Reading Time: 4 minutes

As the two candidates for the Wisconsin governor race faced off on television Wednesday night, Democrat David Crowley and Republican Tom Tiffany criticized each other’s records and laid out their governing priorities.

We’ve already recapped key takeaways. Here, we use data to examine how the candidates spent their time, which topics drew the most attention and how they criticized each other.

School funding dominated the debate

Each candidate spent over four minutes explaining his take on school funding, including positions on private school vouchers, making it the debate’s most covered topic. Taxes ranked second, with candidates covering several issues: income taxes, state budget surpluses and property taxes.

The two candidates spent roughly the same amount of time on most topics. One notable exception came when Tiffany spent three minutes and 37 seconds — two minutes more than Crowley — explaining why he voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election results.

“One of the reasons that I did that is Zuckerbucks,” Tiffany said. “If you remember, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook billionaire, he put $15 million into Wisconsin, and so he was trying to privatize our elections via electioneering. The people of the state of Wisconsin rejected that a few years later.”

“Zuckerbucks” refers to grants funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, that helped local election officials run elections during the COVID-19 pandemic. Wisconsin voters approved a constitutional amendment banning private funding for election administration in April 2024, after Republicans argued the grants disproportionately benefited Democratic strongholds. 

Crowley spent more time attacking Tiffany

Although Tiffany spoke for about 200 seconds longer overall,  he spent much of that time explaining and defending his own positions.

Crowley, by contrast, took a more aggressive approach, spending about four minutes more than Tiffany in directly criticizing his opponent. 

For this analysis, we classified a statement as an attack when a candidate criticized his opponent or made him the subject of a statement. 

Crowley spent the longest time criticizing Tiffany’s positions on taxation, school funding and border control. 

“We’re talking about somebody who actually supported the elimination of the United States Department of Education. We’re talking about someone who, when he served as a senator, voted for one of the largest cuts to our UW systems as well as K-12 through education,” Crowley said. “I went to Milwaukee Public Schools. My daughters go to public schools, and I know that they need an increase in funding from the state of Wisconsin because of the fact that we have been dealing with decades of cuts ever since he was in the Legislature.”

Tiffany spent the most time criticizing Crowley when discussing how Crowley would appeal to those who voted for democratic socialist Francesca Hong in the Democratic primary.

“What he said about a week or two before the primaries, he said there was very little difference between he and Francesca Hong,” Tiffany said. “In fact, one of the only things he could think of is that he was supportive of data centers.” 

The candidates spent similar amounts of time criticizing one another’s records on data centers — less than a minute each.The candidates spent roughly 50 seconds apiece criticizing their opponents’ record on data centers.

Crowley accused Tiffany of supporting tax breaks for data center operators. (Tiffany voted for President Donald Trump’s tax and spending package that included broad tax breaks benefiting data center developers along with many other businesses, but lawmakers did not specifically vote on a data center tax break.)  

Tiffany countered by criticizing Crowley’s past support for subsidies and calling Crowley’s proposal to power data centers with wind and solar energy unrealistic.

Word clouds show how the candidates framed their attacks

After we removed verbal fillers and words used to address the other candidate, the word cloud of attacks shows that Tiffany used the word “taxes” the most often when criticizing Crowley. This reflected Tiffany’s argument that Crowley’s policies would increase tax burdens on Wisconsinites.

“Taxes have went up every single year that David Crowley has been county executive,” Tiffany said. “You know what he’s going to do as governor.”

Crowley most often used the word “work” when attacking Tiffany, repeatedly questioning Tiffany’s track record in following Trump’s decisions and whether Tiffany would represent Wisconsinites if elected.

“Congressman Tom Tiffany, it doesn’t sound like you want to work for the small guys,” Crowley said after Tiffany said he was open to raising income limits on private school vouchers. “It sounds like you want to work for those who have the money and have the means to continue to pay their way. This is what this election is about.”

The pattern was less pronounced in the word cloud analyzing defensive statements. Tiffany most often said the word “Wisconsin” while Crowley’s most frequently used word was again “work.”

How we analyzed the debate

Wisconsin Watch transcribed the gubernatorial debate audio through Parakeet MLX, an automatic speech recognition model, then used the artificial intelligence tool Pyannote to assign each line in the transcript to a speaker. Automated transcription and speaker recognition can produce errors, which may affect the results. 

