San Quentin News

Written By Incarcerated - Advancing Social Justice

Wisconsin governor submits proposal to build more prisons

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Wisconsin’s Governor Tony Evers, whose campaign pledged to cut his state’s prison population in half, has instead recommended a $259 million expenditure to build more prisons.

According to Matt Kettle of MacIver News Service, the governor submitted a proposal to build seven major Department of Corrections (DOC) projects. This is a six-fold increase from his predecessor, Gov. Scott Walker, who recommended $41.68 million in DOC capital financing.

“The spending is just mind-blowing,” said state Rep. Michael Schraa (ROshkosh), chairman of the Assembly’s Committee on Corrections.

Prison construction, at 10% of Evers $2.5 billion two-year budget, demonstrates the new governor appears to have turned away from social reform. MacIver News Service said he now plans on increasing the prison occupancy by at least 310 beds to cover a projected increase of approximately 3,000 additional inmates by 2025.

As late as last year, the state’s prison population was 33% above capacity.

According to reporter Kettle, Evers successfully campaigned on initiatives that included decriminalizing small amounts of marijuana and “investing in people, not prisons.”

The governor was credited with a political strategy that enabled him to agree with reforms that were in line with his more liberal opponents in the Democratic Party primary. Included in his campaign was a promise of a massive reduction of prisoners.

Now, Schraa told MacIver News Service that it appears the governor is stepping away from one of his main campaign promises, which included fiscal and social reform by reducing the prison population. During the campaign, Evers told his constituency that the prison population’s reduction of 50% is a “goal that’s worth accomplishing.” Kettle reported. Now, Wisconsin State Rep. Schraa said Evers made it clear to him in a meeting earlier this year that the governor was not talking about cutting the prison population in half anytime soon. “That’s when he back-

tracked and said that his goal is to have that eventually, that could happen even after he’s out of office,” added Schraa, according to reporter Kettle.

The DOC still says they are committed to research- ing any possible opportunities to reduce Wisconsin’s prison population.

In an email sent to MacIver News Service, the DOC wrote, “Under Gov. Tony Evers’ criminal justice reform, our staff is looking into many different avenues to reduce the prison population while maintaining our first priority of public safety.”

Reporter Kettle concluded that Evers’ reverse and search for additional prison beds, emphasizes an admission that social justice reform programs and initiatives might sound good on the campaign trail, but they don’t necessarily reflect the reality of the rising prison population and the need to keep the public safe.

Wisconsin ends harsh treatment of youth

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Wisconsin prison officials have reached a legal settlement aimed at bringing sweeping criminal justice reform to its youth prisons.
The settlement provides for “broad changes at the state’s troubled youth prison, (which) include banning guards from using pepper spray, ending solitary confinement for rule-breakers and limiting mechanical restraints and strip searches,” The Associated Press reported in June.
Pending approval from a federal judge, the settlement would include $1 million for ACLU’s attorney fees. ACLU represented the plaintiffs against the state.
“We hope this settlement (will) signal a larger shift in Wisconsin’s juvenile justice system toward an approach that recognizes the unique needs and vulnerabilities of youth and respects their constitutional rights,” said Timothy Muth,  ACLU attorney.
The U.S. Department of Justice has been investigating allegations of widespread abuse of Wisconsin prisons since 2015, according to the AP.
“In March, Wisconsin Department of Corrections reached an $18.9 million settlement with a former juvenile inmate who suffered brain damage after she tried to hang herself in her cell,” AP reported.

The girl alleged that staff ignored signs that she was contemplating suicide and didn’t respond to her cell call light when she activated it before she attempted suicide, AP reported.

Wisconsin’s Department of Justice Secretary Ed Wall resigned in February 2016 after the FBI took over the investigation into allegations of abuse at its prisons. The probe is still ongoing, according to AP.

PPI’s “Correctional Control: Incarceration and Supervision by State” is the first report to aggregate data on all types of correctional control nationwide.

