Note: This is an excerpt from our free morning Key Reads newsletter
When Tony Evers first jumped into the governor’s race, he told voters he wanted to cut Wisconsin’s prison population in half. Not tweak it. Not study it. Cut it by 50 percent. He wrapped that pledge in talk of “smart justice” and “modern reforms,” but the bottom line was clear. Fewer inmates. Fewer revocations. More releases.
Eight years later, we’re seeing the results, and they’re not pretty. The prison system is still bursting at the seams, and the facilities Evers said he would fix are among the oldest and worst in America. Waupun and Green Bay remain dangerous places for corrections officers, other employees, and inmates. The staffing across the system is stretched to the breaking point.
The Governor’s main answer has been to push to close prisons and expand options that don’t keep as many criminals behind bars. He’s worked hard to achieve his goal of cutting the prison population in half.
As he enters the final year as Governor, the scandals at the Department of Corrections continue to mount.
The state’s release and monitoring network is now among them. The recent escape from a group home by the Slenderman attacker shed light on a problem the DOC had kept hidden from the public.
On the night Morgan Geyser walked out of her Madison group home, she cut off the ankle monitor and … nothing happened for hours.
Her tamper alert went off at 9:38 p.m. Staff tried a remote reset of the equipment at 11:10. Police weren’t notified until after midnight. By then she’d been gone for three hours.
Yes, she was eventually apprehended. But her escape brought another DOC scandal to light. Their supervision of “clients” on less-restrictive ankle monitors is an absolute joke.
The DOC’s Electronic Monitoring Center is drowning in alarms that go off when the signal is disrupted, either by poor equipment or tampering. We now know, for example, that on the night Geyser escaped, DOC received nearly 400 alerts in a three-hour window. More than 250 of them labeled “high priority.”
Those numbers are staggering, and raise many important, and urgent, questions.
- Just how many people are the DOC monitoring with these ankle bracelets?
- How many staff are there for each “client?”
- How many “clients” are on the loose, unmonitored as you read this?
- What crimes had they committed to become “clients” of the Department of Corrections in the first place?
- The DOC is moving to immediately respond to tamper alarms. Why on God’s green Earth wasn’t this the policy before Geyser’s escape (as it is in many jurisdictions that use these devices)?
Wisconsinites deserve answers to all these questions. Immediately.
Just because the Governor is a lame duck doesn’t mean the press corps that reports on him has to be lame.