We manually reviewed the transcript to correct as many speaker-identification errors as possible. We also tagged each line spoken by the candidates by topic and tone. We categorized a line as “aggressive” if a candidate referred to his opponent as the subject of a sentence or otherwise clearly criticized him. We categorized all other statements as “defensive.”

We calculated speech duration using the transcript’s start and end time stamps.

The SpaCy tokenization algorithm we used to generate the word cloud misidentified “taxes” as “taxis,” so we manually corrected that error. 

Brittany Caroloni contributed reporting. 

By the numbers: How Crowley and Tiffany used their debate time 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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Milwaukee faces a big challenge: replacing tens of thousands of lead water pipes that pose a potential health risk to residents — all by a 2037 deadline imposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 

At the end of 2025, Milwaukee Water Works still had over 55,000 residential homes or properties with lead water lines on the utility-owned side, customer-owned side or both. The utility had yet to identify the makeup of pipelines serving another 27,000 properties. 

But Milwaukee can’t replace all the pipelines at once — and some neighborhoods face greater risks from lead exposure than others.

So which areas should officials prioritize? 

Part of the answer lies in a surprising place: a tool University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers originally developed to study the connection between neighborhood disadvantage and human health.

Lead does not impact neighborhoods equally

Milwaukee’s pipeline problem dates back to 1872, when the city mandated the use of lead in service lines. Although the city abolished the mandate in 1962, older lead pipelines remained in many older residential buildings.

Downtown Milwaukee includes a scattering of homes with non-lead service lines — many due to having already been replaced by the city.

Milwaukee has replaced nearly 15,000 pipelines since beginning its broader efforts in 2017, said Milwaukee Water Works Superintendent Patrick Pauly. When federal funding became available under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the utility expanded its effort, increasing the pace from about 1,000 lines a year to 5,000. 

The expansion included a priority program launched in 2024, which focuses on equity and offers free replacements to eligible residents. 

But scaling up the effort required more than funds and construction crews. The city also needed a systematic way to decide where to work — one that recognizes disproportionate risks across the city.

“We needed to expand the lead service line replacement program, and we needed to develop a, for lack of a better word, defensible method to expand that program,” Pauly said.

What Milwaukee’s priority system looks like

The resulting system assigned each property a score based on three factors: 

• 70% comes from the Area Deprivation Index (ADI), a measure of relative socioeconomic disadvantage developed by UW-Madison researchers. 
• 25% comes from the percentage of local children who tested positive for lead poisoning. 
• 5% comes from lead service line density in the area.

Together, these measures help the utility determine where replacement will yield the highest benefits. 

The city updates each property’s score every other year as new information becomes available, Pauly said. 

The scoring weights heavily toward neighborhood disadvantage as broader challenges residents face can compound risks posed by lead exposure. 

Nationwide, communities burdened by economic disadvantages and racial inequalities can face greater risks of lead exposure, according to a Montclair State University study of New Jersey. Such neighborhoods often contain older housing and sit near former industrial sites.

The ADI relies on attempts to quantify disadvantages in Milwaukee, and its origins have little to do with water infrastructure.

A tool developed to understand health disparities

The ADI measures neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage or adverse social exposure using 17 U.S. Census American Community Survey measures. They include factors related to income, education, housing, and employment.

The index assigns scores to census block groups — small geographic areas that generally contain several hundred to a few thousand people.

Block groups receive a national percentile ranking from 1 to 100 or a statewide decile ranking from 1 to 10. Higher rankings indicate greater socioeconomic disadvantage relative to other areas.

Researchers have long recognized that people’s health depends on far more than the medical care they receive. But measuring the influence of social and economic conditions on health isn’t easy.

Dr. Amy Kind has spent much of her career trying to figure that out.

Kind, a professor of geriatrics and gerontology at UW-Madison and founding director of its Center for Health Disparities Research, grew up in Niagara, Wisconsin, before training as a physician. 

During her residency in Boston, she saw that the medicine she prescribed could do only so much when patients returned to homes without healthy food, stable housing or access to other basic resources. Those experiences helped shape her interest in finding ways to measure such disadvantages. 

Researchers have used indexes like ADI since the 1980s. In 2014, Kind led a group of University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health researchers in updating ADI using modern census data, refined it to the census block level and validated its usefulness across several scientific studies. 

“(Like any marker), it may not be the thing that ultimately drives the risk,” Kind said. “But it has been an extremely strong marker that something going on in that area is increasing risk, whatever it might be.”

