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.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

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.

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.” 

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

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.

The Wisconsin Department of Corrections has halted the work of a nonprofit that donated used books to prisoners for nearly 20 years, calling it necessary to prevent drugs from entering state prisons through secondhand books.

The move is drawing pushback from leaders of the nonprofit Wisconsin Books to Prisoners and prisoner rights advocates. They say the department is limiting inmates’ access to information while failing to narrow wider entry points for drugs, like prison staff. 

The used book ban comes after Wisconsin rerouted prisoner-bound mail out of state in the name of blocking drug shipments — an effort that has cost millions yet has had little visible impact on the numbers.

As they restrict books and mail shipments, Wisconsin prison officials have shared less about plans to stop prison employees from bringing in drugs. 

That’s despite last year’s launch of a federal investigation into employees suspected of smuggling contraband into Waupun Correctional Institution. Separately, multiple Wisconsin prison workers have faced charges related to drug smuggling in recent years. 

Prison officials ban used book donations

Wisconsin Books to Prisoners (WBTP), a small volunteer-run organization, has sent over 70,000 free books to state prisons since 2006.

Camy Matthay, the group’s director and co-founder, said she was alarmed in August to learn state prisons would no longer accept the group’s used books.

“The decision to bar WBTP from sending books unnecessarily restricts incarcerated peoples’ access to valuable educational resources, particularly when many facilities suffer from underfunded, outdated, or non-existent library service,” Matthay’s group wrote on social media when announcing the ban.

“We just want to send books to prisoners, that’s all,” Matthay said in an interview.

The organization inspected all books before sending to ensure they met prison “clean copy” criteria: no highlighting, underlining or marks of any kind, she said. 

In an Aug. 16 email to the nonprofit, Division of Adult Institutions Administrator Sarah Cooper wrote that her agency is not concerned with the organization itself, “but with those who would impersonate your organization for nefarious means.” 

“Bad actors” may send packages and books laced with drugs that “appear to be sent from the Child Support Agency, the IRS, the State Public Defender’s Office, the Department of Justice and individual attorneys,” she wrote.

The corrections department announced its latest ban of used books in January. Then Oshkosh Correctional Institution officials in February and March detected drugs in three shipments of books purporting to be from Wisconsin Books to Prisoners, spokesperson Beth Hardtke told reporters Monday in an email.

That was news to Matthay, she said Monday. The department never notified the group about the incidents, nor did Cooper’s August email mention them. 

Latest effort to restrict book donations 

This isn’t the first time restrictions have threatened the group’s work.  

Prison officials cited drug concerns in halting the nonprofit’s donations in 2008 before eventually agreeing to let it send only new books, following ACLU of Wisconsin intervention. In 2018, the department clarified that the nonprofit, as an approved vendor, could send used books so long as they were clean copies. It reaffirmed that decision in 2021. 

Hardtke said the latest restrictions don’t specifically target Wisconsin Books to Prisoners. They are instead part of a broader ban on all secondhand book deliveries. Prisoners may still receive new books sent directly from a publisher or retailer with a receipt, she said. 

Matthay’s group cannot keep up with demands while being limited to only new books, she said.

The policy will chill prisoners’ access to information, said Moira Marquis, a senior manager at the freedom of expression advocacy group PEN America. Marquis authored the report “Reading Between the Bars,” which detailed state book restrictions nationwide.  

Wisconsin Books to Prisoners sent donated books to inmates for free to address a specific barrier to information. Many prisoners, who in 2023 made as little as five cents per hour in jobs behind bars, cannot afford to buy new books from retailers. 

“If you’re going to limit somebody’s First Amendment rights excessively, you really should have a very strong burden of proof that not only is this necessary, but also that it’s effective,” Marquis said.

Wisconsin Watch asked the corrections department for evidence that necessitated the ban. 

“Unfortunately, in recent years individuals have repeatedly used paper, including letters and books, as a way to try to smuggle drugs into DOC institutions,” Hardtke said in an email.  

The department since 2019 has flagged 214 incidents of drugs being found on paper, representing a quarter of all 881 contraband incidents flagged during that time, according to figures Hardtke provided.  

“DOC is continuing the conversation with Wisconsin Books to Prisoners in the hopes we can come to an agreement to help fulfill the reading requests of those in our care and do so safely,” Hardtke wrote. 

Matthay in August asked the department if providing tracking information on its packages could help it verify that book shipments were indeed coming from Wisconsin Books to Prisoners. 

The department has yet to respond, she said Monday.  

Millions spent rerouting prison mail to Maryland

The corrections department’s broader efforts to restrict mail do not appear to have slowed the flow of drugs. The department counted more incident reports of drugs being found on paper (55) thus far in 2024 than it did in 2021 (49), the year it overhauled its mailing system, the figures Hardtke provided show. 

Not all incident reports flagged as drug-related turn out to actually be so, Hardtke noted, and the figures may not account for drug-related incidents logged in separate medical or conduct reports. 

In December 2021, the department began rerouting all prisoner-bound mail to Maryland, where a company called TextBehind scans each piece of mail and sends a digital copy to those incarcerated. The department has paid nearly $4 million for those services since they began, according to information Wisconsin Watch obtained through an open records request.

Some incarcerated people told Wisconsin Watch the loss of physical mail has increased their feelings of isolation. They can no longer hold the same handwritten letters and photographs their loved ones sent; photocopies aren’t the same. 

“I don’t get to smell the perfume on a letter. I don’t get the actual drawings my kid sends me. It takes away from the sentimental value of it,” said a Waupun prisoner who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution.  

A range of research has shown that maintaining connections to loved ones improves the likelihood that a prisoner will reintegrate into society and avoid recidivism. 

The prisoner said the mail policy hasn’t stopped the flow of drugs into prison.

“Every day I smell weed,” he said. “They’re trying to blame us for the drugs, but if the administration doesn’t hold their staff accountable for their actions, it won’t solve the problem.”

Lockdowns don’t stop drug flow 

Wisconsin in recent years has locked down prisons, limiting inmate movement and privileges to alleviate staffing shortages. Drugs kept flowing even after in-person visits and direct mail to prisoners stopped. 

The department counted 214 total drug-related contraband incident reports in 2024, up from 142 a year earlier and 164 in 2022. 

Last year, a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into a possible drug and contraband smuggling ring prompted the state to place 11 Waupun prison employees on leave. In September, a former Waupun prison employee was convicted of smuggling contraband into prisons under the guise of completing repairs.

And in October 2023, three months after state officials asked federal authorities to investigate staff-led smuggling inside Waupun’s prison, 30-year-old Tyshun Lemons was found dead from fentanyl poisoning. In June, prosecutors criminally charged nine Waupun prison workers, including the former warden, following multiple inmate deaths, including Lemons’.

At least two dozen correctional officers have been caught smuggling contraband into Wisconsin prisons since 2019, according to public records obtained by the advocacy group Ladies of SCI and shared with Wisconsin Watch. 

Wisconsin Watch is awaiting department records requested Sept. 5 detailing additional information related to recent drug incidents in its adult facilities. 

Mail restrictions scrutinized in other states

Multiple states have restricted books and mail since 2015, citing drug smuggling concerns, Marquis said. Meanwhile, prisoners have increasingly relied on electronic tablets, which have come with new limits on what they can read, Marquis said. 

Have such restrictions limited the flow of drugs in those states? Not necessarily, news reports have found. 

A Texas Tribune/Marshall Project investigation in 2021 found that curtailing mail did not curb drugs found in Texas prisons. Guards wrote up even more prisoners for drugs after the policy change. Prisoners and employees reported that staff were most responsible for smuggling drugs.

Pennsylvania’s prison officials banned physical mail in 2018 after blaming a series of staff illnesses on drugs allegedly sent by mail. But less than five years later, the number of prisoners who tested positive on random drug tests substantially increased, The Patriot News reported last year. 

Florida in 2021 stopped all paper mail from entering prisons, citing 35,000 contraband items found in mail between January 2019 and April 2021. But those represented less than 2% of all such items found in the prisons during that period, the Tampa Bay Times reported.  

Wisconsin in 2022 issued new screening requirements for people entering prisons and added metal detectors at points of entry. But one Waupun prison worker said screeners at entrances do not routinely inspect employees’ bags or lunches, allowing drugs to pass through undetected. The prison worker requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to media.

“If it were me trying to stop drugs, the first thing I would do is come up with a system where employees are screened better,” he said. 

To Rebecca Aubart, executive director of Ladies of SCI, the secondhand book ban is an example of how policies touted as safety measures harm incarcerated people. 

“To me this policy is another way DOC is blaming families and the people they incarcerate for the problems their staff can’t or won’t address,” she said. 

“It’s a false narrative that gets repeated, and when it becomes policy, the false narrative gets reinforced.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Wisconsin prisons restrict books and mail to keep drugs out, but some staff still bring drugs in 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 lawmakers have offered few remedies for deteriorating prison conditions spotlighted this year by investigative journalism, litigation surrounding extended lockdowns and criminal charges against nine Waupun prison officials following a string of inmate deaths.

But prisoner rights advocates remain energized by the recent attention. They are calling for the creation of an independent ombudsman to investigate concerns inside prisons and to study solutions.

Experts say such an office, versions of which exist in 19 states and the District of Columbia, could improve safety. Allowing prisoners and their families to air grievances could decrease tension that fuels violence between guards and inmates. And independent monitoring could prevent neglect and abuse — limiting tax dollars paid out in lawsuits, advocates say. 

Between 2013 and 2023, Wisconsin paid out at least $17 million in 450 legal settlements to people alleging abuse, neglect or civil rights violations while incarcerated, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis of settlement data. The cases involved alleged failure to prevent self-harm, deliberate indifference to medical needs and reckless disregard for the safety of prisoners, among other complaints. As a matter of practice, the state typically admitted no fault in its settlement agreements. 

The Wisconsin Watch analysis does not include more than $25 million in settlements and legal fees related to allegations of abuse at Wisconsin’s only youth prison at Lincoln Hills-Copper Lake, including excessive pepper spray use, strip searches and restraints. A counselor was killed this summer in a fight at the prison.  