CA senators bill baring juveniles from adult courts

Formerly incarcerated author, Donna Hylton

Court order gives defense lawyers a raise

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Court-appointed lawyers in Wisconsin are getting a raise in an order meant to address a chronic lack of attorneys willing to take on public defense cases.

Court proceedings with an inmate on television screen (top left)

Court proceedings with an inmate on television screen (top left)


In May, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered that private attorneys assigned to defend cases must be paid $100 an hour—up from $70—beginning in 2020. While defense lawyers welcome the higher rate they say it may not reach far enough, as the court declined to declare lower rates unreasonable.
The Wisconsin Public Defender’s Office assigns about 40 percent of its cases to private attorneys, but it also pays the lowest rate in the nation, only $40 an hour—lowered from $50 in 1995, according to NPR.
The state struggles to find lawyers at this rate, which results in criminal defendants remaining in in jail for months despite the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of a speedy trial.
“If our legislature fails to act, we will see the deepening of this constitutional crisis and a collapse of the system itself,” lawyers John Birdsall and Hank Schultz wrote in a statement for the Wisconsin Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, which petitioned the court.
“The cost to reconstruct after that forgone occurrence will be astronomical—compared to the meager price of simply paying lawyers a minimally reasonable hourly rate,” they continued.
The court also refused the association’s petition to index the new rate to inflation and prohibit flat-fee contracts. Justice Daniel Kelly and Justice Rebecca Bradley wrote a dissenting opinion, stating that while the current compensation is “absurdly inadequate,” the court shouldn’t trespass on “authority that belongs to others,” meaning the Wisconsin lawmakers.
In what seems like a warning to the legislature, the order not only lays out the summary of the problem it responds to but also recounts how other states have had to address the same issues following expensive class action litigation.
Ultimately, the problem isn’t just in finding lawyers to take public defense cases but in getting them to focus their energy when they do.
“If you have a financial conflict that you’re going to lose more money the more you work on a case, it’s going to have a tendency to try to get the lawyer to get the person to plead quicker,” said David Carroll, with the Boston Based Sixth Amendment Center.
According to a 2015 survey of Wisconsin criminal defense lawyers, they do in fact spend less time with public defense clients than with private clients. About half of those surveyed are taking fewer public defense cases than in years past.

San Quentin News & Wall City Merchandise


http://sanquentinnews.com/prosecutors-accepting-guilty-pleas-death-penalty-no-executions/

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The over use of pepper spray on juveniles

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Guards at a Wisconsin youth detention facility were found to have pepper-sprayed teenage inmates more than 100 times in the first six months of the year, reports the Wisconsin State Journal.

The information was based on a report filed by the state Department of Corrections in federal court. “One inmate at the Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls in Irma was pepper-sprayed 12 times between January and June … but the majority of the 51 inmates sprayed were pepper-sprayed four or fewer times,” Molly Beck reported.

The vast majority of inmates being pepper-sprayed were housed in the prison’s solitary confinement cells.

The report was ordered by Judge James Peterson in July as part of a lawsuit against the Department of Corrections by former inmates over the department’s use of the practices.

During a two-day hearing in the case, a juvenile prison expert testified that pepper-spray incidents are related to the amount of time some inmates spend in solitary confinement.

The expert testified that some teen inmates are spending so much time alone in solitary confinement that they purposely behave in ways that will trigger being pepper-sprayed so they can receive stimulation and get out of their cells.

Overall, 331 inmates were found to have been peppered-sprayed by guards in the six months the department counted its use of pepper spray to manage behavior.

The report found that the guards used the spray most when inmates were physically resisting staff, refusing directives to stop abusing property in an unsafe manner, refusing to comply with orders to move to another room or location within the facility and keeping their arms hanging outside of a cell’s trap door.

The Department of Corrections (DOC) of Wisconsin will use the data in the report to “prepare a plan to further reduce or eliminate any remaining use of incapacitating agents,” DOC attorney Sam Hall wrote in the report.

The DOC announced that the facility’s administrator, Wendy Peterson, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, would be leaving her post and taking on a smaller role as the prison’s education director.

 

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