Attorney Steve Hurley with documents of the type Wisconsin prisons are shredding. | Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner

The Office of the Wisconsin State Public Defender and other attorneys are expressing concerns over attorney-client confidentiality and the timely and accurate delivery of legal mail for clients incarcerated in state prisons. 

On Sept. 10, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC) adopted a new policy for external paperwork sent to prisons. The protocol calls for incarcerated residents to watch the copying of their legal mail and allows them to review the copies; then the original mail is shredded. 

Mail covered under the policy includes letters from an attorney, law office, clerk or judge of any state or federal court, court staff or tribal court. It also covers correspondence with federal and state elected or appointed officials including the governor, Wisconsin legislators, the secretary of the DOC and others. 

The process of opening and photocopying the mail, providing the copy to the incarcerated person and shredding the original mail is documented with the facility’s camera system, the DOC policy states. 

The policy’s general guidelines allow staff to inspect legal documents “to the extent necessary to determine if the documents contain contraband or if the purpose is misrepresented.” If staff have reason to believe a letter is not a legal document “and the safety and security of the institution is implicated,” the policy allows them to read legal documents. 

The DOC’s protocol has garnered criticism from the Wisconsin public defender’s office. Public defenders’ primary concerns are timely delivery of information to clients, the accuracy of the copying and protecting attorney-client confidentiality.

“Unfortunately, with DOC’s new mail policy we have experienced significant delays with mail delivery, compromised confidentiality, and in some cases legal documents have been lost,” said Deputy State Public Defender Katie York. “This has impacted our ability to develop trusting attorney/client relationships and has caused unnecessary delays for our clients and others impacted by the legal system. However, in our continuous efforts to provide the highest quality defense for our clients, we will keep doing everything we can to maintain communication with our clients.”

The Wisconsin American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has also raised concerns about how the DOC’s handling of legal mail is affecting incarcerated people and the legal process.

“Alarmingly, the DOC continues to introduce new restrictions that have made it increasingly difficult for people in DOC custody to receive legal mail and books,” Emma Shakeshaft, senior attorney for the ACLU of Wisconsin said in an October statement, “and we are very concerned about how these policy changes are negatively impacting those in custody. Legal mail is essential to incarcerated individuals’ ability to access the courts and to communicate confidentially with their legal counsel.”

Beth Hardtke, director of communications for the DOC, said the department was not aware of any recent concerns from the Office of the State Public Defender about the DOC’s legal mail policy, and that the DOC would follow up with them to learn more. 

Hardtke said the public defenders’ office had input into the development of the policy, and that the policy was revised based on the office’s feedback before it went into effect in September 2024. The DOC is not aware of any significant delays regarding legal mail, she said. 

She said the postal service delivers legal mail directly to facilities, “where it is promptly processed in front of the individual to whom the mail is addressed.” 

“The policy also details a number of steps that are taken to protect the confidentiality of the process including having the process take place in front of cameras placed so that writing is illegible, special copiers just for this purpose and ensuring that the person in our care is part of the process,” Hardtke said. 

Drug concerns 

DOC’s goal with the legal mail policy was to prevent intoxicating substances from entering facilities through legal mail, Hardtke said. 

In November2021, the DOC announced that it would start partnering with a company to photocopy the personal mail of all incarcerated adults in an attempt to keep drug-laden mail out of prisons. The department began giving residents photocopies of their mail instead of original letters. 

In a 2021 press release about the new policy, the DOC said that despite its previous efforts, in September 2021 alone there were 182 drug incidents within Wisconsin prisons, with 16 people needing emergency medical treatment. 

The department said it had seen an increase of drug incidents among incarcerated people. This included the use of synthetic cannabinoids, which can cause violent behavior or a need for emergency medical treatment, the department said. The DOC said paper and envelopes could be sprayed with or soaked in the drugs and sent into prisons through the mail.

In August 2022, the agency said it had seen a decrease in the total number of drug incidents at adult facilities between November 2021 and February 2022. The agency attributed the decrease to its new policy of photocopying mail. The DOC also said it saw a decrease in overdoses requiring transport to a medical facility. 

After receiving inquiries about the department’s controversial ban on used books, the department sent data to reporters in late September. DOC staff reviewed contraband incident reports that facility staff had flagged as drug-related between 2019 and Sept. 18, 2024. 

The department said some drug-related incidents recorded through a medical record or conduct report may not be reflected in their numbers. The DOC also said not all incident reports flagged as drug related turn out to actually be drug-related.

The DOC said legal mail tested positive in five incidents in 2021, and in 2022, there were 10 instances of material “purporting to be legal mail” that tested positive for drugs. 

Six incidents in 2023 involved legal mail, the department said. The DOC said legal mail tested positive for drugs in at least seven incidents in 2024, as of Sept. 18. 

When it comes to mail or donations that tested positive for drugs, the department said it is “often unable to say” whether they are from a legitimate entity, or from someone impersonating another person or organization. 

In an email to the nonprofit Wisconsin Books to Prisoners in August, then-Administrator of the Division of Adult Institutions Sarah Cooper spoke about impersonation. She said “bad actors” impersonated agencies to send drugs into prisons. 

“To provide some examples, there have been many instances of drugs coming in via mail (and publications/books) which appear to be sent from the Child Support Agency, the IRS, the State Public Defender’s Office, the Department of Justice and individual attorneys,” Cooper said.

In the August email, Cooper said the DOC had had to “implement a whole new process” for handling mail from the entities she mentioned. 

The number of drug incidents involving legal mail has fallen to zero, according to a review of contraband incident reports that facility staff flagged as drug-related, Hardtke said. She said between Sept. 19 and Feb. 28, there were no incidents documented in those reports of legal mail testing positive for intoxicants.