Prisoners and advocates say they have nowhere to turn outside of courts for an impartial review of complaints.

While concerned family members can write to the Department of Corrections, their letters often get ignored or routed to prison staff who may retaliate — for instance by writing up the prisoner in question or reducing privileges like family visitation, Rebecca Aubart said. She’s the executive director of Ladies of SCI, a statewide advocacy group that initially focused on prisoners and loved ones at the medium-security Stanley Correctional Institution. 

“What’s going to happen is that it’s going to eventually end up in front of the warden, and nothing will be done about it,” Aubart told Wisconsin Watch.

Creating an ombudsman office, she said, “would give family members a place to go, and it would be kept confidential. We wouldn’t be experiencing the retaliation that we do now.” 

Aubart and other advocates brought the idea to the Republican-controlled Assembly’s Committee on Corrections during a July hearing. Lawmakers signaled openness to the idea.  

Rep. Angie Sapik, R-Lake Nebagamon, said she had previously considered writing a bill. Rep. Darrin Madison of Milwaukee said he and fellow Democrats have worked on their own proposal.

Aubart asked lawmakers to work together. 

“One side cannot fix it,” she said. 

Department of Corrections spokesperson Beth Hardtke said the agency is reviewing the idea, but cautioned a new office would require funding and staff resources.

“We would also note that DOC does have a complaint system, including an appeals process, for individuals in our care,” Hardtke added. “We also regularly offer guidance to the public, route complaints or concerns to the appropriate place, and resolve issues.” 

That complaint system is Wisconsin’s primary avenue for resolving prison grievances, with concerns submitted to and reviewed by an institution complaint examiner. Prisoner advocates call it unresponsive. Unlike an independent ombudsman, it exists completely within the Department of Corrections. Complaints first flow to staff at the prison where they originate, creating a perverse incentive to dismiss them out of hand, critics say.

Rep. Ryan Clancy, D-Milwaukee and a corrections committee member, calls it “the worst possible system.”

“We need an independent fact-finder to investigate because a system where you can be punished for speaking out is not a good one,” Clancy said. 

Independent prison oversight in other states

Lawmakers outside of Wisconsin are increasingly turning to independent prison monitors. Virginia and Maryland this year passed bipartisan bills to create ombudsman offices, as did Congress — strengthening oversight of federal prisons. 

“States and legislators around the country are starting to understand how essential this is. It’s basically what democracy and good governance is all about,” said Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, who has extensively researched independent prison monitoring. “And that’s why these bills are passing with bipartisan support, unanimous support.”

New Jersey and Washington state represent strong models of oversight, Deitch said, giving investigators broad access to inspect facilities. Internal inspection offices can serve a purpose, she added, but they rarely share findings publicly, limiting transparency and accountability. 

Some corrections staffers who initially bristle at outside oversight end up benefiting through improved relations with prisoners and working conditions, Deitch said. 

“Oversight benefits everybody involved in the system, from incarcerated people and their families, to staff and administrators,” Deitch said.

Employees at understaffed Waupun Correctional Institution might welcome such results. The prison experienced 176 assaults on staff from June 2023 to June 2024 — more than a third of assaults systemwide, Department of Corrections data show.

One Waupun prison staff member said the many assaults and tensions from ongoing litigation at times make correctional officers reluctant to impose consequences for threatening or assaultive behavior for fear of triggering additional lawsuits or charges.

“You can’t run a prison in fear, and right now, we’re on our heels,” said the staff member, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.  

How Minnesota does it

Wisconsin can look to its neighbor for one oversight model.

In the early 1970s, in the wake of one of the country’s bloodiest prison riots in Attica, New York, problems brewed at Minnesota’s Stillwater prison, which saw uprisings, escape attempts, murders and a violent attack on the warden. In 1970, armed inmates took three officers hostage and tried to walk out wearing their uniforms. The prisoners gave up after listing their grievances to a reporter.

Two years later Minnesota created its ombuds office to address grievances before hostilities spiraled into violence. 

The office was defunded in 2002 and closed the following year, but it reopened in 2019 after the deaths of two correctional officers, said Margaret Zadra, the state’s ombudsperson for corrections. 

“A lot of people at the time were talking about the office as a pressure release valve,” Zadra said. “But we tend to talk about our office more like a flashlight. We shine a light on issues, and we can go behind the walls and see things that most people don’t have access to and can’t see.”

Although Minnesota and Wisconsin have roughly the same demographics and population, their corrections systems look dramatically different. Wisconsin locks up more than 22,000 people in adult prisons, more than twice as many as Minnesota.

Minnesota, as a result, spends proportionately less on corrections than Wisconsin: $111 per state resident in 2020, compared to Wisconsin’s $220, according to a Wisconsin Policy Forum analysis. 

Minnesota’s Office of the Ombuds for Corrections employs five staff members and plans to add three more. It oversees 11 prisons and 150 jails statewide and has a budget of $1.3 million. The office is independent from the state’s corrections department and reports to the governor. 

Minnesota’s ombuds fields complaints from prisoners, staff and community members and holds office hours at correctional facilities. It lacks enforcement powers but presents recommendations to the Department of Corrections and Legislature. The office helps those incarcerated resolve individual problems and advocates for systemic change after diagnosing larger problems, Zadra said.

Since 2020 the office has produced recommendations for improving use of force policies, unsafe practices when transporting prisoners and crumbling conditions within state prisons. Several recommendations have prompted legislative action, including creating a body-worn camera pilot project for correctional officers.

Costly complaints

Wisconsin prisoners who believe their rights have been violated can sue the Department of Corrections, but only after exhausting every step of the internal grievance process.   

Missing a step or deadline can trigger a case’s dismissal. 

That happened in May when a federal judge dismissed eight of 10 plaintiffs in a lawsuit alleging cruel and unusual punishment at Waupun’s prison. U.S. Magistrate Judge William Duffin ruled the eight incarcerated men failed to exhaust administrative remedies before suing. 

Lonnie Story, who represents the inmates, told Wisconsin Watch he plans to refile the case. 

Reliance on internal complaint systems stems from the Prisoner Litigation Reform Act of 1996, which Congress enacted to stem the tide of “frivolous” lawsuits. Legal scholars and prisoner rights advocates say the law created barriers to resolving grievances — aside from prompting more case dismissals. 

For instance it capped attorney fees plaintiffs’ attorneys can win, making it harder for prisoners to find representation.

Many prisoners represent themselves in lawsuits, and some win — evidenced by the 450 settlements over prison allegations from 2013 to 2023. 

Of the $17 million paid out in those lawsuits, $5 million went to the family of James Black. The family’s 2014 lawsuit alleged correctional officers ignored Black’s requests to be moved out of a cell he shared with an inmate known for sexually predatory and violent behavior. The prisoner later violently raped Black and stomped on his head, leaving him with severe and permanent brain damage that required 24-hour supervision, according to the suit.

Another $175,000 went to a Milwaukee Secure Detention Facility prisoner who was harassed and sexually assaulted by former correctional officer Paul Vick Jr., who later received a prison sentence for sexually assaulting inmates and misconduct in office. 

Improving prison conditions at the complaint stage might save the state money by reducing lawsuits, Deitch said, adding that critics counter that added scrutiny would expose more problems that festered in secret, perhaps at least initially increasing lawsuits. 

“It could cut either way,” said Deitch. “But the reality is, if you clean up what’s going on inside prisons, of course, you’re going to reduce the number of lawsuits.” 

Minnesota’s ombuds office operates parallel to the internal correction department grievance system. Investigators encourage prisoners to follow the internal complaint process ahead of an ombuds investigation. 

Little progress

The push for increased scrutiny over Wisconsin prisons follows months of lawmaker inaction. 

In November, months after Wisconsin Watch and the New York Times exposed worsening conditions and extended lockdowns at Waupun’s prison, Democratic lawmakers called a press conference to unveil  17 bills that they said would improve transparency, oversight and conditions of confinement. The bills did not advance in the Republican-controlled Legislature. 

Speaking at the July hearing, Rep. Michael Schraa, R-Oshkosh, the outgoing Assembly Committee on Corrections chair, said he may have supported some bills had Democrats sought his input before the press conference. 

“You guys went in front of the TV cameras. You took your five minutes of fame. You never came to any member on this committee, on the Republican side, and worked with any of us,” Schraa said. “That’s not the way that things work here. The majority party brings these bills forward, and if they’re bipartisan bills, they get hearings.”

Clancy, the Milwaukee Democrat, disputed that account. Email correspondence he shared with Wisconsin Watch showed he contacted Schraa’s office about the bills weeks before the press conference. Schraa’s office canceled the meeting before it took place, Clancy said. Through an aide, Schraa declined to be interviewed for this story. Schraa lost his reelection bid in a Republican primary earlier this month.

Entrenched partisanship has fueled gamesmanship that prevents lawmakers from solving problems, Clancy said.  

“It’s just a really toxic environment of them not wanting to give us, as Dems, a win.” 

Legislative stalemates left chronic prison staffing shortages unaddressed for years. While DOC officials warned of a looming staffing crisis nearly a decade ago, the Legislature took no meaningful action to hire and retain correctional staff until 2023 — after the prisons began locking down due to a lack of staff to fully operate. 

DOC has since filled vacancies in some prisons. The systemwide vacancy rate for correctional staff and officers as of Aug. 28 sits at 12%, down from its 35% peak in August 2023. The vacancy rate at Waupun still remained above 41%, higher than any other prison. 

Madison, the Milwaukee Democrat, recalled seeing a stack of letters from incarcerated people during his first day in office. The letters detailed problems Madison saw evidence of while touring prisons as a member of the Assembly corrections committee. 

“If an office of ombudsman existed, those complaints would fall on them instead of an internal system, which is not a good model of accountability anyway,” Madison said. “We’d likely see more results in changing practices within facilities if it was independent of administration.”

Douglas Duncan contributed research for this story.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Short on fixes for prison problems, Wisconsin weighs independent oversight 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’s prison population has swelled since a pandemic dip, complicating efforts to address dangerous conditions that were highlighted in June when prosecutors criminally charged nine Waupun Correctional Institution workers, including the former warden, following multiple prisoner deaths.

