Prison and Politics
On Tuesday, October 28, the Wisconsin State Building Commission released $15 million to assess a planned overhaul of Wisconsin’s prison facilities. Republicans only left this tiny sliver of Governor Tony Evers’ proposed $325 million prison reform package when passing the $111 billion prison budget. Up until the day before the Building Commission meeting, Republicans were acting cagey, like they might change their mind and hold back even that sliver, as they did in 2019 when withholding funds to close Wisconsin’s youth torture prisons.
We have argued that the Governor’s proposed budget was a charade. He knew that little of it, especially this prison overhaul, would pass the still-gerrymandered Republican legislature. He proposed it as political theatre to make the Democratic base think he cares, just like Republicans mislead their base by passing laws they know he’ll veto. We also identified many actions Evers could take to actually address the state’s prison crisis. From using his pardon authority, to changing policies on supervision and parole, Evers could make good on his promise to dramatically reduce the prison population, regardless of what the fascist legislature has to say about it. Doing so would greatly reduce the costs of moving people around and closing facilities. Instead of addressing problems, Evers is playing political games, while the prison population and death toll rise continuously.
Political Fumbles
If you’re going to play these games with incarcerated people’s lives, the least you could do is play them well. Evers isn’t. As with childcare, he is celebrating the Republican budget and the “swift” release of these funds as a “bipartisan success”. This stupidly gives Republicans undeserved credit when they literally obstructed 96% of his reform proposal. Republicans are now talking about running in the 2026 election on this bipartisan budget. Evers handed them these talking points. The centrist Democrat election strategy is all about winning over moderate Republicans as their party shifts to the radical right, but Evers keeps sending out press releases reminding voters that Republicans work well and cooperate with him.
Celebrations of bipartisanship also normalize and hide the gross dysfunction going on in Wisconsin’s prisons. Evers’ press release presents the state’s “skyrocketing prison population” as an immutable fact, when it’s actually a policy choice he and the legislature are making. Even worse, the release claims $15 million will “advance the 2017 Wisconsin Act 185” by closing Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake Schools in “early 2029”. In reality, Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake are prisons (not schools) where young people were tortured, sexually assaulted, and driven to suicide by staff. Act 185 required Wisconsin to close the facilities by January 2021, but that didn’t happen: Act 185 involves a shitty compromise where those youth prisons will only close after Wisconsin builds more youth prisons. Bad faith Republicans joined gullible liberals in that compromise (after much infighting and villainizing kids) only because torturing kids hurt Scott Walker’s re-election campaign. Evers and other Democrats seem to have forgotten that their victory in 2018 came in part from promising a more humane alternative on prison issues.
Wisconsin Prisons More fucked up than ever
Racially targeted mass incarceration is Wisconsin’s dark secret, and the consequences of an ever growing prison population are increasingly horrific. Wisconsin prisons are overcrowded and plagued with long lockdowns, corrupt wardens and staff, violence, inadequate food, torture practices, and increasingly frequent deaths. Forum For Understanding Prisons, an advocacy organization with many contacts inside Wisconsin’s prisons, reports that conditions have grown steadily worse under the Evers administration. It seems that because he’s a Democrat and makes the occasional symbolic or rhetorical gesture, he evades otherwise warranted criticism.
Meanwhile, Republicans underlined their callousness and floundering on prison issues by holding a news conference before the Building Commission vote. There, they complained about being excluded from the planning process, even though they control the legislature, and could develop and propose their own plans. The only action they’ll entertain is building new facilities. They claim more prisons will prevent problems like medium security prisoners being held in max facilities. That may sound logical, but it’s not. In reality, Wisconsin cannot find and retain people willing to staff the existing prisons, despite giving guards huge raises in the last budget. Understaffed facilities are put on long lockdowns, making them all function like max joints regardless of what security level they are officially designated. Adding facilities and beds will also reduce judge’s sentencing hesitation, and further increase the prison population, making the staff-to-prisoner ratio even worse. Wisconsin already spends far more money on prisons than the national average or neighboring states. The new budget increased prison spending by $461 million without addressing major problems. Hateful, reactionary Republicans reject these facts and the advice of fiscal conservative groups like The Badger Institute, insisting on building facilities that even guards do not want.
A Prison Election?
As in 2018, the humanitarian crisis in Wisconsin prisons could play a big part in Wisconsin’s 2026 governor and legislative races. It should be easy to create a strong contrast with the absurd and inhumane Republican position. Everyone says crime is an issue that helps Republicans, but in Wisconsin, Republicans are not anti-crime so much as they are pro-torture and racial targeting. And as the prison population grows and conditions worsen, more voters are impacted by this humanitarian crisis. The system clearly targets urban people of color, but people in neglected, economically marginalized, and precarious rural areas are also increasingly likely to have incarcerated family members experiencing hardship in DOC captivity.
The right candidate could make decarceration and prison reform a campaign asset. There are some real sociopathic prisonphiles in the Republican caucus, and a few of them, like Senator Van Wanggaard (district 21, Racine and South Milwaukee) are sitting in newly blue-leaning seats. Wanggaard’s Democratic challenger, Trevor Jung, makes no mention of incarceration or prison issues on his platform, and we encourage him to seize the opportunity.
For the governor’s race, Democratic candidates will have to distance themselves from eight disastrous years of Democratic control of the DOC under Tony Evers. Former Evers employees Missy Hughes and Sara Rodriguez seem unlikely to do this. If Mandela Barnes joins the race, he might tap into his organizing experience, but will also have to reconcile with his silence during four years as Lieutenant Governor under Evers. County Executive David Crowley has a record of actively expanding mass incarceration in Milwaukee County by steadily increasing the sheriff’s budget, every year. This year he went after buses to fund the sheriff and stole from school libraries to fund prosecutors.
That leaves two candidates that can credibly contrast themselves with Republicans on prison issues: Kelda Roys and Francesca Hong. They are both publicly championing a conditions of confinement package introduced by Representative Darrin Madison. Roys has spent years on the Senate Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety. Her campaign website includes a litany of specific reforms that will reduce the prison population, but also touts her advocacy for crime victims and her father’s history as a prosecutor. Hong’s campaign site is less ambiguous. In addition to criminal legal reforms, her ambitious socialist platform would work upstream of the prison system, reducing incarceration by alleviating poverty.
This election season, we will be watching to see how candidates talk about prison, and whether or not electoral attention will bring any hope for change.