An unexpected use for health research

“When we first developed the metric, we thought that perhaps it would be used primarily by health systems, primarily in the research community,” Kind said. 

Instead, Kind and her colleagues heard from many community groups and local governments that were interested in using index data to guide their public health work.

Since 2014, the University of Wisconsin has tracked over 3,500 academic papers citing the index and more than 400 examples of its use across different fields. That includes a recent Kind study linking environmental factors to the likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Meanwhile, the index helped officials in Puerto Rico decide where to send nurses to combat dengue fever and the mosquitoes that carry it.

That wide interest prompted Kind to develop the Neighborhood Atlas in 2018, making the data more accessible. 

Kind said she enjoys seeing the index be used in sometimes unexpected ways to address local challenges. That includes Milwaukee’s effort to protect children from lead exposure, where officials are using it as one component of their model. 

Thousands of pipelines replaced, thousands more to go 

Milwaukee Water Works has replaced lead pipes at more than 6,000 properties under its priority program, which launched less than three years ago.

The work has been largely concentrated on the city’s North Side but has also expanded into near South Side neighborhoods. 

Pauly expects the utility to reach a milestone next year of 20,000 lead lines replaced.

But officials will soon face a difficult question: how to pay for replacements after  Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding runs out in 2028.  

One possibility is returning to a funding system that required homeowners to pay part of the cost of replacing the privately owned portion of their service lines. 

“I don’t believe the city has the financial capacity to take on fully funding the private side replacement costs,” Pauly said.

That could present another challenge for a program designed to prioritize neighborhoods where residents already face financial disadvantages.

For now, residents living in homes with lead service lines that are not yet scheduled for replacement can take steps to better understand their own risk. 

Julie LaRose, lead and nutrition program coordinator at the MacCanon Brown Homeless Sanctuary, runs one of the many programs in the city where residents can submit samples of their tap water for free lead testing.

LaRose recognizes residents’ concerns about their tap water. But she also emphasizes that Milwaukee water is highly regulated, and she has not seen any samples tested through her program exceed one part per billion (ppb) of lead. 

That’s far below the FDA limit for lead in bottled water (5 ppb) and the EPA’s threshold for utility action (15 ppb). 

“If you’re nervous about this, let’s test it,” LaRose said.

How a UW tool helps Milwaukee decide which lead pipes to replace first 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.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Wisconsin Watch has documented the deadly toll of Wisconsin’s drinking culture, from liver disease and alcohol poisoning to crashes involving impaired drivers. 

But one alcohol-related danger receives far less attention — and it doesn’t end when someone hands over the car keys: walking while intoxicated.

Police reported suspected alcohol use among nearly 1 in 5 pedestrians killed in Wisconsin crashes between 2017 and 2025. Because pedestrians are not routinely tested, researchers say the true share may be higher.

The pattern is not unique to Wisconsin. Nationwide in 2024, 27% of pedestrians killed in traffic crashes were alcohol-impaired, compared with 15% of drivers involved in fatal pedestrian crashes, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The figures do not make the danger of walking drunk comparable to driving drunk: An impaired driver controls a fast-moving vehicle and endangers others. But they underscore the risks intoxicated pedestrians face.

“We always hear somebody talking about having a safe plan home, have one sober driver. Maybe you should have a sober walker if you’re walking home,” said Vera Elle, a researcher at Wellbrook Recovery, a Brookfield-based alcohol and substance recovery rehabilitation center. She and her colleague Shimmy Stregosky wrote a series of reports on the topic and brought the issue to Wisconsin Watch’s attention.

Alcohol-related pedestrian crashes fall from 2019 peak

The number of annual crashes involving drunk pedestrians dropped from a 2019 peak of 126 to 101 in 2025. Annual deaths in those crashes plunged from 15 to five during the same period.

That trend coincided with lower reported binge drinking, defined as four or more drinks for women and five or more for men on a single occasion, said Maureen Busalacchi, director of the Wisconsin Alcohol Policy Project at the Medical College of Wisconsin. 

She cautioned that the data cannot establish that changing drinking habits caused fewer pedestrian crashes. Traffic volume, remote work and vehicle speeds also affect crash frequency. 

“The use of alcohol is going down, and then you start to see changes in perceived health effects. So more people are starting to see it as bad for health than they have in the past,” Busalacchi said.

Nationally, Gallup found that 54% of adults reported consuming alcohol in 2025, a record low in its polling. The share of adults ages 18 to 34 who considered moderate drinking harmful rose from 34% in 2018 to 66% in 2025.