The state’s adult institutions were locking up nearly 22,800 people as of Aug. 9. That’s more than 5,000 above the design capacity of Wisconsin’s prisons and more than 3,000 above levels three years ago when COVID-19 actions shrunk prisoner ranks to a 20-year low.

If the growth persists at this rate, Gov. Tony Evers’ administration could oversee more prisoners within a year than it inherited when Evers succeeded Scott Walker in early 2019.

The trend does not correspond with an increase in reported crime. Statewide offenses reported to the Wisconsin Department of Justice were up in 2021 but declined in 2022 and 2023. 

The prison population increase comes years after Evers vowed to ease crowding in a state that stands out nationally for disproportionately imprisoning 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.”

The latest trend highlights the challenge of doing so a quarter century after Wisconsin enacted one of the country’s most punitive sentencing laws.

The prison problem spans policy and politics. Evers, a Democrat, contends with a Legislature led by Republicans who seek to paint Democrats as soft on crime. Meanwhile, some Democrats say Evers has done too little to wield his own powers to reduce crowding. 

“I’m hoping he honors the promises he made on the campaign trail,” said state Rep. Darrin Madison, D-Milwaukee. “Because right now that promise is not being fulfilled the way voters thought.”

Experts note that the governor has limited control over the size of the prison population.

Changes such as shrinking maximum sentences, reducing imposed sentences or diverting more people to treatment would require action by judges or the Legislature. 

Evers spokesperson Britt Cudaback pointed to the governor’s last three budget proposals — largely rejected by Republican lawmakers — that, she said, sought to “bolster evidence-based and data-driven policies we know have improved community safety and reduced recidivism in other states, and support alternatives to incarceration, including increased investments in treatment and diversion.” 

“The single greatest obstacle to implementing real, meaningful justice reform in Wisconsin is Republican control of the Legislature,” Cudaback added. “There’s no question that if Republicans had adopted all or even some of the governor’s justice reform initiatives, Wisconsin would have begun relieving pressure on correctional institutions years ago.” 

The Evers administration can address some issues on its own. For example, the governor could parole more “old law” prisoners convicted before sentencing reform or issue more pardons.

Evers has issued the most pardons of any Wisconsin governor — more than 1,200 during his tenure. But that has not affected prison populations. He has limited pardon applicants to those who completed their sentence at least five years ago and have no pending criminal charges.

Separately, the Evers administration can make administrative changes to reduce one major driver of new prison admissions: technical revocations — violations of community supervision rules that can return people to prison even if they haven’t committed new crimes. 

The Department of Corrections beginning in 2021, for instance, raised the threshold for revocations in certain circumstances, which corresponded with an initial dip in technical revocations.

No matter who’s responsible, the ballooning prison population comes with a financial cost for Wisconsin taxpayers, a physical and psychological toll for those in the corrections system and — with now six recent deaths of inmates in custody at one prison alone — the potential loss of life.

Advocates: New staff alone won’t improve conditions 

The prison population is rising as the Wisconsin Department of Corrections works to reverse a long-ignored hemorrhaging of corrections workers. The department reluctantly acknowledged staff vacancies played a role in recent lockdowns in Waupun and Green Bay Correctional Institution that left prisoners confined to cells without timely medical care.

The former warden at Waupun was among nine state employees charged in connection with the deaths of inmates Donald Meier and Cameron Williams. Meier and Williams were among six Waupun inmates who died from various causes since June 2023; investigators and family members have linked many of those deaths to inhumane conditions and the treatment of inmates by corrections staff. 

State leaders can’t substantially improve conditions without decarceration — releasing more inmates and diverting others to programs rather than prisons, justice reform advocates say. The high population requires prisons to need so many guards and medical staff in the first place. Curbing the population, advocates say, is the pathway for closing the troubled Waupun and Green Bay prisons, which were both built in the 19th century.

“Wisconsin doesn’t have more crime than other states, but we have a bad habit of keeping people incarcerated much longer than necessary,” Beverly Walker and Sherry Reames of WISDOM, a statewide faith-based organization, said in an email.  

How state officials tackle prison crowding matters for the welfare of prisoners and corrections officers — and for taxpayers. 

Wisconsin allocates more money for corrections than most states do. In 2020, the state spent $220 per resident to lock up people, according to a Wisconsin Policy Forum analysis of National Institute of Corrections data. That was far above neighboring states and the $182 national average.

State efforts to imprison fewer people are unlikely to yield major savings unless they prompt prison closures — a politically challenging task, said Michael O’Hear, a Marquette University Law School professor and expert on criminal punishment. 

“The big driver of the system costs are in the fixed costs of having an institution,” O’Hear said. “The big savings come from getting your prison population down to the point where you can actually start closing institutions.” 

Other states — some led by Republicans and some by Democrats — have managed to close prisons by adopting rehabilitation-focused reforms that trimmed thousands from the prison population. 

Roots of mass incarceration in Wisconsin    

How did Wisconsin prisons fill in the first place?  

Aggressive prosecutors and judges in the 1980s and 1990s — seeing retributive justice as a pathway for winning elections — fueled mass incarceration in Wisconsin and nationally, as did toughened drug sentencing laws. 

Then the state’s truth-in-sentencing law — signed in 1998 by Gov. Tommy Thompson and passed with bipartisan support — virtually eliminated parole for newly convicted offenders. By then prisons filled up beyond the system’s designed capacity, in some cases requiring doubling up or tripling up in cells.

Some zeal in the war on drugs waned after 2000, with fewer drug arrests statewide, particularly in Milwaukee, O’Hear said. But the sentencing overhaul closed pressure release valves in the prison system; it narrowed release options, preventing a corresponding drop in the prison population.

“The potential dividends of walking back the war on drugs were lost as a result of truth-in-sentencing,” O’Hear added.  

Prisoners sentenced prior to truth-in-sentencing — a group known as “old law” inmates — were eligible for release after serving 25% of their time. They received a mandatory release after serving two-thirds of their time. The overhaul changed that, requiring them to serve 100% of their sentences plus post-release “extended supervision” of at least 25% of the original sentence. 

Parole remains available only to those sentenced before the law took effect on Dec. 31, 1999. 

Rules of extended supervision 

Extended supervision requires following at least 18 standard rules, including regularly reporting to a supervision agent and giving blanket consent to be searched. People under supervision learn that violations could include any conduct that conflicts with law or “is not in the best interest of the public welfare or your rehabilitation,” or failing to comply with probation agent-imposed rules that can be modified at any time. 

Like most issues across Wisconsin’s criminal justice system, revocations back to prison disproportionately affect Black residents, according to a February Council of State Governments report. The state has the widest racial disparities in the country in revocations among states that provided data for the report. Black people in Wisconsin are 15.4 times more likely than white people to be incarcerated for a revocation.

Little is more traumatic than returning to prison following a brief stint of freedom, said Dennis Franklin, who previously served prison time and is now the interim associate director of EXPO, a Wisconsin-based advocacy organization for formerly incarcerated people.

 “It’s very depressing when you don’t have a new charge,” he said. “It’s discouraging to get out and then go through the same thing.”

Extended periods of supervision after release from prison do little to improve public safety, according to Cecelia Klingele, a University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School professor of criminal law. The long terms “may interfere with the ability of those on supervision to sustain work, family life and other pro-social connections to their communities,” she wrote in a 2019 study examining 200 revocation cases.

“Fewer, more safety-focused conditions will lead to fewer unnecessary revocations and more consistency in revocation for people whose behavior poses a serious threat to public safety,” she added. 

Streamlining the standard supervision rules would require the Legislature to act.

Back to prison for violating supervision rules

Supervision or probation can be revoked in three ways: a new sentence for a new crime; a revocation plus a new sentence; or a technical rules violation without a criminal conviction. Revocations follow a Department of Corrections investigation, supervising agent’s recommendation and administrative law judge’s ruling. They require a lower standard of evidence than in a criminal courtroom. Administrative law judges may accept even hearsay as evidence.  

Criminal justice reform advocates often call technical violations “crimeless revocations,” although corrections officials note such violations could include allegations of criminal behavior not yet charged.  

Still, advocates highlight examples of seemingly minor behavior that send people back to prison.

Joseph Crowley, a Kenosha man who was convicted of sexual assault in 1999 before truth-in-sentencing kicked in, said he was sent back to prison in 2011 for technical violations that included wearing a green hat on St. Patrick’s Day and using a credit card to buy a PlayStation 3 and the laptop he was using at Gateway Technical College. 

Crowley said one of his probation rules barred him from altering his appearance and another allowed him to use debit cards but not credit. 

“Their reasoning was that if you got locked up, you wouldn’t have any way of continuing the credit payments,” Crowley recalled. 

He said he served nine additional years in prison because of the violations. Crowley was assaulted at Dodge Correctional Institution before being paroled in 2021 under the old law, he said.

Klingele’s research suggests most technical revocation stories look different than Crowley’s. 

Her 2019 study found numerous examples of revocations stemming from multiple technical violations. The most frequent serious allegations were: failing to complete the terms of an alternative program; alleged assaultive crimes; and absconding, which included continually failing to attend meetings or check in with agents. 

Substance abuse problems contributed to technical revocations in an “overwhelming majority” of cases, Klingele wrote, because “agents have few options to impose meaningful sanctions other than imprisonment.” 

That’s why researchers say expanding substance abuse treatment could help reduce revocations and recidivism. 

Beth Hardtke, a corrections department spokesperson, noted that Evers’ most recent budget proposal sought to invest millions of additional dollars in Alternatives to Revocation, the department’s Earned Release Program, other types of substance use disorder treatment and a program that helps formerly incarcerated people experiencing mental illnesses safely transition into communities. 

The Legislature rejected or reduced funding for those proposals.

The department did, however, make changes to increase enrollment in the Earned Release Program, which offers pathways for early release to eligible prisoners with substance abuse issues who complete treatment and training, Hardtke noted. That included expanding access to prisoners in medium custody. 

Effort to reduce technical revocations

Technical revocations accounted for more than 13,800 prison admissions from the beginning of Evers’ first term in January 2019 through last May, according to Department of Corrections data. That’s about 34% of all admissions during the period. 

