Scott Walker Is Clueless About His Jails
by Betsy Woodruff
Unbeknownst to the governor, Wisconsin’s jails are flooded with non-violent offenders—and he may pay a price for his ignorance on the 2016 campaign trail.
Gov. Scott Walker says he is proud of the way Wisconsin handles non-violent criminals.
The Badger State governor traveled to Disney's Magic Kingdom last week to speak at a forum hosted by Florida Governor Rick Scott for some of the 2016 presidential contenders. He spoke very highly of his own record on criminal justice.
“I think, nationally, that’s something we need to look at,” Walker said, discussing reform of mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug offenders. “In our state, we have relatively few compared to the federal government.”
Then he added, “The challenges in terms of people being incarcerated for relatively low offenses is not a significant issue in the state of Wisconsin.”
The only problem? Criminal justice advocates argue he’s totally wrong.
Wisconsin’s criminal justice system has long drawn criticism from inside and outside the state, in part because roughly half of new inmates each year get imprisoned because they break the rules of parole—not because they’re convicted of new crimes.
This could potentially hinder the governor’s presidential ambitions, as other presidential contenders—like Sen. Rand Paul and former Texas Governor Rick Perry—have prioritized criminal justice reform efforts.
The state’s prisons had 22,156 inmates at the end of April 2015—roughly twice as many as Minnesota’s, even though the two states’ total populations are about the same.
As you’d imagine, keeping all those people in prison doesn’t come cheap.
The state spends more on prisons than it does on the University of Wisconsin system.
“The challenges in terms of people being incarcerated for relatively low offenses is not a significant issue in the state of Wisconsin.”
In its most recent budget, for the 2013-2015 biennium, the state appropriated $2.315 billion for the Department of Corrections and $2.247 billion to the university system. Politifact notes that sentencing laws passed in the 1980’s contributed to the state’s prison population growth.
When he was in the state Assembly, Walker advocated for Truth-in-Sentencing legislation. Bipartisan critics say that policy also spurred more incarceration.
And while the prison populations in Wisconsin have been higher—in 2007-2008, the average daily population was 23,338 according to the state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau—advocates say the state’s criminal justice system still needs serious help.
But Wisconsin doesn’t just draw criticism for the size of its prison population; a 2013 study showed that it incarcerated a higher percent of its African-American male population than any other state in the union.
Marilyn Walczak of the Justice Initiatives Institute said Minnesota’s criminal justice policy puts Wisconsin’s to shame.
“There’s something magical in the Mississippi river, I guess, on their side of the river,” she said drily. “But it’s not magic. It’s that back in the '70s, they took a stand and decided that they were not going to bankrupt the state on building prisons and filling them up.”
more:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/08/scott-walker-is-clueless-about-his-jails.html?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
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