She said these records may not include all incidents, since some incidents may be documented in conduct reports, other types of incident reports or medical records. 

“The most important thing to know about the legal mail policy is that it works,” Hardtke said. 

But York said she also knows there have been instances of false positive tests. 

“I know it has happened because I’ve talked to both staff and private bar attorneys where the institution has sent back materials because they tested positive,” York said. Transcripts that were not drug-laced have been returned after positive tests, she said. She could not provide a number of such incidents and said she also believed some documents that were confiscated after positive tests were not sent back.

Hardtke said the DOC uses the IONSCAN 600 testing technology to test books, packages and other materials coming into DOC facilities. She said the technology was chosen in consultation with the Wisconsin Department of Justice and the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratories “in part because its results have held up to court scrutiny.” 

Some family members of incarcerated people in Canada expressed concern that ion scanners yielded false positive test results, and some experts have raised questions about ion scanners’ ability to distinguish between banned drugs and everyday chemicals. 

Steve Hurley, a defense attorney at Hurley Burish, S.C. in Madison, told the Examiner about a case a few years ago in which his firm represented a lawyer who was accused of sending drugs to a client. 

He said their investigation used the test used by the DOC and got a false positive, and that the department relied on a presumptive test that was not intended to give a conclusive result.

This test was not the IONSCAN 600. The DOC did not say whether it currently uses other tests as well as the IONSCAN 600. 

“They didn’t charge him criminally because I think they knew that they had misused the [drug] test,” Hurley said. “So when I called them on it, eventually, they just dropped the whole thing and reinstated his ability to communicate with his client.” 

Attorneys suggest creating a verification method for legal mail 

Shakeshaft said attorneys attempting to communicate with their clients are not the source of drugs in prison. She thinks there should be an alternative method of getting legal mail to clients without having all the documents copied and the originals shredded.  

“To the extent that third parties are attempting to disguise contraband as legal mail, there’s a lot of less restrictive ways to address that, to ensure that legal mail is coming from licensed attorneys… [Methods that] are not nearly as much of a threat to attorney-client confidential communications,” she said. 

York said her office asked about creating a process that would certify the mail was from the assigned attorney and not from an impersonator. 

“We asked if there was some sort of system, if it was like, some sort of changing numbering system, or something that we could put on the envelopes that would ensure that they knew that it was coming from our office,” she said.

York said her office also made an offer to reach out to a facility beforehand when they’re sending a client their file. The public defender’s office would let them know how many boxes they would be sending with a client file, so the facility would know in advance that the documents were coming from their office. She said the offer was not accepted. 

York said her office used to receive calls seeking to verify that her office had sent mail to a resident. She didn’t think this was consistent across all facilities. 

“They would call our office and ask, ‘Did you send mail to this person?’ when they got letters,” said York. “I used to get those calls when I was the appellate division director. So that was another way that they used to try to kind of validate the fact that it came from an attorney.”

Confidentiality concerns 

Hurley said that as a defense lawyer, it’s his job to not trust the government when it comes to his clients. He believes his clients should receive their legal mail unopened.

“The minute you open a lawyer’s mail, somebody is going to look at it,” Hurley said. “I don’t care what they say about their policies, somebody’s going to look at it. And you can’t do that.”

If others know what someone is convicted of, it could lead to a more difficult time in prison, Hurley said. He also said information in an incarcerated person’s legal mail isn’t necessarily about their criminal record.

“If you were getting divorced, do you want your neighbor to know what you’re arguing with your spouse over about what the extent of your property is?” Hurley said. “No, and you don’t want a guard to know that either.” 

Nicole Masnica, an attorney with Gimbel, Reilly, Guerin & Brown LLP in Milwaukee, said prison staff reviewing privileged communications and legal mail from counsel creates a concern about the safety and security of incarcerated people in the DOC.

Legal correspondence and materials “may very well contain” information detailing a person’s cooperation with authorities against other incarcerated people “and even sometimes staff employed by the Department of Corrections,” she said in a statement emailed to the Examiner.

“I have represented individuals who have expressed concerns about confidential information from legal correspondence getting into the wrong hands at the prisons, and policies like those currently in place with the DOC that permit the reviewing of confidential information by DOC staff only amplifies those risks to individuals assisting law enforcement investigations,” Masnica said. 

Shakeshaft said there are opportunities during the copying and shredding of legal mail for someone to view the documents. She also raised the question of how the process would be filmed without the camera viewing information in the legal mail. 

“There’s a number of different parts of the policy where confidentiality is threatened overall,” she said. 

Attorney Lonnie Story sent the Examiner a conduct report from when an incarcerated man, Justin Welch, was written up by a DOC staff member in February 2024. The report indicates a staff member read a letter from Welch that was “addressed to Story Law Firm Attorney Lonnie Story.”

According to the report, in the letter, Welch referenced a recent assault he was involved in with another person. Welch said that he was going to be placed by this person and “will have no choice but to fight him again. This is what the WCI does this time I will hurt him.” The staff member wrote the conduct report, saying Welch was making direct physical threats to the other person. 

Story said he contacted Department of Justice attorneys, who called the warden. Story sent the Examiner a letter from the warden on which Welch was copied, dated March 25, 2024. The letter said the warden had initiated a review of the incident, and the hearing officer’s decision and the punishment of 30 days in restrictive housing were reversed. 

Welch sent the Examiner a complaint he made to the DOC about a prison denying three of his emails, preventing them from reaching the intended recipients. (Electronic correspondence is not treated as legal mail under DOC policy.) 