In Wisconsin, the state’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System estimates a similar trend: The share of adults reporting binge drinking fell from 21.9% in 2019 to 19.1% in 2024.

Alcohol-related crashes span age groups

From 2017 through 2025, 16 pedestrians ages 35 to 39 were killed in Wisconsin crashes in which police suspected they consumed alcohol, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis of Wisconsin Department of Transportation data. 

That was the highest death toll of any five-year age group. Pedestrians ages 30 to 34 had the second-highest total, with 11 deaths, followed by those ages 25 to 29 and 50 to 54, with 10 each. Overall, 78 of the 96 pedestrians killed were ages 20 to 59.

Across crashes of all injury severity, pedestrians in their 20s accounted for the most cases involving suspected alcohol use. The total was highest among those ages 20 to 24, followed by those ages 25 to 29. But the numbers remained relatively high across most age groups from 30 to 59. Most pedestrians in those crashes suffered injuries.

The data showed a stark difference in injury severity: 44.6% of pedestrians suspected of alcohol use were seriously or fatally injured, compared with 21.1% of those without suspected alcohol use. 

However, the connection does not establish that alcohol alone caused the difference. Nor can the data show how much more likely an intoxicated person is to be struck because no reliable count exists of how many intoxicated and sober people walk Wisconsin’s roads.

The figures are also likely to understate how many pedestrians involved in crashes had been drinking, said Richard Blomberg, vice president of the research firm Dunlap Research. 

His research found that police generally identified alcohol use reliably when they checked the “had been drinking” box on crash reports. But an unchecked box did not mean a pedestrian was sober because police were less likely to document alcohol use when signs were unclear.

Research shows alcohol’s role in pedestrian crashes

Adults who had been drinking, especially those doing so excessively, were heavily overrepresented among pedestrians struck by vehicles, Blomberg found in a study he designed in the 1970s. About half of the adult pedestrian victims had been drinking, and nearly one-quarter had a blood alcohol level of 0.20% or higher.

Blomberg also compared crash victims with a random sample of pedestrians walking on the street near the crash sites. The researchers assembled three control groups. Some pedestrians were sampled at the same locations, days and times as previous crashes, while others were sampled at 112 randomly selected locations across New Orleans. The comparisons allowed Blomberg to estimate the extent to which alcohol was overrepresented among crash victims.

Blomberg also found alcohol-involved victims were disproportionately middle-aged men and more likely to have arrest records. Their crashes clustered at night and on weekends. 

Blomberg cautioned that findings in one city did not represent the entire country, even if New Orleans was reasonably similar to other urban areas. Almost half a century later, he found the same demographic overrepresented in an analysis of crash data from five states from 2007 to 2017.

Later studies examined a related but different question: whether alcohol was associated with more severe injuries once a pedestrian was struck. In a study published in 1995, Dr. James Williams of Memorial Medical Center in Savannah, Georgia, reviewed autopsies of 223 pedestrian fatalities. He found that alcohol-involved pedestrians were more likely to suffer more severe injuries than sober pedestrians when struck by vehicles. Because the study included only fatalities, it did not measure whether intoxicated pedestrians were more likely to die after being struck.

A Florida analysis published a year later, however, found that pedestrians classified by police as under the influence had four to five times the adjusted odds of dying from a collision as pedestrians not classified as such. Rebecca Miles-Doan, the analysis’ author, cautioned that the finding might overestimate the association because police tend to conduct more intensive investigations into fatal cases. 

Using more recent data from 2011 to 2016, University of Tennessee researchers found that alcohol was identified in about 7% of Tennessee pedestrian crashes but in 22% of pedestrian fatalities. The researchers pointed to limitations of their study: Few crashes had BAC readings, and alcohol classifications relied heavily on police judgment.

Experts point to public health solutions

Unlike impaired driving, walking while intoxicated generally is not a crime in Wisconsin. The Legislature eliminated the crime of public intoxication in 1973, which critics said created a “revolving door” through the criminal justice system for lower-income people and did little to improve rehabilitation — and sometimes worsened it.

Experts interviewed for this story also do not view criminalization as a principal solution. 

Cities elsewhere have experimented with less punitive measures to improve safety. Baltimore launched the “Walk Smart Baltimore” campaign at the turn of the century. Blomberg participated as a researcher. 