“If we really want to reduce the prison population responsibly, that is the way to do it,” David Liners, executive director of WISDOM, said about curbing technical revocations. 

“The governor is not handling it. He’s basically maintained the status quo.”

The Department of Corrections has sought to reduce technical revocations. Beginning in 2021 it raised the threshold for revocations in a number of circumstances. That included requiring all treatment options be exhausted before returning someone to prison for violations related only to substance abuse — changes widely unpopular with parole officers who must implement them, according to a legislative audit.

The changes corresponded with an initial drop in technical revocations — to 27% of prison admissions in 2022 from 34% a year earlier. 

The department previously cited the changes as one of several factors in the prison population’s plunge to a two-decade low in mid-2021. A spring 2020 pause on admissions to slow COVID-19 largely shaped that decline, as did court backlogs that left defendants waiting for their cases to be processed — a trend seen nationally.

“With some exceptions, the statutory framework courts and the department operate under largely remains the same” since the pandemic, Hardtke said in an email. “This underscores that, without comprehensive criminal justice reform, including strong investments in substance use and mental health treatment, Wisconsin will not be able to meaningfully and safely reduce our prison population.” 

As the broader prison population rebounds, so have technical revocations, which increased to about 30% of total admissions in 2023 and 40% during the first five months of this year.

Hardtke cautioned that the department may later link some of the recent technical revocations to new criminal sentences when more information is available, which would retroactively affect the admissions data.  

Lessons from the pandemic and from other states

Incarceration rebounds in Wisconsin and other states reflect having moved past the pandemic, which saw disrupted court operations and intense concerns about COVID-19’s spreading, said O’Hear, the Marquette law professor.

State Sen. Kelda Roys, a Madison Democrat who sits on the Senate’s Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety, said the population decline during the pandemic public health emergency illustrates that Wisconsin can safely decarcerate without a clear impact on public safety. 

But more action is needed to reduce revocations and increase paroles, Roys said. 

“We did it when it was necessary to save people’s lives. We were able to bring the prison population down safely and we can do that again,” she said. “Crimeless revocation is making us less safe.”

Her Republican colleagues see things differently. 

Sen. Eric Wimberger, R-Green Bay, called rehabilitation an important component for those wanting to change after hitting rock bottom. But he claimed that many don’t seek redemption. 

“The bulk of prisoners are not inclined to change, and they are just doing their time looking for opportunities to get out as soon as possible by completing programs,” said Wimberger, who also sits on the judiciary and public safety committee. “Gov. Evers, with hubris, seems convinced that society is responsible for the crimes against it, and he can somehow sit criminals down for a good talking-to in a program to have an epiphany about doing the right thing.”

Advocates for prioritizing rehabilitation say Wisconsin should follow the lead of other states that have dramatically reduced their prison populations without jeopardizing safety. 

New York, for instance, has cut its population in half since 2008 and closed some prisons. That’s due to various factors, including fewer admissions and releases to parole supervision, early releases of certain people during the pandemic and reforms to drug sentencing laws. The state in 2021 removed incarceration for most minor technical parole violations. 

Republican-led Texas has also closed several prisons in recent decades as a result of bipartisan criminal justice reforms that reduced the need for incarceration. That included a greater focus on substance abuse treatment and diversion. 

The Minnesota Legislature’s criminal justice overhaul in 2023 included provisions to curb revocations. 

California, meanwhile, has carried out the largest court-ordered prisoner reduction in history by shifting responsibility for certain lower-level offenders from prisons to jails — encouraging more cost-effective local alternatives to incarceration. 

“We don’t have to have 20,000 people in prison,” O’Hear said. “The ability of many states to experience reductions in their prison population — by whatever means — without necessarily having big public safety problems resulting, there’s a lesson to be drawn from that.” 

This story was co-produced by the Cap Times and Wisconsin Watch. Mario Koran of Wisconsin Watch contributed reporting. Nicholas Garton joined the Cap Times in 2019 after three years as a features writer for Madison365. Jim Malewitz joined Wisconsin Watch in 2019 as investigations editor and is now deputy managing editor.

Wisconsin’s inmate population swells as other states limit incarceration and close prisons 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.

While serving time in a Wisconsin prison in 2021, Darnell Price watched a golf-ball-size lump on his thigh grow as large as a football. Price pressed for a thorough examination, he said, but the prison’s physician, Dr. Joan Hannula, did not order a biopsy.

Months later, when Price moved to another prison, a different doctor ordered the test and diagnosed him with Stage 4 soft-tissue cancer. Soon after, the state’s Department of Corrections took the extraordinary step of granting him compassionate release, a measure reserved for the terminally ill or elderly.

“I did my time,” said Price, 52, who had been convicted of robbery of a financial institution. “But they took the rest of my life.”

Price filed a federal lawsuit against Hannula and four other medical employees this year. It is not the first time Hannula has come under scrutiny: Records show she surrendered her medical license in California in 2004, then pleaded guilty to a drug possession charge and no contest to a charge of forging a prescription.

In Wisconsin, where the arrests of multiple prison officials last month raised urgent questions about prisoner care, Hannula is not an anomaly, an examination by The New York Times and Wisconsin Watch found. Nearly a third of the 60 staff physicians the state corrections system has employed over the past decade have been censured by a state medical board for an error or a breach of ethics, an unusually high concentration given how rare it is for a doctor to be formally reprimanded.

Almost all those censured staff physicians were disciplined before they began working in the state’s prisons.

Many, like Hannula, have gone on to face lawsuits from prisoners saying they made errors that led to serious harm. At least 32 of those cases over the past decade have ended in settlements, for a combined $692,000, an analysis of state data shows. Other cases are still pending.

Neither Hannula, who is now in private practice, nor her lawyer responded to calls or emails seeking comment. After she completed a diversion program, her guilty plea on the drug possession charge was withdrawn, the judgment against her was vacated, and the charge was dismissed, medical board records show. Her no contest plea to a charge of forging a prescription was set aside, and the charge was dismissed. She has denied in court records that she was negligent in Price’s care.

In a statement, Beth Hardtke, a Corrections Department spokeswoman, said that all prison system doctors must have an unrestricted Wisconsin medical license.

Hardtke said the department allowed the hiring of doctors with disciplinary records so long as they completed the education or treatment programs required to rehabilitate their licenses, standards similar to those in place at hospitals and clinics outside the prison system.

But Dr. Sheldon Wasserman, a former chairman of the state’s Medical Examining Board who reviewed a list of prison doctors and their disciplinary histories for The Times and Wisconsin Watch, said many of the physicians would have probably had trouble getting hired at hospitals and in other settings because of those histories.

“A lot of these people are not employable,” he said.

While doctors outside the prison system also make mistakes, a vast majority of U.S. physicians have never been disciplined by state regulators. In Wisconsin, the overall discipline rate was 1.23 for every 1,000 doctors from 2019 to 2021, according to a report by Public Citizen, an advocacy research group.

Over the past year, the prison system has become a flashpoint in Wisconsin. Last summer, The Times and Wisconsin Watch reported that lockdowns at the  maximum-security Waupun Correctional Institution kept prisoners from getting medical treatment and psychological services. Later, a string of prisoner deaths at the facility drew public scrutiny.

Last month, the Dodge County sheriff announced the arrests of nine of the prison’s employees, including the former warden and two registered nurses, and criticized them for ignoring prisoners’ medical conditions and providing inadequate care. A former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, Janine Geske, said she had never seen a warden jailed on such charges and called the case “shocking.”

Corrections officials in Wisconsin have said that staffing is among the system’s biggest and most persistent challenges. For prison doctors in particular, the vacancy rate climbed from 13% in early 2016 to 37% in October, according to an analysis of Corrections Department data. The rate is currently about 18%, state data shows.

The doctors’ disciplinary histories underscore the difficulty of filling those jobs, Wasserman said.

“The Department of Corrections is so desperate to get doctors on board that they’re overlooking some of the things it shouldn’t,” he said.

Suspended licenses and hard labor

After a prisoner died in custody more than two decades ago, Wisconsin’s Legislative Audit Bureau examined the quality of health care offered in the state prison system. One paragraph in its 122-page report noted that 11 of 213 medical professionals had faced professional disciplinary action at some point in their careers. That included four of the 38 physicians on staff at the time.

Hardtke said she could not say whether the corrections department took any action as a result of the report. But the hiring of doctors with disciplinary records continued.

One physician hired in 2014, Dr. Kevin Krembs, had previously drawn scrutiny from the federal government while working for several online pharmacies at once. The Drug Enforcement Administration investigated Krembs in 2009 for prescribing controlled substances to “thousands of individuals across the United States” without physically examining them, a violation of multiple state laws, medical board records show. Krembs later agreed to a six-month suspension of his DEA-issued prescribing registration, which is required to prescribe narcotics.

In 2012, the medical board in Indiana, where Krembs was licensed, examined the case. The board concluded that Krembs was “unfit to practice due to professional incompetence” and issued a $1,000 fine, records show. Krembs closed his practice in Indiana and surrendered his prescribing registration for cause.

Another physician, Dr. Rey Palop, had been convicted of obtaining controlled substances by fraud, a felony in Wisconsin, after writing prescriptions in the name of a fictitious patient, medical board records show. Palop surrendered his DEA prescribing registration and was reprimanded for his “unprofessional conduct” by the state medical board in 2004. He was hired to care for prisoners in 2020.

Krembs, who left the prison system in 2019, did not respond to messages left at an alternative medicine clinic in Indiana where he is listed as a staff member. Palop also did not return calls. The corrections department said it would not comment on individual employees.

In addition to its full-time doctors, who earn about $380,000 a year, the department pays some doctors to work on short-term contracts. Those physicians are hired through private staffing companies and cost $260 an hour, or the equivalent of more than $540,000 a year.

The corrections department declined to provide a full list of doctors it had hired on contract since 2018, saying the information was not readily available. It provided a list of the eight contract physicians currently treating prisoners. One of those physicians, Dr. Howard Martin, had his license revoked by the North Carolina Medical Board in 1986 after he admitted to groping a patient and having sexual intercourse with her in an examination room while on duty at a naval hospital, medical board records show. He wrote in a sworn affidavit that the intercourse was consensual.