Two emails were intended for a reporter, while the third was sent to Story. According to Welch’s complaint, a staff member told him that emails were not for legal communication and an attorney call should be set up instead. Welch’s complaint was successful, leading to a ruling that his emails should not have been denied. 

Devin Skrzypchak, a resident of Oshkosh Correctional Facility, said he has concerns that the prison staff have had access to his legal mail for up to three days while the prison was setting up a time for the copying and shredding when he could be present. He has concerns that his legal mail could have been read during that wait time.

Not all legal mail involves physical documents, according to Masnica. If there are large files, it’s cheaper to send a hard drive or USB. In one case, Masnica said she sent documents related to potential jurors and received an email from the prison. 

The person from the prison who contacted Masnica didn’t necessarily think the documents were related to litigation, she said. To her, it was clear that the prison had reviewed the mail in detail. 

“They had made remarks that it was not just the jurors in the case, but all jurors potentially that were going to be called that week, or that month,” Masnica said. 

Masnica said she complained and was sent a policy. DOC policy says that when a facility receives new digitally formatted legal material, it shall assign staff to review the content with the incarcerated person present to make sure it is “legal in nature.”

The policy states that “if any file is found to contain contraband, the data storage device may be subject to disposal” in accordance with the DOC’s contraband policy after consultation with the Office of Legal Counsel. 

Timeliness concerns 

“We’ve heard of attorneys having to push back court deadlines and delays because they can’t continue that communication [with clients],” said Shakeshaft. “They can’t get the legal documents to clients in time, or clients aren’t getting the correct legal documents.”

The Examiner asked York about specific situations that make it critical for the incarcerated person to have the legal mail for the case to proceed in court.

“There is not a super clean answer to this, but there are some situations, for example, we need clients to sign documents,” said York. “One example of that is notice of intent to appeal in a termination of parental rights case; we have to have a wet signature from the client on the notice before we file it, and it’s a pretty tight turnaround. It’s 30 days.”

York said there’s also a problem when clients don’t accept their mail due to the policy of copying and shredding. This leaves the attorney with the option of meeting in person to get a signature on a form, which can be time consuming. 

Lost in the mail

Masnica recalled her firm having to send mail multiple times because a client didn’t receive it. 

“If we’re sending something to a client on the street who is living in their home, we never really have issues,” Masnica said. 

Story said he’s had an issue with not receiving mail that a client said they sent to him. 

“Most disturbing is when my clients have part of their case record from their legal materials disappear,” Story said. “Their file doesn’t follow them to the next institution, or part of it is mailed to me and not the whole of it.”

Dorin Ferguson, who is incarcerated at the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility in Boscobel, said he has sent mail to Story that didn’t arrive, including mail that was returned to Ferguson.

DOC policy allows the resident to check the copied legal documents and request two rescans. York said sending large files poses a risk of miscopying.

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• Two women incarcerated at Taycheedah Correctional Institution have died following hospital stays that began Feb. 22. 

• Family members of both women say hospital staff linked the deaths to pneumonia. They said both women started mentioning health issues over the phone around a month ago.

• Corrections officials briefly locked down part of Taycheedah due to an increase in respiratory illnesses.

Two women incarcerated at Taycheedah Correctional Institution have died following hospital stays that began Feb. 22. The Wisconsin Department of Corrections has shared limited information about their deaths, frustrating family members and those locked up at the maximum- and medium-security women’s prison. 

Shawnee Reed, 36, died Feb. 23, a day after arriving at an area hospital. Brittany Doescher, 33, died Thursday after spending nearly two weeks on life support, according to an online corrections database and family members. 

Both women were mothers, family members said. 

Two prisoners at Taycheedah told Wisconsin Watch and WPR that a third incarcerated woman was hospitalized around the same time as Reed and Doescher. The online corrections  database shows the woman they identified was “out to facility” on Feb. 23. She returned to Taycheedah in the same week.

Reed and Doescher’s official causes of death are pending, said Dr. Adam Covach, Fond du Lac County’s chief medical examiner. Family members of both women say hospital staff linked the deaths to pneumonia. Reed and Doescher’s relatives asked not to be identified to avoid drawing more attention to their families. 

Doescher’s relative said she learned of Doescher’s hospitalization two days after it began. She arrived to find Doescher chained to a bed with blisters around her ankles. 

Following discussions with doctors, Doescher’s family member believes earlier treatment could have prevented the death, particularly because she was so young. 

Asked about the deaths, department spokesperson Beth Hardtke wrote in an email to WPR and Wisconsin Watch: “The federal Centers for Disease Control is seeing ‘high’ numbers of respiratory illness cases in Wisconsin, and the Department of Corrections (DOC) is taking a number of steps to prevent the spread of respiratory illnesses to staff and persons in our care.”

People incarcerated at Wisconsin prisons, including Taycheedah, were recently tested and treated for Influenza A, Hardtke added.

Relatives said both women started mentioning health issues over the phone around a month ago.

Questions about the illnesses are swirling within the prison. Three incarcerated women told WPR and Wisconsin Watch they learned Reed had died but heard different versions of the cause. 

Corrections officials locked down part of Taycheedah — limiting prisoner movement — on Feb. 28. That was due to an increase in respiratory illnesses, according to an internal memo from Warden Michael Gierach. The department lifted the lockdown Thursday. 

Wisconsin typically charges prisoners a $7.50 copay for each face-to-face medical visit, among the highest in the country. Citing the surge of respiratory visits, the department lifted copays for visits beginning Feb. 28, five days after Reed died.

“DOC health care staff recently reminded employees and those in our care of ways to protect themselves as influenza, COVID-19, pneumonia and RSV continue to circulate,” Hardtke wrote.  

