Gov. Tony Evers at a press conference about his DOC budget proposal on Friday. Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers wants to dedicate over $325 million of the state budget to updating aging correctional facilities. The plan he laid out Friday would end with the closure of Green Bay Correctional Institution in 2029 and involves spending more than $40 million for policies meant to help stabilize the prison population.

Serious problems have plagued the state’s correctional facilities for many years, exacerbated by aging facilities that lack adequate space for the number of incarcerated people. 

While the state’s correctional facilities have the capacity to house 17,638 people, there are 23,074 people being held in facilities across the state. The total population is expected to grow to 24,000 people by the end of the biennium. 

Evers said Wisconsin needs to do the work to move its correctional operations into the 21st century and help ease some of the challenges. 

“Wisconsin spends more on corrections than most states, including all of our Midwest neighbors,” Evers said. “That’s because, unlike red and blue states across the country, Wisconsin has refused to move our approach to corrections into the 21st century. The bottom line is that this trajectory is not sustainable.” 

“We can address long-term staffing challenges, expand workforce training, implement evidence-based practices that reduce recidivism and save taxpayer dollars all while — most importantly — improving public safety,” Evers said. 

Evers said he was planning to speak with Republican lawmakers about the plan in the near future and called for their support.

On Tuesday evening, Evers will deliver his full budget address. After he submits his budget proposal to the Legislature, lawmakers will write their own version that will go to Evers for final approval. 

‘Stabilize’ population

The first part of Evers’ correctional plan focuses on “stabilizing” the state’s growing prison population through policy changes meant to help limit recidivism. 

“About 90% of the people incarcerated will be released back into our communities, so we must reduce the likelihood that people will commit another crime when they’re out in our communities,” Evers said. “Our work to prevent people from reoffending must start long before they ever leave our correctional institutions.” 

He proposes expanding access to workforce training and substance use treatment for people who have 48 months or less left in their sentences for nonviolent offenses. Evers said the programs will help support people to reenter the workforce once they are out of prison and to help people who are working to overcome drug and alcohol use disorders.

The changes to the Earned Release Program would help support about 2,500 people.

To support the policy changes, Evers also wants to dedicate $3.7 million in the budget to pay  progression for social workers and treatment specialists.

In addition, Evers’ budget proposal will include $8.9 million for expanding the Alternatives to Revocation Program, $1 million for community supervision regional coaches to help the high number of people with substance use recovery needs, $3.1 million to expand the number of community corrections supportive housing beds for people with hardships, $10.7 million for cost of living increases for the division of community corrections and reentry unit, $1.9 million for 13 new DOC positions and $9.6 million for pay progression and parity for probation and parole agents and correctional field supervisors.

Modernizing correctional facilities

The largest allocation in the plan would got to  the “domino” plan to update the state’s correctional facilities — a plan that ends in the closure of the Green Bay Correctional Institution by 2029.

“In order for my plan to work, several crucial steps must happen, and they must happen together,” Evers said.

“There cannot be delays or obstructions like we’ve seen with Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake,” he added. 

2017 Act 185 signed by Gov. Scott Walker, set a deadline to close the Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake youth correctional facilities  in January 2021.  Evers later extended that to July 2021, but that deadline also passed and plans to close the facilities have continued to get pushed back. 

 Evers plan would convert the youth facilities into a 500-bed medium security facility for adult males.

Under the plan, a Type I facility would be completed in Dane County at the cost of $168 million to house 32 male and 8 female youths. 

The plan also calls for using $245.3 million to update Waupun Correctional Institution, the state’s oldest prison, built in 1851. Cell halls would be demolished and some areas of the prison would be remodeled to create vocational programming.

A new “vocational village” at Waupun would be modeled on efforts undertaken in Louisiana and Missouri. Under the plan, it would be prepared to open by 2031. 

The plan would also have Stanley Correctional Institution converted into a maximum security facility with the ability to “flex” as a medium security facility. 

Green Bay Correctional Facility would close by 2029 at a cost of $6.3 million. 

According to the Evers administration, the plan opts to close the Green Bay facility over the Waupun facility because there is local support for closing the Green Bay facility and because it will  cost less to update the Waupun facility. 

The plan also includes expanding Sanger B. Powers Correctional Center located in Outagamie County by 200 beds. Employees at the Green Bay facility would have the option of transferring to the Sanger Powers facility. 

In addition, John Burke Correctional Center would be converted from an adult male to an adult female facility with 300 beds.

“We need Republican lawmakers to get onboard with this plan,” Evers said. “There is not an alternative to my plan that is safer, faster and cheaper… My plan is the most cost effective for taxpayers. It’s the most efficient for alleviating the challenges facing our correctional institutions.” 

DOC Secretary Jared Hoy said during the press conference Evers’ plan is exciting because it is “a comprehensive and cohesive plan to address long standing issues within our correctional system while investing taxpayer dollars wisely.” 

“The effort comes down to safety in our institutions and our communities,” Hoy said.

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Click here to read highlights from the story

• Gov. Tony Evers is proposing a “domino series” of changes to state prisons, culminating with the closure of Green Bay Correctional Institution in 2029. The total cost would be just shy of $500 million.

• The plan calls for finishing a juvenile detention facility in Dane County in order to finally close Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake youth prisons in northern Wisconsin by 2029. The facility would be converted into an adult prison.

• Waupun Correctional Institution would be renovated; Stanley Correctional Institution would be converted into a maximum-security prison; and Sanger B. Powers Correctional Center in Brown County would add 200 beds.

• The plan also expands the number of inmates in the state’s existing earned release program by 1,000.

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.

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.

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Click here to read highlights from the story

• 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.

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.”

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.”

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.” 

One child, $463,000 per year: Ballooning costs of troubled Lincoln Hills youth prison 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.