Martin was convicted by court-martial of indecent assault upon a patient, discharged from the military, fined $12,000 and sentenced to 12 months of hard labor in prison. According to his affidavit, he was released after three days and granted clemency.

Reached by a Times reporter, Martin declined to comment. The staffing company that placed him in the prison system, SUMO Medical Staffing, said that it conducted criminal background and discipline history checks and that doctors were “subject to final client approval.”

Experts said they were not surprised that physicians with disciplinary records in other states had been licensed in Wisconsin. Each state issues its own licenses to practice medicine. And while medical boards across the country have access to a federal databank of physicians’ disciplinary histories, they do not always refer to it, said Robert Oshel, who used to manage the databank program.

A spokesman for Wisconsin’s Department of Safety and Professional Services, under whose umbrella the medical board operates, said it was impossible to know why Wisconsin had granted licenses to some physicians despite problems in other states, because several of the applications were decades old and “no longer available” for review.

Medical positions in prisons are often hard to fill, current and former employees and experts said. Doctors treat patients under difficult conditions in an environment that is sometimes dangerous.

Generally, Oshel said, “the people that apply are the people that can’t get jobs elsewhere.”

A raft of lawsuits

Records show that many of the Wisconsin prison doctors with disciplinary histories continued to face scrutiny after their hiring.

Prisoners can sue their doctors in federal court under the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits the government from inflicting cruel and unusual punishments. Most lawsuits are dismissed, and settlements related to medical issues in Wisconsin are typically less than $20,000.

The group of 17 physicians with disciplinary histories did not account for a disproportionately large share of settlements, a Times analysis found. But nearly a quarter of them were involved in at least four settlements each, including Patrick Murphy.

Before the corrections department hired Murphy in March 2007, he reported himself to the Wisconsin medical board for having had sexual relationships with multiple patients, board records show. After Murphy started working in the prisons, the board suspended his license for 18 months because of the relationships, but stayed the suspension so long as he had his work monitored and saw a therapist. His license was fully restored in 2011.

Three years later, Murphy treated Nevada Jerome, a prisoner in Oshkosh who had been coughing up blood. According to a lawsuit later filed by Jerome’s family, Murphy failed to order follow-up tests to an abnormal X-ray, at one point labeling them “non-urgent,” and went nine months without seeing Jerome, even as his condition worsened.

In 2015, a bronchoscopy revealed a mass on Jerome’s lungs. It was Stage 4 cancer.

Jerome’s family sued after his death in 2016 and settled for $250,000, one of the largest settlements in recent history. They could not be reached for comment.

Murphy continues to work as a physician for the corrections department. In court filings, he has denied that he was deliberately indifferent to Jerome’s medical needs. He did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Krembs, who had previously been investigated for prescribing controlled substances online, was also sued by a prisoner, Nathaniel Robinson, whom he had treated for stomach pain. According to the suit, Krembs told Robinson that he had terminal cancer and said radiation treatment would only “prolong the inevitable at best.” He promised to prescribe the “best pain medication known to man.”

The news sent Robinson into a deep depression and led to two suicide attempts. But Robinson did not, in fact, have cancer. Later, an oncologist pointed to constipation as the most likely source of his stomach pain. Another physician told Robinson that the pain medications he took caused additional complications.

Robinson’s suit was settled in 2019 for $5,000, court records show. He could not be reached for comment. In court records, Krembs denied violating Robinson’s constitutional rights.

‘Great assets’ to the system

Wisconsin is not the only state to grapple with the quality of prison doctors. In 2021, BuzzFeed News found that 10 of the 12 doctors employed by Louisiana’s prison system had been disciplined for reasons that included fraud, illegally distributing drugs, sexual misconduct and possession of child pornography. The Oklahoman revealed in 2016 that more than a third of state prison doctors in Oklahoma had been disciplined at some point in their careers.

Some medical professionals say that past disciplinary issues should not necessarily bar physicians from practicing.

One former prison physician, Dr. Scott Hoftiezer, was arrested in 1984 for possessing a controlled substance and fired two years later from a Sheboygan hospital for abusing drugs. The Wisconsin medical board ordered him to submit to regular drug tests, but he did not keep to its terms and relapsed repeatedly, records show.

After Hoftiezer wrote false prescriptions and forged another doctor’s signature, an administrative law judge recommended that his license be revoked, writing, “Dr. Hoftiezer’s substance abuse turned him into a liar and a thief, and the evidence is insufficient to conclude that he is incapable of such behavior again.” But the medical board overruled the judge, instead letting Hoftiezer practice with a limited license.

Hoftiezer got sober in 1990 and had his license fully restored in 1995, he said in an interview. The Wisconsin Department of Corrections hired him in 2002.

The prison system was not his only option for employment, he said. He wanted the job because of the straight salary and the fact that he would not have to haggle with insurance companies, he said. “I found a whole world of people, inmates, who were in need of good health care,” he said.

He ended up spending 20 years with the corrections department, including 16 as a supervisor, before retiring, he said. He was sober throughout and remains in sustained recovery, he said.

“Many, if not most, doctors can recover and can practice safely and be great assets,” he said.

But one psychiatric nurse practitioner who worked for three years in the corrections department said that physicians and nurse practitioners who had clean records and wanted to work in prisons were exceptions to the rule. She asked not to be named because she is still employed by the state and is not authorized to speak to the news media.

Price, the former prisoner with cancer who was granted compassionate release, said in court documents that his initial physician had “ignored his obvious need for medical attention during his incarceration.” Had she taken decisive action, he said, he would not be facing “imminent, certain death.”

Price is not ready to die, he said on a recent morning at a Milwaukee diner. There is still too much he wants to see: a sunrise over the Nevada desert, the raucous concert halls of Nashville. Sometimes he thinks back on the night in prison that followed his diagnosis. His fellow prisoners had left a card on his bed. It was decorated with a pair of cardboard boxing gloves and a simple message: “Never stop fighting.”

Justin Mayo contributed reporting.  Susan C. Beachy and Douglas Duncan contributed research.

Mario Koran examined the Wisconsin Department of Corrections as part of The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship. He reported this article in partnership with Wisconsin Watch and with support from the Data-Driven Reporting Project, which is funded by the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University | Medill.

These doctors were censured. Wisconsin’s prisons hired them anyway. 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.

I never expected to become a real reporter. While the other students in my first journalism class could go out into the community to interview sources, my options were limited. As an inmate, the only people I could interview were other prisoners and the guards.

It was 2010, and I was a 28-year-old alcoholic with a crack habit serving a yearlong sentence in a Wisconsin county jail. I’d been convicted of burglary after breaking into a bar and walking out with a bottle of liquor. It was a felony, and it was right on time — the culmination of wrecked cars, lost jobs and alcohol-fueled arrests. When the judge sentenced me, he said I exemplified “a waste of a human life.” He wasn’t wrong.

During those first months behind bars, there was no sun, no night sky. I measured time by the opening and closing of the steel cell doors. But midway through my sentence, as is typical in many cases, the judge granted me the option to work or take classes during the day at a nearby university.

I took a janitorial job in the community, elated to be out of my cell. One morning as I vacuumed, I grabbed a Rolling Stone magazine from a coffee table. Out slipped a flier for a college journalism contest; winning entries would appear in the magazine. Only college students could enter.

I didn’t know anything about journalism, but I felt an odd sensation — an intuition — that I’d finally found something I didn’t even know I needed. That day, I enrolled in the university closest to the jail.

That’s how I found myself, weeks later, interviewing my correctional officer for a story in the student newspaper. We had never spoken with each other so mindfully or exactingly. This was someone who, at any other time, had absolute authority over me. Yet in that moment, while interviewing him, I felt a subtle and palpable shift of power.

I could sense him calculating what he wanted to say, leaving out words that might get him in trouble. I felt empowered to chase after those pregnant pauses, to seek out the truth and bring order to the world around me. The experience was liberating. It showed that even an inmate’s voice could resonate if facts and rigorous research backed up what he or she had to say.

After my release, I stayed in school, eventually earning a master’s degree in journalism. And I kept writing. Story by story, and with the help of patient editors, I learned how to report and write better, faster. I got sober. Finally, I landed a reporting internship, then a full-time job.

In the years since, I have been a reporter in California and returned home to take a reporting job with Wisconsin Watch — the place that offered me my first internship.

And then, last June, 13 years after I wrote my first article from a Wisconsin jail, I began covering the state’s prison system as a New York Times Local Investigations fellow. The fellowship program is designed to strengthen the power and reach of local journalism.

By then, I had a mounting stack of letters from men housed at Waupun Correctional Institution who had been confined to their cells for months without regular access to showers, fresh air, family visits and timely medical care. In August, guided by a team of editors that included Dean Baquet, a former executive editor of The Times, I broke the story that the state was locking down prisons because of staffing shortages.

In February, we revealed that the state knew for years it was losing guards faster than it could replace them. Then in June, I reported on the extraordinary arrests of nine prison employees, including a former warden, in connection with a string of inmate deaths.

Our latest article brought to light another fact: Nearly a third of the 60 staff physicians the corrections system has employed over the last decade have been disciplined by a state medical board for an error or a breach of ethics.

My past has put me in a unique position. As a reporter, I purposefully detach myself from my investigations to follow the truth, wherever it leads. I value independence. But, like anyone else, I have been shaped by my experiences. I know the smell of jailhouses and the ever-present hunger pangs prisoners feel. I know what it means to be denied fresh air for months. I’ve also seen the unexpected acts of kindness that happen behind bars.

My experiences inform who I talk to — and who talks to me — and how I approach my reporting. For better or worse, I am forever a member of this community. And that’s the very spirit of local journalism.

Mario Koran examined the Wisconsin Department of Corrections as part of The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship in collaboration with Wisconsin Watch. This essay was written for Times Insider, which explains who Times reporters are and what they do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how their journalism comes together.

My unlikely path from jail to journalism 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.

The former warden of a Wisconsin prison and eight other prison employees were charged on Wednesday in connection with multiple prisoner deaths over the last year, the local sheriff said.