The prisons are providing vaccines, masks and soap for regular hand washing, Hardtke added. Anyone who tests positive for a respiratory illness is quarantined for at least seven days.

While women at Taycheedah did receive information about respiratory illness precautions, the department shared no details about the hospitalizations and deaths, said Kady Mehaffey, who is incarcerated.

“Which is kind of maddening because of the amount of people that are filling in the blanks about what happened,” Mehaffey said.

The department did not publicly announce the women’s deaths, which WPR and Wisconsin Watch learned about from women incarcerated at the facility.  

Online records showed the women had died but little other information. The department has since provided basic information, including the women’s names, ages, death dates, and that they died in an “area hospital.”

States including Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska publicly announce prisoner deaths, sharing the person’s name, prison, where they died, and in some cases, details related to their cause of death. 

Wisconsin is not the only state to limit the release of such details, but doing so is problematic, said Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin.

“There’s no greater responsibility that prisons have than keeping the people inside safe and alive and when there’s a failure to do that the public has a right to know,” Deitch said.

Hardtke wrote that her department follows best practices to protect the privacy of people who are incarcerated and their families. What’s more, it’s up to county coroners or medical examiners to investigate causes of deaths.

The Department of Corrections does confirm deaths and release names after family is notified, but the department can’t release other details, including cause of death, because of privacy laws, Hardtke said.

Deitch said prison systems often interpret privacy laws broadly and then point to such protections to justify withholding information. 

While the department updates its online database to note prisoner deaths, someone seeking information about a death would first need to know the prisoner’s name. That database was used to confirm the March 4 death of a prisoner at Waupun Correctional Institution — Damien Evans, the seventh Waupun prisoner to die in custody since June 2023. 

Fourteen prisoners residing at Wisconsin’s adult institutions have died this year, Hardtke wrote. The prisons saw 61 deaths in all of 2024 and 54 deaths in 2023.  

Reed and Doescher both participated in a program to help with substance abuse and facilitate an early release, according to relatives and court documents. Doescher expected her release within months, her relative said.

“She was hoping to come home and start her own business,” the relative said. “She wanted to counsel other girls in situations like her.”

Both Reed and Doescher enjoyed jewelry making while at Taycheedah.

“I don’t know how (Reed) did it, but she would get like thread and threaded around like a plastic piece or something like that and she could make these really cool designs,” Mehaffey said. “She was good with the small intricate things.”

Both women have children.

“We’re going to miss her and I certainly hope the prison system can be reformed because there’s no call for this,” Doescher’s family member said. “I feel for any other parent that has to go through this.”

Families seek answers after deaths of two women incarcerated at Taycheedah 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.

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A seventh inmate has died at Wisconsin’s oldest prison, less than a year after the then-warden and multiple members of his staff were charged with misconduct and felony inmate abuse.

The state Department of Corrections offender website notes that 23-year-old Damien Evans died Tuesday at the Waupun Correctional Institution. The site does not offer any details. A Corrections spokesperson didn’t immediately return a message Wednesday. Dodge County Sheriff Dale Schmidt said in an email to The Associated Press that his agency is investigating Evans’ death but he had no information to share.

Online court records indicate Evans was sentenced in 2019 to seven years in prison for armed robbery and an additional two years to be served concurrently for bail jumping. Both cases were filed in Racine County.

Evans is the seventh Waupun inmate to have died in custody since June 2023. One killed himself, one died of a fentanyl overdose, one died of a stroke, and one died of dehydration and malnutrition. Another inmate, 66-year-old Jay Adkins, died in May. A sixth prisoner, 57-year-old Christopher McDonald, died in August.

The Dodge County Sheriff’s Office has said McDonald’s death appears to have been a suicide. He was sentenced to 999 years after pleading no contest to being a party to first-degree intentional homicide in 1992. Schmidt didn’t immediately respond to follow-up emails Wednesday afternoon seeking updates on the investigations into Adkins’ and McDonald’s deaths.

Prosecutors last year charged warden Randall Hepp with misconduct and eight members of his staff with felony inmate abuse in connection with the deaths of two of the prisoners, Cameron Williams and Donald Maier. Three of the eight staff members also were charged with misconduct. Hepp subsequently retired.

According to criminal complaints, Williams died of a stroke in October 2023. His body went undiscovered for at least 12 hours.

Maier died of dehydration and malnutrition. He had severe mental health problems but either refused or wasn’t given his medication in the eight days leading up to his February 2024 death.

Federal investigators also have been looking into an alleged smuggling ring involving Waupun prison employees. Gov. Tony Evers office has said the probe has resulted in the suspension of nearly a dozen employees. A former prison worker pleaded guilty in September to smuggling cellphones, tobacco and drugs into the facility in exchange for money.

Waupun inmates have filed a class-action lawsuit alleging mistreatment and a lack of health care.

The maximum-security prison was built in the 1850s. Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike have been calling for years to close it. Concerns about local job losses and the cost of building a replacement prison have stymied progress.

Evers, a Democrat, last month proposed a multitiered, $500 million plan for the state’s prisons that includes converting Waupun to a medium-security center focused on job training for inmates.

This story has been updated to correct that Evans is the seventh inmate to die at Waupun Correctional Institution since June 2023, instead of the sixth inmate, and to correct that one inmate killed himself, not two.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup. This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.

Seventh inmate dies at Wisconsin’s Waupun Correctional Institution 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.

Wisconsin Secure Program Facility in Boscobel, a maximum security prison where the peer specialist program started. | Photo courtesy Wisconsin Department of Corrections

William Bowers is incarcerated at the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility in the city of Boscobel, in southwestern Wisconsin, a maximum security prison, where inmates’ behavior and activities are closely monitored. 

