsin, you must submit what’s known as a “public records request” to the police agency involved in the shooting. Bodycam footage must be maintained for at least 120 days after being recorded and, for serious incidents, until an investigation or case is resolved.
This can be done with a web search for the agency’s name and “public records” or “records request.” Many agencies have a page with a phone number, email and/or mailing address alongside a form to fill out. General open records letter templates and advice are available at websites such as the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council.
When filling out the form or submitting the written request for a police shooting video, it’s important to be as detailed as possible about the information you are looking to receive. Ask for body-worn camera and/or dash camera audio-video recordings, and write a detailed summary of the shooting in question. Relevant information can include the date, location and time of the shooting, the people involved and any other case knowledge you have.
How quickly an agency fulfills your request depends on whether your record is “simple” or “complex,” or where it is chronologically in the police agency’s record requests log, depending on the records custodian. At many agencies, the more precise you are with your request, the more likely it is to be categorized as “simple” and completed quickly. Wisconsin law only requires that agencies provide or deny records “as soon as practicable and without delay,” but for simple requests the attorney general has suggested it should be no more than 10 days.
Under a 2024 Wisconsin law, police agencies are allowed to require payment before providing video to cover the cost of redacting, pixelating and/or editing it for privacy. Individual requesters must attest that they do not plan to use the footage for financial gain, or face a flat $10,000 fine.
In at least one case, a police agency has threatened to fine a reporter for sharing requested footage with a news publication though ultimately apologized and never went through with it. WFIC President Bill Lueders said he has never heard of a police agency actually levying fines against requesters.
“If push comes to shove, I think (the issue) would probably end up in the courts and maybe (the law) would be struck down. But push has not come to shove,” Lueders said.
Finally, though anyone can request police bodycam footage under the public records law, the state allows police agencies to deny the request if they demonstrate how “harm done to the public interest by disclosure outweighs the right of access to public records.”
Should this occur with your request, you may go to court and ask for the record’s release. Wisconsin law stipulates that you may also request the attorney general or district attorney of the county where the record took place to go to court on your behalf, but Lueders said he could “probably count on one hand” the amount of times this has been done in the past 20 years.
Wisconsin Watch readers have submitted questions to our statehouse team, and we’ll answer them in our series, Ask Wisconsin Watch. Have a question about state government? Ask it here.
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