The prison, Waupun Correctional Institution, about 70 miles northwest of Milwaukee, was the subject of a 2023 report by The New York Times and Wisconsin Watch that found that prisoners had been confined to their cells for months and denied access to medical care.

The prison’s former warden, Randall Hepp, had left his job earlier this week. He was charged with misconduct in public office, a felony. Hepp’s arrest was first reported by The Associated Press. His attorney could not immediately be reached for comment.

The other prison employees, most of whom worked as correctional officers and registered nurses, were charged with abuse of a prisoner. Two of the correctional officers and a sergeant were also charged with misconduct.

In announcing the arrests during a Wednesday news conference, Dale Schmidt, the sheriff for Dodge County, Wisconsin, said Hepp and the other employees had failed to adequately care for prisoners in their custody. Schmidt described in detail four recent deaths, including one involving a prisoner who had not eaten in days and was “drinking sewage water” and “played in the toilet.” The medical examiner said the cause of death was malnutrition and probable dehydration and ruled it a homicide.

Schmidt identified a host of problems, including inadequate staffing, inside the facility that he said had contributed to the deaths.

The Times and Wisconsin Watch reported in February that state lawmakers and prison officials knew for years that they were headed toward a staffing crisis, but took little action to address the shortages.

In a statement issued Wednesday, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, called for accountability and justice. “Each and every person who’s failed to do their job to the high level that we expect or treat people in our care with the dignity, humanity, and respect they deserve should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law — it’s that simple,” he said.

The Times and Wisconsin Watch were the first to report that staffing shortages at the prison, a maximum-security facility, had caused it to be locked down for months. Prisoners were confined mostly to their cells, went without regular fresh air and family visits, and faced significant delays in medical care and psychological services. Inmates told The Times and Wisconsin Watch that prisoners who said that they planned to take their lives were ignored.

In the months that followed, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel chronicled the four deaths that occurred at the prison, including the suicide of Dean Hoffman, who in June 2023 died in his cell after prison employees failed to give him psychiatric medication, the newspaper reported.

The newspaper also examined the deaths of Cameron Williams, who died in October of a stroke; Tyshun Lemons, who died in October from a drug overdose, and Donald Maier, who died in February from malnutrition and dehydration.

Schmidt said that no employee misconduct was found to be at fault in the overdose death. “Of great concern, however, is the quantity and frequency of contraband being able to be smuggled into Waupun Correctional Facility,” he said.

A recent federal investigation into the smuggling of drugs, cellphones and other items into the prison led to the suspension of 11 prison employees, The Journal Sentinel reported.

During his remarks on Wednesday, Schmidt raised broader concerns about accountability, saying that he alerted Kevin Carr, the secretary of the state Corrections Department at the time, to the problems in February. Schmidt said Carr declined to take personal responsibility and resigned a week later. “I did not find that to be a coincidence,” the sheriff added.

Carr said in an interview that he left his position for family reasons and because he had reached retirement age. He said he made the decision before Maier’s death. Carr also pushed back against Schmidt’s accusation that he had taken no responsibility. “If you look at the number of people we’ve investigated, either fired or disciplined for misconduct at that facility, it’s totally contrary to what he’s saying,” he said.

Schmidt said he was aware of similar concerns at another state maximum-security prison, Green Bay Correctional Institution. He called on state leaders to consider closing and replacing the two facilities and to create new statewide standards for prisons.

When asked if the yearlong lockdown at Waupun played a role in the deaths, Schmidt was adamant that it did not. He acknowledged, however, that the state Corrections Department had failed to properly staff the prison, which is the reason prison officials said they had put the lockdown in place. Vacancy rates for correctional officers at Waupun have dropped in recent months, but are still higher than 42%.

Lonnie Story, a lawyer who is representing several Waupun prisoners in a class-action lawsuit that accuses prison officials of failing to provide adequate physical and mental health care, believes differently.

“The lockdowns aided and abetted the abuse of my clients,” he said. “If it weren’t for the lockdowns, they wouldn’t have had the issues with staffing or medical issues.”

Inside the prison, Kevin Burkes, a prisoner, said he and other prisoners watched on television as news of the warden’s arrest broke.

“We all got to clapping,” he said. “The thing is, he wasn’t the only one responsible.”

Burkes said that despite the news coverage and a pledge from the governor to address the problems, conditions have remained largely unchanged over the past year.

Mario Koran is examining the Wisconsin Department of Corrections as part of The New York Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship.

Former Waupun prison warden and employees charged in prisoner deaths 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.

Reporters examined staffing and payroll data and interviewed dozens of guards and inmates for this article, which is part of a series about the Wisconsin Department of Corrections by The New York Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship.

Wisconsin’s top prison official wrote to the governor in 2015 with a dire warning: The state prisons were dangerously understaffed, imperiling both guards and inmates.

Five years later, two men escaped from a maximum-security Wisconsin prison that once held Jeffrey Dahmer, fleeing early one morning when four of the facility’s five watchtowers were unmanned.

Today, two of the state’s prisons have been in lockdown for months. Prison officials who initially blamed the restrictions on violent outbursts have since conceded that a shortage of guards has kept the lockdowns in place.

That should not have been a surprise. By the time the crisis began, the state had known for years that it was losing guards faster than it could replace them, an examination by The New York Times and Wisconsin Watch has found.

Almost half the jobs for guards at the state’s maximum-security prisons were unfilled in mid-2023, up from just 10% at the start of 2017, according to an analysis of Department of Corrections data. Overtime costs have skyrocketed, and so has the percentage of inexperienced officers in the workforce.

The lack of personnel drove prison officials to take extreme shortcuts in how they ran the facilities, interviews and records show. Even so, state leaders did not take significant steps to slow the hemorrhaging of guards until last year, long after the earliest problems were apparent.

Wisconsin’s struggle to staff its prisons is reflective of a crisis building across the country, as the job of prison guard, long seen as a stable position with generous benefits, has become increasingly undesirable. Working conditions deteriorated as the pandemic ravaged aging correctional facilities, and other entry-level jobs suddenly began offering higher wages. The number of people employed by state prisons fell in 2022 to its lowest point in more than two decades, according to U.S. census data.

A national review by The Marshall Project described how short staffing has changed nearly every aspect of prison life across the country. In Georgia, the staff was stretched so thin that no one noticed for five days that a man had died in his cell. A prisoner in Missouri pulled out his own teeth, one by one, because he could not see a dentist.

The state’s oldest prison, the Waupun Correctional Institution, has been locked down since March, with prisoners confined to their cells nearly all the time, eating meals out of brown paper bags and sometimes going weeks without fresh air and exercise. Inmates have been denied family visits, access to the law library and timely medical and dental care.

Prisoners say those conditions have driven many of them to think of suicide. One provided reporters with a prison report showing that on more than one occasion, guards had walked away while he cut himself. Three incarcerated men have died in Waupun since its lockdown began, including one confirmed suicide.

In interviews, guards said their jobs have gone from difficult to nearly impossible. The prisons have become increasingly hard to control, they say, as basic operations have slowed to a crawl.

They described nights when 10 staff members at Waupun have been responsible for 900 prisoners; vans that no longer patrol another prison’s perimeter at night; teachers who set aside classroom duties to supervise inmates during recreation time.

Guards are now regularly required to work overtime; they are ordered at the end of a shift to stay at work for another, often with no warning, leaving family plans in upheaval. Some guards are made to work 16-hour days several times a week.

The Department of Corrections declined to comment for this article. In a statement this week, the department said that conditions in the locked-down prisons had improved and that it had hired nearly 300 new guards in November and December. In total, the department has nearly 3,000 full-time positions for corrections officers.

Last year, the Republican-controlled Legislature approved significant raises for guards, which have begun to reduce the number of unfilled openings. The move came two years after a similar proposal died amid partisan infighting, leading the percentage of unfilled openings at the state’s maximum-security institutions to climb sharply, exceeding 50% at four of the six prisons.

Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat who was in office when that happened, acknowledged the staffing crisis in a recent interview. He said the raises for guards were helping and expressed regret that they did not extend to other corrections employees, like nurses and teachers.

“The pay makes a difference,” he said.

Overworked staff and angry prisoners

When Joe Verdegan was hired as a corrections officer at the Green Bay Correctional Institution in the 1990s, the benefits were good, the hours predictable, and the work manageable. There was a waiting list of applicants, he remembers, and the prison pretty much ran itself.

“When you got hired there, you were set for life,” Verdegan said.

That has changed tremendously over the past decade, he and other current and former guards said.

The first big shift came around 2011, when Scott Walker, the Republican governor at the time, signed Act 10, a sweeping law that gutted public employees’ ability to bargain collectively with the state, a step Walker said was needed to close a $3.6 billion budget gap.

The law broke most of Wisconsin’s powerful public-sector unions. Guards lost the ability to negotiate for better working conditions. Take-home pay shrunk because workers had to contribute more to pay for their benefits. A record number of state employees retired the year the law took effect. The employees who remained were forced to cover for them, often through mandatory overtime.

Veteran officers began to lose prized seniority rights, like the ability to choose preferred shifts and work assignments, according to Jeff Hoffman, who worked as a corrections officer at Green Bay until he retired in 2023. Schedules were even more grueling for the newest hires.

“They were getting jammed every single day, working 16-hour days, week after week after week, until they quit,” Hoffman recalled.

Between 2013 and 2022, annual overtime pay for officers and sergeants more than doubled, to $64.8 million from $28.1 million, according to an analysis of state payroll data.

The high levels of overtime resulted in at least 714 officers and sergeants — roughly one out of every six guards and sergeants — being paid more than $100,000 in 2022. Twenty-eight of them made more than the $152,755 salary of the head of the department.

The ballooning costs reflected the Legislature’s decision to prioritize overtime ahead of increasing pay to attract new hires, said Ed Wall, who led the Department of Corrections from 2012 to 2016.

In 2015, Wall saw the staffing shortfalls as a brewing disaster and wrote a memo to Walker to warn him.

“If we don’t address the recruitment and retention issues appropriately, we will continue to see OT escalate and fatigue get worse,” he wrote, adding that overworked guards and angry prisoners were a recipe for trouble.

He said he handed it to Walker’s chief of staff. It never came up again.