Bowers struggles with his mental health and self-harm, and is concerned about his safety. He said he has received help from a peer specialist. Through this state program, incarcerated people in Wisconsin are drawing on their personal experiences to mentor other prisoners. 

Bowers called his peer specialist a “miracle worker” who has “saved my life so many times.” He said the demand for peer specialists currently exceeds the number of specialists available and he thinks more staff should be better informed about the program. 

If he’s in a crisis and wants to see his peer specialist, Bowers said, he can press a button in his cell and make the request. If he is able to see the specialist, they’ll go to a separate room and talk. He also has a scheduled meeting with his peer specialist each week.

He said that his peer specialist has been more helpful for him than the psychological services at the prison and he wishes to be transferred to the Wisconsin Resource Center. The facility treats people incarcerated in state prisons who need specialized mental health services. So far, prison authorities have not agreed to his request.

Certified peer specialists have personal experience with a range of issues including addiction, recovery and mental illness, and have been trained and certified by the state to use that experience to mentor others. 

Since 2010, 1,500 peer specialists have been certified by the state of Wisconsin. After completing their training, peer specialists work alongside clinicians — psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, and counselors — helping their clients or “peers” move toward recovery from addiction and function without criminal violations. 

Over 100 specialists are incarcerated people who mentor other prisoners, as of August 2023. 

The Wisconsin Peer Specialist Employment Initiative is a service of the organization Access to Independence, funded by a grant from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. The organization provides 52 hours of training, according to Gaochi Vang, the peer specialist program manager for Access to Independence. She said she thinks peer specialists in prison take a little under 48 hours of training due to the schedule and the needs of the Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC). Peer specialists must get continuing education and apply for recertification after two years. 

“We’ve had countless feedback from agencies and employers and organizations just saying, ‘Wow, our clients are opening up to the certified peer specialist more than the therapist or the social worker,’ and it’s just because they have that connection of having that lived experience,” Vang said. 

Vang said peer specialists “learn to decenter themselves so that they can support another person, while also knowing when it is appropriate or when it is necessary to share their lived experience.”

A year-end report from Stanley Correctional Institution noted that in one of its housing facilities, Unit 3, five  certified peer specialists work with 25 incarcerated peers. 

A report from Dodge Correctional Institution stated that so far in 2024, 14 certified peer specialists had offered their peers 12,103 sessions. On 138 occasions, the prison staff requested a peer specialist to deescalate a situation or meet a peer in crisis. 

Kenya Bright, from the Bureau of Prevention of Treatment and Recovery for the Department of Health Services (DHS), explained what peer specialists do during a Dec. 19 Zoom meeting of the Wisconsin Council on Mental Health Criminal Justice Committee. 

A certified peers specialist, Bright said, “walks beside the individual who is struggling and help(s) them identify through their own lived experience ways that perhaps a person might work to grow in their recovery.”

In an August 2023 webinar hosted by Vang, Tracy Johnson and Allyson Eparvier, peer specialist co-directors for the DOC, talked about the DOC’s experience with the program in prisons beginning in 2017 at Wisconsin Secure Program Facility in Boscobel and at Oshkosh Correctional Institution, two maximum security prisons.

Johnson said in 2017, 10 men from Boscobel and eight from Oshkosh were screened and gathered in Boscobel for an intensive week of training.

“We covered everything in the curriculum,” said Johnson, “and we added more layers that apply to the Department of Correction.”

In 2019, women from the Taycheedah Correctional Institution, a women’s maximum- and medium-security prison, attended  training.

By 2023, Johnson said, 150 had taken the training while serving a prison sentence, and most had been certified.

Results of the peer specialist program

To receive the training, the potential peer specialist must meet certain criteria, Johnson said. These include having committed no major rule violations (such as using drugs or fighting) within the last year, having a positive work record within the facility and having adjusted to life within the facility. The specialist must go through an approval process, which includes the prison’s security threat group coordinator and the psychological services unit. 

“Our guys (peer specialists working at Dodge) are well equipped to deal with anxiety and depression, trauma and grief,” Eparvier said.  “We always have interpersonal issues with a cellmate. We have this phrase that we’ve coined, kind of called cell etiquette, and so they talk about how, if you’re not getting along with your cellmate, how to navigate that and so that you don’t end up getting in trouble or getting in a situation that where you could get a little riskier than normal. So they talk about how to navigate various types of situations. Same thing with staff — if they’re not getting along with staff on their unit, just how to navigate that.”

Eparvier said one peer specialist at Dodge sleeps with his shoes on so he is able to quickly leave his cell to help someone in crisis.

“These guys do wonders with individuals who have a history of self-harm,” said Eparvier. “They’re very, very compassionate and very patient and very understanding. And a lot of times, we find some really amazing success stories come out of some of the individuals who have a significant history of self-harm after they’ve been working with a [peer specialist]. They work on general self-improvement, release planning, goal setting. They’re always goal setting no matter what part of their incarceration they’re at.”

The peer specialists are paid $1 an hour — the maximum amount that incarcerated people make in DOC — for up to 40 hours per week.

Eparvier said a dissertation published in 2023 — “Effectiveness of the Certified Peer Specialist Program in Wisconsin” by Shelby Kottke-Weaver, University of Wisconsin-Madison — reveals peer specialists  working with peers has resulted in fewer misconduct reports, less time in restrictive housing and less recidivism.

The research paper, which collected data from 24 DOC institutions, found  “these results suggest overall positive effects of the [peer specialist] program for individuals who receive peer services and have far-reaching policy implications for the use of peer support in carceral settings.” 

