Tony Evers’ Prison Charade
Governor Tony Evers’ proposed budget will include a $500 million plan to reform Wisconsin’s prisons. Last week’s news cycle flooded with articles detailing this plan, but none pointed out that it is a sham. The Governor’s prison reform plan makes him look good for liberal voters and reform advocates, but it is extremely unlikely to occur. If Evers actually wanted to address egregious problems in his prisons, and reduce rather than expand Wisconsin’s incarcerated population, he could. Instead, he’s choosing to float this sweeping proposal to a legislature long determined to sink everything he does.
Tony Evers Refuses to Decarcerate
Like most oppressive systems, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections is convoluted, opaque, and poorly covered by mainstream media. Evers relies on these facts to conceal his operation of the most racist, abusive, and lawless prison system in the midwest, and one of the worst in the country. Wisconsin’s prison system is not normal. There is an exceptional humanitarian crisis happening in our state, and, yes, it is hard to understand all the bureaucracy involved, but when has confronting systemic racism and oppression ever been easy?
Below is a brief list of clear actions Evers could take, without the legislature, to significantly reduce Wisconsin’s prison population. It would take thousands of words to explain each item on this list, so we have embedded links to sources that go more in depth than we are able to. Please, consider taking an afternoon to click through and learn the banal and evil details of how Wisconsin’s prisons operate, and how stubbornly Tony Evers is refusing to do anything about it.
Release “old law” prisoners. The 2000 truth in sentencing law created a messed up incentive for the parole commissioners to protect their jobs by deferring everyone who comes before them. Evers’ first parole commission chair, John Tate II broke the mold. He was (very slowly and cautiously) beginning to release people. Then, Tony Evers forced him to resign and replaced him with Jon Erpenbach, who has restored the old tradition of collecting a big government salary to defer almost every applicant.
Use pardons to release people. There are many aging prisoners with good behavior sentenced under stupid “tough on crime” laws who could come home and rejoin their families. They pose little to no threat, and their release would reduce overpopulation in the system, something Evers ran on. Instead, Evers betrayed campaign promises, instructing his pardon board to never even consider anyone currently in prison for a pardon and release. Even when COVID had infected half the prison population, killing dozens of people, he refused to even consider saving a single life.
End crimeless revocations. Roughly one third of the people in Wisconsin’s prisons were put in by aggressive probation officers for violating minor rules of community supervision, not for breaking laws. The DOC also chooses to count “street time” irregularly, which keeps people perpetually cycling back into prison without breaking any laws. Tony Evers could direct DOC officials to change course. Instead he left Walker appointees in charge of Community Supervision, without even educating himself enough to realize it.
Bypass superpredator sentences to empty abusive youth prisons instead of building more. More than a decade after the tortures at Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake were exposed, staff are still abusing kids in those facilities and saying they want to abuse them more. Wisconsin is one of the only states that still has 90’s era superpredator laws, despite studies linking youth incarceration and even youth police contact with increased crime. Rather than using his pardon power to protect kids from those sentences, Tony Evers keeps fighting to build new youth prisons. These new prisons will cost $2.45 million per bed and . They will take years and dirty tricks to bypass public opposition and build. They probably won’t be any safer. Worst of all, they won’t even hold enough kids to take the current youth prison population.
Stop Gaslighting Us
In 2018, Governor Evers ran on reducing the prison population by 50%, but the population is now climbing fastest it has since before 2000. Instead of taking concrete and decisive action, Tony Evers lies. Sometimes the lies are small misdirections. For example, every time criticism mounts, Evers puts out a misleading press release about his record number of pardons, confident that most people won’t read past the headline to learn that none of those pardons actually released anyone from prison.
Sometimes the lies are about taking credit for things he didn’t do. When COVID shut down the courts, Wisconsin’s prison population temporarily declined to the lowest it had been for decades. Evers tried to take credit for that, even though the only part of that population decline he actually owned are more than two dozen people who died because he let COVID rampage through the prisons while refusing to even consider anyone for release.
The Governor’s biggest lies are the kind he’s telling right now. Evers keeps peddling legislative reform packages, usually attached to the state budget. This is not just about prison. Every biennium he attaches dozens, sometimes hundreds of progressive policy changes to the budget, knowing full well the Joint Finance Committee will throw them all out. They do it every single time. The budget process is a charade; a tedious rerun of an old and boring story.
Due to Evers’ still unfair maps Wisconsin’s democracy remains broken. Robin Vos still controls the assembly. He still uses dirty tricks and ruthless cunning to keep every other Republican Assembly Representative in line serving the interests of hypocritical, big money fascists, like Dick Uihlein. These cowed Republicans sacrifice everything Wisconsinites need and every populist issue they ran on, for Vos and Uihlein’s single policy priority: making rich people richer. This dumb and predictable game is why we have massive surpluses, stubborn racism, hundreds of school referendums, and a humanitarian catastrophe in our prisons.
Some members of the Republican caucus are finally chafing against Vos’ control regarding the incredibly popular bipartisan issue of post-partum medicaid. They might even win, breaking Vos’ grip on them, but that means nothing for prison reform. When Tony Evers acts like assembly Republicans might partner with Democrats against Vos on something as thorny and complex as prison reform, he is selling pollyanna nonsense. As we’ve argued before, we have to stop listening to Democrats who tell us stories.
Unfortunately, some overly credulous non-profits like WISDOM are complicit in this deception. They applauded Evers for gaslighting us with his sham budget proposal, even though they know better. WISDOM has been demanding executive action for years. When Evers first came into office, they and other advocates delivered to his office a much longer list of actions and policy changes that didn’t need legislative cooperation. When he failed to act, they protest outside the DOC offices and outside his mansion. Now They are calling on people to join another big action day later this month. Yet, WISDOM leadership betrays the good work of those volunteers by celebrating false solutions and repeating lies from this Governor.
Tony Evers and his staff count on the complicity of these non-profits to continue their inaction. They also count on our collective amnesia, on our exhaustion with complex oppressive systems, our willingness to look away from abuse and hardship, and our fear of criminalized and vilified people in our community.
Undoing the harm of our prison system is a huge project. Legislation is surely part of that project, and Republican obstruction of that legislation is unconscionable and morally depraved. Tony Evers, refusing to do what he can through executive action and policy change to reduce harm and start the process, is also unconscionable and morally depraved. Stop applauding him for it.