The view in the department, Wall said in a recent interview, was, “They’re not going to take us seriously until somebody gets killed.”

Wall resigned in 2016, during a federal investigation into allegations of abuse at a youth prison in northern Wisconsin, and he was later fired from a civil service position over allegations that he tried to evade the state’s open records law. Wall has said he was a scapegoat and that his ouster was politically motivated.

Walker did not respond to a request for an interview about Wall’s memorandum.

In a statement, Walker said: “State government leaders in Wisconsin can look at recruiting efforts, higher pay, and — most importantly — greater certainty with scheduling to help address the staffing issues in the Department of Corrections. Our Act 10 reforms do not have an impact on any of these issues.”

In 2020, the pandemic threw the prison system into chaos. In April of that year, two men with violent histories escaped from Columbia Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison north of Madison, where four out of the five guard towers were unmanned.

A Corrections Department spokesperson denied that short staffing played a role in the security lapse, though he also said that towers at all of the state’s prisons have been closed on overnight shifts as a result of budget cuts.

A plan to raise wages

In 2021, the Department of Corrections asked a state legislative committee to take a major step to stabilize the prison system: A $5-an-hour pay bump for corrections officers and sergeants, with extra pay available for workers at maximum-security prisons.

At the time the state had amassed a $2.5 billion surplus, and the booming job market was hurting recruitment efforts. During a hearing on the proposal, a state official testified that corrections officers were leaving for higher wages at convenience stores and factories. Others were leaving to work as officers at county jails, which were offering attractive bonuses and a starting wage of $25 an hour, she said, compared with $19 an hour at the state prisons.

In testimony and letters to the legislative committee, guard after guard said their facilities were in dire crises.

One young officer, Lucas Meier, said a colleague was beaten unconscious by an inmate. The assault stopped because “the inmate, frankly, got tired,” he said.

George Kraemer, a sergeant at Dodge Correctional Institution, an intake facility, described one overnight shift in 2021 when a single guard had to monitor 144 inmates in two separate barracks-style dormitories — leaving 72 prisoners unsupervised at any given time.

The legislative committee approved modest across-the-board raises for all state employees, but voted 6-2 against extra pay for guards, with Republicans on the committee opposing it. The Legislature instead voted to give the guards extra pay using short-term federal pandemic money — which Evers then vetoed, saying it was irresponsible financing and the money was needed elsewhere.

More corrections officers left. The vacancy rate at one prison reached 67%.

At least three prisons were placed on lockdown. All had severe guard shortages, the staffing data revealed. One — the Stanley Correctional Institution, a medium-security prison in western Wisconsin — had the state’s highest ratio of inmates to guards: nearly 20 inmates for every guard in May 2023. Two years earlier, the ratio was about 8 to 1. Stanley remained on lockdown for a year.

Verdegan, who retired from the Green Bay prison in 2020, said he often saw prison officials attribute a lockdown to inmate misbehavior, when too few guards was the real reason.

“They would make a mountain out of molehill and implement lockdowns — but in reality they knew they were heading into the next week short of staff,” Verdegan said.

As the situation in the prisons worsened, the calls to raise guards’ pay started to receive support from Republicans. In 2023, the Legislature agreed to raise starting pay for corrections officers to $33 an hour from $20.29 and made additional pay available to those working at maximum-security prisons and facilities with vacancy rates above 40%.

Vacancy rates for guards finally started declining. Restrictions have been eased at some facilities, including the Stanley prison, where family visits and recreation were restored. Still, two prisons remain on lockdown, and prisoners have said in recent weeks that life in those facilities has barely improved since the lockdowns started.

Evers said the pay increases helped attract an especially large class of recruits. Corrections officers said they were cautiously optimistic, but that it might take a year or two for the new wave of recruits to make much difference in the staffing shortages. One reason: The department has historically lost about half of all new recruits in their early years of service.

Jack Kelly contributed reporting.

Mario Koran is examining the Wisconsin Department of Corrections as part of The New York Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship. This article was reported in partnership with Wisconsin Watch and Big Local News at Stanford University and with support from the Data-Driven Reporting Project.

10 guards, 900 inmates: Wisconsin prisons see dire results of ignored warnings 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 Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Listen to Mario Koran of Wisconsin Watch and The New York Times discuss the Wisconsin prison lockdowns on WPR

The Wisconsin Department of Corrections is confining prisoners to their cells due to a lack of staff to operate facilities at full capacity — a practice unfolding at more prisons than officials previously acknowledged.

The New York Times and Wisconsin Watch have learned that Stanley Correctional Institution — a medium-security prison in Chippewa County — has limited prisoner movement for the past year. Department officials previously said only Waupun and Green Bay correctional institutions were doing so.

Meanwhile, in Waupun, 30-year-old Tyshun Lemons became the second prisoner to die in custody since the department instituted lockdown conditions in March. DOC spokesman Kevin Hoffman said a medical examiner has yet to determine a cause of death, but attorney Lonnie Story, who has been in contact with the Lemons family, said Lemons died by suicide. The death follows the June suicide of Dean Hoffmann.

In August, more than two dozen inmates incarcerated at Waupun described to Wisconsin Watch and The New York Times squalid conditions inside the prison, including dirty water, limited opportunities for recreation and showers, canceled family visits and a dearth of timely access to medical and mental health care. Men were so desperate for medical care, they said, some have cut themselves or threatened self-harm to be seen by nursing staff.

Elsewhere, prisoners inside Green Bay Correctional Institution, facing restricted movement since June, describe similar conditions, including rodent infestations.

The department refers to the restrictions not as “lockdowns,” but rather “modified movement,” because officials can adjust the restrictions over time. Some prisoners have been allowed at times to leave their cells for work, appointments or recreation. But experts call lockdown an appropriate term for conditions in Waupun, where prisoners in recent months have been confined to their cells for up to 24 hours each day, going without family visits and regular access to showers and recreation. 

Waupun staff have themselves used the term lockdown when refusing medical care.

“No optical during lockdown,” read a note from Waupun medical staff, in response to a request from a man seeking medical attention for eye pain and blurry vision. 

Story, who is representing several Waupun inmates in a class-action lawsuit, said he’s shocked to see the Waupun lockdown approach seven months. In 1983, Waupun prisoners were locked down for just three days after seizing control of buildings, taking hostages and setting fires. 

“These men are already serving a sentence, and these conditions are going above and beyond that. It’s almost as though they’re receiving a second sentence,” Story said.

Hoffman, the DOC spokesman, said the department is incrementally easing the restrictions in Waupun and Green Bay. In Waupun, for example, the number of prisoners allowed out of their cells to work jobs within the facility has tripled, and behavioral health groups have resumed. In Green Bay, prisoners have been allowed to resume chapel services, he added. 

The lockdowns come amid a staffing crisis in Wisconsin’s prisons. At Waupun, more than 53% of sergeant and correctional officer positions remain vacant. It’s the shortest-staffed prison in a system averaging a 32% vacancy rate.

Initially, prison officials denied any link between lockdowns and staff vacancies, telling Wisconsin Watch and The New York Times that threats and assaultive behavior prompted the restrictions.

“Staffing is not the reason for the modified movement,” a DOC spokesman said in July. 

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and department officials have since acknowledged that vacancies hinder efforts to resume normal operations. 

“Staffing did not cause the modified movement,” Hoffman told Wisconsin Watch in September. “But staffing does factor into the facility’s ability to lift these restrictions because adequate staffing is required for escorting, responding to threatening behavior, and maintaining the safety of everyone at (Waupun).”

Department officials have also shared conflicting information about how many prisons face restricted movement. In July, Hoffman said only two prisons met that criteria. DOC Secretary Kevin Carr repeated that information to lawmakers during his September reappointment hearing. 

But The New York Times and Wisconsin Watch have since obtained a memo authored by Stanley Correctional Institution Warden Chris Buesgen announcing that a “modified movement phase” would begin Nov. 7, 2022.

“While it is understood that these changes will not be favored, they are necessary at this time given the current staffing shortage,” Buesgen wrote.

Stanley’s 44% vacancy rate for sergeants and correctional officers ranks third highest among Wisconsin prisons, department data show. Stanley prisoners say they’ve spent 18 hours a day in their cells with reduced access to the day room, where they can use the phones. They had previously been allowed to spend about half of each day outside of their cells. 

Lack of staff has so hobbled the institution that educators must supervise the yard during recreation time. Prisoners say they’ve missed education time due to teachers being assigned other duties within the institution.

Hoffman said the department has eased some restrictions at Stanley in recent months, including increasing recreation time. It is not uncommon for education staff and other non-uniformed personnel to assist with supervision and recognize emergencies, he added.

“Bottom line, security is everyone’s role in an institution,” Hoffman said. 

Multiple prisoners and their family members say they are facing increasing discipline during the restrictions, with some drawing citations for infractions as small as eating a turkey sandwich on the stairs or speaking with someone during a video visit who is not on an approved visitor list — even if that person is an infant being held by their mother. The infractions could land a prisoner in solitary confinement.

Among the biggest effects of the restrictions, said Emily Curtis, whose loved one is incarcerated in Stanley: less time to speak with him at visits and on the phone.

Research has long shown that connections with family and friends can improve a prisoner’s likelihood of successful reintegration after release.

“You might only talk to a loved one twice a week,” Curtis said. “They are constantly living within such a negative space there and a lot of times we are the only positive thing they have, the only hope and encouragement they have, as we try to bring them out of the dark place they’re in.”

“We are not numbers on a piece of paper,” said Curtis’ loved one, Martell Rogers, who while incarcerated has built a real estate company with the help of people outside of the prison.

“We are not items that you can bind up and mistreat and think everything will be fine when we’re set free. You cannot separate us from our humanity,” Rogers said.

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Second prisoner dies during Waupun Correctional Institution lockdown; restrictions linger at two additional prisons 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.

Prisoners locked in their cells for days on end report walls speckled with feces and blood. Birds have moved in, leaving droppings on the food trays and ice bags handed out to keep prisoners cool. Blocked from visiting the law library, prisoners say they have missed court deadlines and jeopardized appeals. Unable to access toilet paper, one prisoner tore his clothing into patches to use for tissue.