“So individuals who work with a [peer specialist] while they’re in the Department of Corrections, when they get out, they are, it seems, better and more well equipped to deal with life out there,” Eparvier said. “That goal planning and that release planning and goal setting seems to be really sinking in and having a positive impact.”

Johnson said that often when peers are being released from prison, they want to work with another peer specialist  on the outside.

“We have a lot of peers releasing saying this has been the best thing I’ve ever done working with a peer specialist,” said Johnson, and she said many peers on the outside stay in touch with the specialist  they worked with.

Johnson said she receives regular email from a staff member commenting on how a peer specialist has made a difference in the life of other residents and in the lives of staff members.

Like Bowers, Ronald Dennis is incarcerated at the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility in Boscobel. He has been in prison since 1975 and has a life sentence, he told the Examiner over the phone. 

“I’ve had a real violent past in prison,” Dennis said. “I’ve stabbed guards, stabbed inmates.”

Dennis said he became involved with the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist criminal gang that operates inside and outside of prisons. He said that gang membership lasts for life, but that he is no longer actively involved with the gang’s activities. 

“As I got older I learned to deal with people on a individual basis, not on whatever race they are,” he said. “I try to get along with everyone.”

Dennis said he’s been in Wisconsin since 2002 and hasn’t received a disciplinary report for violence in over two decades. More recently in his incarceration, he worked as a peer specialist, he said. 

Dennis said he uses his past to try to keep someone from going down the same path. Incarcerated people at Boscobel are more at ease talking to another incarcerated person than to a staff member, he said, adding that people he’s talked to have broken down and cried, and that he’s talked people out of hurting themselves or beating someone up.

Dennis said he lost his position because he received pornographic photos while in prison but continues to work with other incarcerated people. 

“I hear guys on the tier… [saying], ‘I’m going to beat this guy’s ass, or ‘I’m going to beat that guy’s ass,’ when we come out to rec,” Dennis said. “And if I know the guy, I’ll try to pull him aside and try to talk to him [and say]… ‘What if you get in the fight, you hit [him], he falls over, hits his head on the table and he dies. Now you’ve got a life sentence over some stupid stuff you don’t even got to fight for.’”

Connecting with people before they leave prison

Tamra Oman is the Peer Support Administrator at Ex-Incarcerated People Organizing (EXPO). She’s been involved in peer support work for over two decades. 

“So, I have the privilege of going back in and hopefully sharing hope and inviting people to really look at themselves and determine what they want for their life, and what’s it going to take,” Oman said. “And allow people to support them while they’re in the institution.” 

Oman prefers to develop contact with  incarcerated residents before they leave a correctional facility. 

“Our greatest desire would be to meet with people and connect with them and hear their hopes and dreams and then support them in developing a reentry plan that actually has a schedule to it,” she said, “Because it’s hard when you go from 24 hours a day of what you’re going to do, to then 24 hours a day of ‘I don’t know what to do,’ right?”

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• 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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Most inmates in Wisconsin’s federal prison, and in federal prisons nationally, are U.S. citizens.

Following Trump administration arrests of immigrants suspected or convicted of crimes, Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden of western Wisconsin claimed Jan. 27 that over 50% of inmates at the Federal Correctional Institution in Oxford, Wisconsin, are “illegal aliens.”

Oxford is a low-security prison 60 miles north of Madison that houses 1,100 male offenders.

As of Jan. 25, 59% of Oxford inmates, and 85% of federal inmates nationally, were U.S. citizens. The Federal Bureau of Prisons does not readily have data on what percentage of inmates are unauthorized immigrants.

Nationally:

U.S. citizens constituted two-thirds of recently federally sentenced individuals.

The most serious offense for 76% of noncitizens sentenced for a federal crime in recent years was immigration-related, such as unlawful U.S. entry or smuggling noncitizens (14% were drug-related).

Donald Trump’s administration has called unauthorized immigrants criminals, but being undocumented is a civil violation.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

• U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement: News Releases and Statements
• X: Derrick Van Orden post
• Federal Bureau of Prisons: Email, Jan. 29, 2025
• Federal Bureau of Prisons: Inmate citizenship
• U.S. Sentencing Commission: Federally Sentenced Non-U.S. Citizens
• U.S. Government Accountability Office: Noncitizens in the U.S.: Public Information on Federal Incarcerations
• Axios: All undocumented immigrants are "criminals," Trump administration says

Did most federal prison inmates in Wisconsin and the U.S. enter the country illegally? 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.

Green Bay Correctional Institution | Photo by Andrew Kennard/Wisconsin Examiner

A consulting and management firm will begin on-site visits to Wisconsin prisons next week, the next step in a third-party review of the state’s prison system. 

Falcon Correctional and Community Services, Inc. “exists to elevate mental health services in jails and prisons” for incarcerated Americans with mental illness, according to the firm’s website. Amidst concerns over the conditions of confinement in state facilities, Falcon is studying some aspects of life inside Wisconsin prisons to find areas for improvement. 

The Wisconsin Department of Corrections recognized the value of a third party reviewing policies and procedures and providing recommendations for improvement, DOC Secretary Jared Hoy said in a July 9 letter to lawmakers on Wisconsin’s 2023 Assembly Committee on Corrections. 

On the same day, prison reform advocates spoke in front of the committee, giving testimony about solitary confinement and other issues. The Department of Corrections has received scrutiny after deaths of incarcerated people and criminal charges against staff at Waupun Correctional Institution.

“This is just one step of many that we at the department are taking to make improvements at our facilities to help keep staff safe and improve the conditions for those in our care,” Hoy said of the review in the letter. 

Falcon teams have been deployed to review restrictive housing practices in at least four states, according to the firm’s proposal: Washington, Connecticut, Louisiana and Massachusetts. 