The campaign tested measures that did not depend entirely on intoxicated pedestrians making safe decisions. The city distributed reflective hats and used television, radio, billboards and flyers to warn pedestrians of dangers.

The evaluation reported fewer pedestrian crashes in the target area, although Blomberg said the program required resources that made it difficult for other communities to replicate.

“We can wrap them in cotton and potentially keep them from being injured in a crash or in a fall, but the health effects of that excess alcohol use are still there,” Blomberg said. “If we solve the underlying alcohol problem, everything else goes away.”

Addressing excessive alcohol use is the long-term goal, Blomberg said, but communities should not wait to reduce immediate risks through other efforts including safer vehicle designs, separating pedestrians from traffic or other measures. 

If a street redesign, safer ride home or other intervention reduces alcohol-involved pedestrian crashes by even 5% or 10%, he said, “then of course we should do it.”

DataWatch: The overlooked risks of walking while intoxicated 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.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Wisconsin’s prison population hit a record high this week, a new milestone for a system that has for decades held thousands more people than it was designed for. 

According to figures released Friday, the state’s Department of Corrections held 23,854 people in custody. That’s 28 above the record set in 2019 and nearly 6,000 beyond the prisons’ intended capacity. 

Wisconsin’s prisons have been severely over capacity for at least 20 years, prompting officials to add bunk beds and increase the number of people per cell. The three prisons that house only women are particularly overcrowded. There, staff have converted offices to dorms and, at times, set up beds in gyms.

Sarah Buckingham, who is incarcerated at Robert E. Ellsworth Correctional Center in Racine, told Wisconsin Watch in May that prison officials “just cram us in wherever they can.” That minimum-security women’s prison was designed to house 230 people. As of Friday, it held 495, more than twice its design capacity. The state’s other minimum-security women’s prison, the Milwaukee Women’s Center, was designed for 42 but now holds 104, making it Wisconsin’s  most crowded prison.

Contacted for comment, Department of Corrections spokesperson Kevin Hoffman said the department has “extremely limited statutory authority on its own to reduce the prison population.”

The new record comes years after Gov. Tony Evers vowed to ease prison crowding in a state that stands out nationally for disproportionately incarcerating Black residents. In a 2018 Democratic gubernatorial debate, Evers — who has spoken of “second chances” and “redemption” — called a goal by activists to cut Wisconsin’s prison population by half  “worth accomplishing.”

But the Republican-led Legislature has stymied such efforts, spokesperson Britt Cudaback said, pointing to the governor’s “eight years of budget requests to reform our state’s justice system.” 

The governor doesn’t choose who goes to prison or for how long, Cudaback added. In 1998, Wisconsin legislators adopted one of the country’s most punitive “truth-in-sentencing” laws, requiring most prisoners to spend their full sentence behind bars, without the possibility of parole. Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson signed the bipartisan legislation into law.

Policy changes such as reducing sentences or diverting more people to treatment would require action by judges or the Legislature, though the governor’s administration can singlehandedly address revocations, a common way people end up in prison. 

People on court-ordered supervision can end up back in prison if they allegedly violate the rules of their release, even without committing a new crime. In 2021, the Department of Corrections raised the threshold for revocations in certain circumstances, which corresponded with an initial dip in technical revocations.

Evers recently took another unilateral step that could reduce the prison population, though likely modestly. In April, he signed executive orders allowing eligible Wisconsin prisoners to apply to have their sentences shortened for the first time in 25 years. 

It’s unclear how many people might receive commutations or how much their sentences might be shortened. The Commutation Advisory Board heard testimony from a dozen applicants at its inaugural hearing on Aug. 21. A second hearing, featuring another dozen applicants, is scheduled for Sept. 18.

Not just tight quarters

Overcrowding stresses prisons in a variety of ways, increasing dangers and reducing quality of life for both prisoners and correctional officers. A higher prison population requires more officers, who can be tough to recruit and retain. In 2023, officials locked down Waupun Correctional Institution — canceling programs and confining prisoners to their cells for months — because they didn’t have enough officers to operate normally, Wisconsin Watch reporting revealed.

Today, the state’s adult prison system is short about 658 full-time correctional officers and sergeants, the latest DOC figures show. The system has 35 fewer people in those positions than it did in May, even as the prison population grew by about 250.

A higher prison population can increase competition for limited spots in treatment, education and work programs designed to prepare prisoners for release. 

Already, many prisoners wait months or years for those opportunities, and advocates say increased crowding could keep people in prison longer or contribute to their return — a cycle that could further pack prisons.