One thousand people incarcerated at Waupun Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison in southeast Wisconsin, have been confined mostly to their cells for more than four months, ever since prison officials locked down the facility and halted many programs and services.

More than two dozen prisoners at Waupun, the state’s oldest prison, have revealed to The New York Times that since late March they have been forced to eat all meals in their cells, received no visits from friends or family, seen complaints of pain ignored and been allowed limited, if any, fresh air or recreation time.

The Wisconsin Department of Corrections has offered little explanation about the lockdown or why it has lasted so long.

“There were multiple threats of disruption and assaultive behavior toward staff or other persons in our care, but there was not one specific incident that prompted the facility to go into modified movement,” said Kevin Hoffman, the department’s deputy director of communications. According to state data, nearly 100 assaults have occurred there in the past fiscal year.

Others familiar with the sprawling penitentiary suggest another reason for the restrictions: dire staffing shortages.

More than half of the prison’s 284 full-time positions for correctional officers and sergeants remain unfilled, state data shows. The shortages have severely hobbled the facility’s ability to operate safely, according to former wardens, correctional officers and members of Waupun prison’s community board.

“If I was the warden right now, I’d have that institution on lockdown, too,” said Mike Thurmer, who once ran the prison and now sits on its community relations board. “You can’t have a 40 or 50% vacancy rate and not have at the very minimum a modified lockdown.”

What is happening in Waupun illustrates a reality at prisons across the country: Lockdowns, once a rare action taken in a crisis, are becoming a common way to deal with chronic staffing and budget shortages.

Critics say these shutdowns became easier to justify during the pandemic, when prison officials could cite the need to control the spread of COVID-19. But even as most COVID-related restrictions have been lifted, lockdowns continue to be applied.

“They are using it at the drop of a hat because it makes day to day operations easier,” said Tammie Gregg, deputy director for the ACLU’s National Prison Project.

Waupun is not the state’s only prison under lockdown. Eighty miles northeast, those at the maximum-security prison in Green Bay have been effectively locked down since June. Prisoner advocates have shared reports of prisoners protesting conditions inside the institution, but the Department of Corrections would confirm only that there were unspecified security threats.

Green Bay’s prison has a vacancy rate for correctional officers and sergeants of 40%.

State prisons across the country have been denying prisoners showers, exercise and timely medical care. In Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas, thousands of people have been kept in their cells as officials scrambled to hire more officers.

Last year, a former lawmaker and director of an association that represents prison workers in Oklahoma said staffing shortages had led to increased violence and repeated lockdowns.

And in the federal prison system, which is also suffering severe labor shortages, officials in recent years have turned to nurses, teachers and cooks to guard prisoners as nearly one-third of correctional officer jobs sat vacant. Staffing shortages led one prison in Texas to lock prisoners in their cells on the weekends.

The practice extends to jails, where offenders typically await trial or serve sentences shorter than a year. In 2022, one Pennsylvania jail was locked down after officials called a state of emergency because of low staffing levels. More recently, officers at Prince County jail in Maryland said a shortage of guards resulted in frequent lockdowns and forced overtime for officers.

The effects of chronic staffing shortages

Given the staffing shortages, some prison officials in Wisconsin and elsewhere said their facilities would be impossible to manage without lockdowns.

But studies show there may be more at stake. A survey across 19 prisons in the United Kingdom found that 84% of prisoners who responded from higher-security prisons said their mental health had deteriorated over the course of lockdowns during COVID outbreaks because of boredom, anxiety and limited social interactions.

Lockdowns often also restrict family visits, as they have in Waupun, which research has long shown can negatively affect the likelihood of successful reintegration after a prisoner is released.

Gregg said parallels can be drawn between lockdowns and solitary confinement, which can lead to long-term psychological damage. Limited access to libraries, a loss of educational opportunities and a denial of substance abuse treatment — all of which frequently result from lockdowns — can mean the punishment prisoners already experience is compounded.

With its 53% staff vacancy rate, Waupun is the most short-staffed facility in a chronically understaffed state prison system. Supplemental correctional officers come in on a rotating, two-week basis to provide relief for full-time staff, but the help may not go far enough.

The lockdown at Waupun has led to delays in medical care and psychological services. Multiple prisoners reported those who were cutting themselves or threatening self-harm simply to get medical attention. And even then, they said, assistance was slow to arrive — if it came at all.

Prisoners at the maximum-security prison have been convicted of felonies ranging from drug possession to burglary to murder. The Times interviewed prisoners by phone and email.

“People are threatening suicide every day, and there’s no treatment here,” said a Waupun prisoner, Jayvon Flemming, referring to mental health care. “You have to harm yourself or threaten suicide just to get staff’s attention. I’m in a nightmare.”

“I’ve attempted suicide four times in the past months just because of this lockdown and not being able to go outside to get sunlight,” said another prisoner, Ashton Dreiling.

“We’ve received no indication that this is the case,” Hoffman, the Department of Corrections spokesman, said when told of allegations that prisoners were threatening suicide or self-harm more often since the lockdown began.

Wisconsin prisons also face a shortage of staff for health care (24%) and psychological services (27%), according to data from the Department of Corrections. One Waupun prisoner, Kevin Burkes, has been living with pain and blurry vision — a possible complication, medical records indicate, of an autoimmune disorder. In June, he submitted a request to see a doctor but received a reply that read, “No optical during lockdown.”

Hoffman acknowledged that early on, appointments were limited to those deemed necessary by medical professionals. Routine appointments are now allowed more frequently, he said.

Lonnie Story, a civil rights attorney based in Florida, agreed in August to represent Waupun prisoners in a class-action lawsuit against the state.

Story said their complaints have been notably consistent. “What’s setting off legal alerts and red flags in my mind are the medical aspects — complaints about the ventilation system, the denial of medical treatment and the denial of psychological evaluations or treatment,” he said.

The exact number of lockdowns that occur in federal and state prisons is not clear because there is no national tracking system. There are no standards for how lockdowns are implemented or how long they can last, Gregg said, and there is little oversight for the practice.

The Wisconsin Department of Corrections cannot say whether the lockdown at Waupun is the state’s longest because it does not formally record the numbers. But those familiar with the state’s prison system said lockdowns typically last just days or weeks, not months.

In April, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Georgia, introduced a bipartisan bill in Congress, the Federal Prison Oversight Act, which would require the Department of Justice’s inspector general to review the 122 correctional facilities within the Bureau of Prisons and assess the frequency and duration of lockdowns.

The office of Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, whose administration oversees Wisconsin’s Department of Corrections, told The Times that ensuring prison safety is a top priority and that his office will continue to rely on the DOC’s judgment. The governor’s office did not respond to questions about the cause of the restrictions or steps it might take if the lockdown continued.

Sean Daley, a representative for AFSCME, the union that serves as an advocate for Wisconsin prison guards, said he would not be shocked if staff shortages were at least partly to blame for the lockdown at Waupun.

“The system is breaking, if it’s not broken yet,” Daley said. “And Waupun can be a glaring example of that under its current state.”

Outnumbered, overworked and underpaid

Lawmakers hope an increase in pay will improve recruitment and retention, although hiring enough new staffers to provide relief may take months. The state Legislature agreed to raise starting pay for correctional officers to $33 an hour from $20.29 an hour and made additional money available for those working at maximum-security prisons and facilities with vacancy rates above 40%.

But Mike Thomas, a former correctional officer who worked at Waupun’s prison for seven years before he retired as a captain, said the pay increase was only one piece of the puzzle.

Dangerous conditions, forced overtime and lack of time off contributes to high burnout rates among correctional officers. Thomas recalls working 75 days straight, many of them double shifts. It was so difficult to plan for days off, he said, that many resorted to calling in sick when they needed a personal day.

Since mid-2012, Waupun has seen 440 assaults on staff. At least 95 occurred this fiscal year — more than any other Wisconsin prison and nearly double the number of the next closest facility, according to DOC data. When adjusted for the prison population, Waupun’s incident rate in fiscal year 2023 is the third highest and seven times the state average.

In testimony sent to state lawmakers in January, Brian Wackett, a correctional officer, described an urgent need for pay raises to attract and retain more officers.

Waupun prison had a night last year, he said, when they only had eight staff members working inside the prison. “They have 900 inmates there, and no one can adequately supervise them all at a given time,” he said.

Prisoners can’t get basic services

Many prisoner jobs inside the prison have been put on hold. In-person college classes for prisoners, offered by Trinity International University, were paused at the end of March, according to a representative from the college.

Policies that say prison staff must offer prisoners showers at least twice a week, as well as four hours of recreation outside of their cells, have been suspended during the lockdown.

The DOC said recreation is still offered but that the frequency and duration were dependent on staffing levels. Some inmates claimed they received one hour a week of exercise. Others said recreation was offered inconsistently, and often canceled if prisoners broke minor rules, like not standing up for morning head count. 

In addition to the loss of educational opportunities, prisoners like Chase Burns said they were denied visits to the law library, a right guaranteed by the U.S. Supreme Court. The DOC said prisoners can still request materials from the library. But multiple prisoners report that those requests are delayed until a librarian can fulfill the search, making it difficult to file documents by court deadlines.

Days after responding to questions from The Times, the prison began allowing library visitation for those with a court date within 45 days.

Flemming, the Waupun prisoner who described how prisoners were threatening suicide to get medical attention, said his biggest fear was not being able to summon help in a medical crisis.

He said he recently had trouble breathing and requested immediate assistance, but it took four days for a nurse to see him. When she came, he said, she charged him $7.50 for a medical co-pay, took his vital signs and told him he was on a list to be seen by a doctor. His breathing problems continued.

“There’s no ventilation in these cells,” he said, adding that there was no way to call out to staff in a medical emergency. “We shouldn’t have to live like this.”

Jamie Kelter Davis and Justin Mayo contributed reporting.

Mario Koran is examining the Wisconsin Department of Corrections as part of The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship. He reported this article in partnership with Wisconsin Watch and with support from the Data-Driven Reporting Project, which is funded by the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University | Medill.

Inside Waupun Correctional Institution’s ‘nightmare’ lockdown 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.