Bringing in Falcon is an acknowledgement of serious problems in the department, said Mark Rice, the transformational justice campaign coordinator at the nonprofit WISDOM. Rice hopes the study will lead to change, but he also thinks the department should make improvements based on information that is already available.

“Solitary confinement is being used far too frequently,” Rice said. “People have been dying. People have not been able to get access to medications that they need in some situations. People have not had adequate health care during emergency situations. And so certainly [there have] been several deaths that were preventable.”

What will Falcon do? 

In November, the DOC and Falcon signed a contract. The Examiner received the contract and accompanying documents through public records requests to the DOC.

The partnership includes a comprehensive study of the Division of Adult Institutions’ health care program, behavioral health program, correctional practices and restrictive housing practices. 

The study was projected to take six months, the documents say, with a cost of about half a million dollars. 

Currently, the Falcon team is on the fourth stage of the study, according to Beth Hardtke, director of communications for the Department of Corrections. This involves beginning group workshops, according to the contract documents. 

The fifth stage is titled “Onsite Visits and Facility Studies,” and it is scheduled for weeks eight through ten of the partnership. The Falcon team will begin on-site visits next week, Hardtke said. 

Some priorities listed in the plan focus directly on incarcerated people. These include timely emergency treatment, access to and administration of necessary medication, psychiatric services and access to recreation. 

Other priorities are focused on employees. These include facility leadership culture, staff wellness and safety and behavioral health and health care staffing. 

The second part of the partnership is labeled as optional. It involves technical assistance for implementing the study recommendations and includes Falcon measuring the impact of the changes after 30, 90 and 180 days. 

Hardtke said the DOC plans to release recommendations from Falcon after the project concludes.

One section of the proposal covers six areas of focus for Falcon’s experts. It tasks Falcon’s experts with conducting analyses related to training, recruitment, culture and retention of staff, as well as restrictive housing and initiatives aiming  to reform it. 

One of the other areas of focus is a report with “actionable recommendations and a roadmap for addressing behavioral health, health care and correctional practices, including restrictive housing, and their impact on [incarcerated people] and staff.” 

The report should include a timeline for execution and proposed ways to evaluate and adjust the implementation of the recommendations, the section says.  

WIDOC_Falcon_Scope_Proposal_8.22.24

Analyzing restrictive housing

In a section about restrictive housing, the proposal says the DOC is “engaged in an agency-wide culture change” to more rehabilitative practices. Restrictive housing includes disciplinary separation — when an incarcerated person has committed a violation. It also includes instances when staff remove an incarcerated person from the general population for reasons such as their own safety.

The state limits when incarcerated people in disciplinary separation can leave their cells. They may do so “as needed for urgent medical or psychological attention, showers, visits, recreation and emergencies endangering their safety in the cell or other reasons as authorized by the warden.” 

For November 2024, 3.4% of incarcerated people tracked were in disciplinary separation, according to the DOC. 

Also for November, the average sentence to disciplinary separation was 37.4 days, while the average time spent there was 23.6 days. The average time spent in disciplinary separation declined overall from January to November.. 

The most common reasons for disciplinary separation are disobeying orders, disruptive conduct, disrespect, threats and assault, according to DOC data from November 2019 to November 2024.

Advocates have called for reform of solitary confinement in Wisconsin, which can be defined as confining a prisoner for 22 or more hours a day without meaningful human contact. In 2011, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture said indefinite and prolonged solitary confinement in excess of 15 days should be prohibited, citing the mental damage caused by social isolation. 

The Falcon team hopes  “to reduce reliance on restrictive housing as a tool.” The group’s analysis will cover prevention of restrictive housing when possible and alternatives and modifications to restrictive housing time. It will also focus on the return of incarcerated people to other housing after leaving restrictive housing. 

To substantially decrease reliance on restrictive housing, “the scope of systemic change must reach far beyond the restrictive housing areas,” the proposal says. 

Advocates want to see reform, independent oversight 

When the Examiner shared the contract documents with WISDOM’s Mark Rice, the focus on solitary confinement reform drew his attention. He hopes the publication of a report will lead to the end of long-term solitary confinement in Wisconsin. 

“We’ve really been leading the charge on that issue for over a decade, and have seen not a huge amount of progress, not the progress that we want to see,” Rice said. 

Susan Franzen told the Examiner that she’s encouraged by the focus on behavioral health and restrictive housing. Franzen is the director of operations for Ladies of SCI, another prison reform advocacy group. She said she’d like to see incarcerated people have the opportunity to share what it’s like trying to get mental health care in prison.

“They mention that they’re going to partner with all relevant stakeholders [for the study],” Franzen said. “But there is no mention of speaking to or engaging with inmates or their family members.” 

Falcon experts will gather information through staff interviews, workshops, site visits and existing documents, forms and data, according to the  proposal document. The Falcon Method of analysis “relies heavily” on interpreting quantifiable data instead of using “only subjective testimonies,” the proposal states.

“DOC values input from friends and family and while they won’t be engaging directly with Falcon consultants the department is certainly considering their viewpoints as leadership makes decisions on this project,” Hardtke said. 

The consultants will continue to interact with “a wide variety of staff” throughout the DOC and during the site visits, she said.

Franzen pointed to unfilled positions for DOC psychological services, where the agency has a vacancy rate of 21.6%. She hopes the Falcon partnership will benefit incarcerated people who need psychological services. 

In October, the Examiner reported on the Falcon partnership and the idea of creating an independent ombudsman to increase oversight of the prison system. Sen. Van Wanggaard (R-Racine), chair of the 2025 Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety, and Rep. Jerry O’Connor (R-Fond Du Lac), vice chair of the 2025 Assembly Committee on Corrections, weighed in.