A prisoner at Taycheedah Correctional Institution in Fond du Lac told Wisconsin Watch that crowded conditions make it harder to offer a key type of counseling. Since 2019, the maximum-security women’s prison has allowed prisoners to meet with certified peer support specialists, fellow prisoners trained and paid by the Department of Corrections to share their own experiences and support others navigating challenges behind bars. 

Converting more spaces into dorms leaves fewer places for peer specialists to hold one-on-one meetings, said Natalie Murphy, who has worked as a peer specialist for seven years. Fewer than 10 peer specialists serve the 1,074-person facility, Murphy said. 

“There’s a huge waitlist, and we are trying to accommodate all of the people, because we want to help people,” Murphy said. “But one of the biggest problems is that we can’t hire anybody because we do not have physical space to work in.”

Solutions elusive

Policymakers and prisoner advocates disagree about how to ease crowding. In the major revamp he proposed last year, Evers called for, among other things:

• Closing the nearly 130-year-old Green Bay Correctional Institution.
• Transforming Waupun Correctional Institution into a “vocational village.” 
• Converting the troubled Lincoln Hills School from a juvenile prison to an adult prison.
• Converting John C. Burke Correctional Center in Waupun into a women’s prison.
• Expanding a program that allows some people incarcerated for nonviolent crimes to qualify for early release by completing substance use treatment. 

Together the changes would reduce the state’s prison capacity by 700, the governor’s office said. The plan drew criticism from Republican lawmakers, who pointed to the state’s crowded prisons as a sign that the state needs more space in its prisons, not less.

State Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, said the answer is “right-sizing” the population by “adding additional beds, reducing overcrowding and making facilities safer for not only our inmates, but for our staff,” WPR reported. 

Last October, the State of Wisconsin Building Commission released $15 million to plan for Evers’ proposed changes. 

“The governor’s corrections proposal would have paved the way for much-needed facilities upgrades and expanded programming to address many of the challenges we face today,” DOC spokesperson Hoffman said. “Unfortunately, the Legislature did not fully fund the plan and only provided $15 million for planning.”

Wisconsin spends about $1.06 billion a year on its prisons, or 5% of the state budget. State officials estimate it costs roughly $50,000 to incarcerate one person for a year in Wisconsin. By comparison, the state spends around $15,000 a year per student in the public K-12 school system. 

Meanwhile, some states have significantly reduced their prison populations in recent decades. New York has cut the number of people behind bars by half since 2008 as a result of various factors, including ending incarceration for most technical violations of supervision rules. Republican-led Texas has closed several prisons as a result of bipartisan criminal justice reforms, including a greater focus on substance abuse treatment and diversion. 

Brittany Carloni contributed reporting.

Wisconsin prisons hit record population as crowding strains staffing and programs 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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Wisconsinites breathed record-breaking levels of air pollution Thursday as wildfire smoke from northern Minnesota and Canada wafted across much of the Great Lakes region and the Northeast. Many monitoring stations across the state recorded pollution considered hazardous for the first time in at least 16 years — the span covered by most monitoring stations’ records.

As of 8 a.m. on Friday, Air Quality Index, or AQI, levels in Madison had peaked above 450 — far above the AQI’s 301 threshold for “hazardous” air quality, where everyone — not just sensitive groups — should take precautions to avoid breathing dangerous air. 

Milwaukee’s AQI reached 644 earlier on Thursday — more than twice the hazardous threshold. Air quality deteriorated even further in northwestern Wisconsin, with the index reaching 967 along the Minnesota border earlier in the day. 

Many Wisconsin communities, including Milwaukee, Waukesha, Odanah and Appleton, were still observing AQI over the 301 threshold Friday morning.

The index categories typically run only from zero to 500.

Thursday’s pollution surpassed levels once considered unprecedented. Before Canadian wildfire smoke pushed the AQI to record highs across Wisconsin in July 2023, cities including Madison, Milwaukee and Waukesha had not recorded an AQI above 200 since at least 2010, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis of historical AQI data.

But wildfire smoke has elevated air pollution in Wisconsin each summer since 2023. Major cities have periodically recorded higher AQI readings around July, though Thursday’s levels were the first to surpass those recorded in 2023.

“This is a hazardous air quality episode that we have not experienced before,” Craig Czarnecki, air management outreach coordinator for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, said in an email.

DataWatch: Wisconsin air pollution reaches record highs as wildfire smoke engulfs the state 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.