Rice doesn’t see the Falcon partnership as a substitute for independent oversight, but he thinks “lives can be saved” if it leads to improvements in the prison system. 

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• Wisconsin budgets nearly $463,000 a year to incarcerate each child at the state’s beleaguered Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake schools, a figure that has ballooned over a decade as enrollment has plummeted.

• A new Department of Corrections budget request would nearly double that figure to about $862,000 a year — 58 times what taxpayers spend on the average K-12 public school student.

• Experts attribute the enrollment trends and costs to demographic changes, a paradigm shift from large youth prisons to smaller regional facilities and scandals on the campus that made judges hesitant to send teens to Lincoln Hills.

Wisconsin budgets nearly $463,000 a year to incarcerate each child at the state’s beleaguered juvenile prison complex in the North Woods, a figure that has ballooned over a decade as enrollment has plummeted.

A new Department of Corrections budget request would nearly double that figure to about $862,000 a year — 58 times what taxpayers spend on the average K-12 public school student.

It comes as efforts to close the Lincoln County complex — home to Lincoln Hills School for boys and Copper Lake School for girls — and build a new youth prison in Milwaukee have slowed to a crawl.  

Six years after the Legislature approved the closure plan, Republican lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers are blaming each other during funding and policy disagreements that have delayed the closure. 

A 2018 legal settlement restricted how guards could discipline youth. That followed a series of scandals involving allegations of inhumane conditions, such as frequent use of pepper spray, strip searches and mechanical restraints and solitary confinement. 

Republicans earlier this year pushed to lift pepper spray restrictions after a 16-year-old incarcerated at Lincoln Hills struck a counselor in the face, resulting in his death. A judge denied requests to alter the settlement in a dispute that has added to closure delays, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

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.

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Transfr, a New York company, seeks to put virtual reality technology in the hands of people who are incarcerated in Wisconsin, hoping they can overcome barriers to employment once released. 

“It’s life-changing for an individual to be able to come out of incarceration with actual career pathways,” said Ruben Gaona, executive director of My Way Out, an organization that supports people who are leaving reincarceration and one of Transfr’s local collaborators. 

“They’d be able to go out into the community and say, ‘OK, you know what: I’m not only here to get a job, I’m out here to get a career.’” 

Avoiding reincarceration

Research has found that a criminal record leads to a 50% reduction in callbacks and job offers. 

The Wisconsin Department of Corrections, among others, reports that the more likely someone with a criminal record is employed, the less likely the person is to return to incarceration. 

According to the department’s 2022 report, people who “completed vocational programming had lower rearrest, reconviction and reincarceration rates … compared to their peers who were identified as having a vocational programming need but who did not receive programming.” 

“From a personal and professional standpoint, I can tell you that a good-paying, career-supporting job is very essential to someone staying out and keeping that recidivism rate down,” said Andre Brown, employment specialist with Project RETURN, a reentry nonprofit established nearly 50 years ago.

For all the talk about pipelines into prison, Brown and his colleagues are trying to create a pipeline out of prison.

“If one can support themselves, pay their bills, take care of their family and have some fulfillment, one has no time to think of crime,” Brown said. 

Inside and outside

My Way Out provides six weeks of training and education to people inside Milwaukee County Community Reintegration Center, a county-run correctional facility. This support is designed to help people with job searches, including résumé writing and interviewing skills. 

With Transfr, Gaona and his team see an opportunity to expand their support by adding four weeks of virtual reality training for in-demand vocations, in fields such as construction, manufacturing,  hospitality and health care.

My Way Out staff also want to bring these resources to state prisons overseen by the Department of Corrections. 

“People will be able to come out (of incarceration) and take apprenticeship tests, so they’d start getting placement in apprenticeship programs and secure living-wage jobs,” said Gaona. 

Funding obstacle

Funding is the main obstacle to getting this technology into the hands of people who are incarcerated. 

The Department of Corrections does not have a budget for this type of technology but suggested that Transfr reach out to Wisconsin Workforce Development Boards, which partner with the department in reentry work, Beth Hardtke, director of communications for the Department of Corrections, said in an email. 

Ryan Leonhardt, state workforce manager for Transfr, said the company has had conversations with these boards but, for the most part, has heard that funding is not currently available from them as well.  

My Way Out applied for a grant that would help provide funding to work with Transfr, but its request was denied. 

Opportunities

Transfr offers more than 350 trainings, all 12 to 20 minutes, which teach foundational skills within various fields, Leonhardt said.

“If somebody is learning how to use calipers, they pick up calipers in the virtual environment. They set the calipers using the controls. They actually do the measurements,” said Leonhardt, explaining how Transfr users learn about this measurement tool common in engineering, metalworking and woodworking. “And then the final thing is they get step-by-step instruction from a digital coach, who then turns around and gives them an assessment.” 

Transfr also provides career explorations. Like the trainings, these are hands-on and guided by a coach but are five- to eight-minute experiences of a day in the life of a job “so people can get an idea of what it’s like,” Leonhardt said. 

Better trained workers are beneficial not just for the people getting trained but for the wider economy as well because of nationwide workforce shortages, Leonhardt said.

“Right now, the labor markets are such a way that if someone can come in and they have foundational skills … they’re going to have better chances for employment because they’re going to be able to meet their (employers’) needs right away,” he said. 

News414 is a service journalism collaboration between Wisconsin Watch and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service that addresses the specific issues, interests, perspectives and information needs identified by residents of central city Milwaukee neighborhoods. Learn more at our website or sign up for our texting service here.

Virtual reality technology connects people who are incarcerated to a new type of job training 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.