Urgency to close Lincoln Hills youth prison fades as costs — and concerns — mount
Molly Beck
MADISON - One year ago lawmakers moved quickly to pass a law that would close the state's youth prison where a toxic environment led to dozens of injuries to inmates and staff — some nearly deadly.
In a time of deep division between Democrats and Republicans, not one lawmaker opposed the effort to shutter the Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls.
But now, just 15 months later and even as the same signs of danger linger, lawmakers and Gov. Tony Evers continue to push back the prison's closure date and the funding to replace it.
"I just feel horrible about it," said 19-year-old Elijah Jammerson, who spent five years in Lincoln Hills until 2018. "To be treated like animals and be caged — it’s just wrong. It just needs to stop."
RELATED: Lawmakers approve $1 billion in building projects for UW campuses, reject funding to replace youth prison
Offenders in the prison north of Wausau were held in isolation for weeks at a time. Pepper spray was used as punishment. And one girl suffered permanent and severe brain damage after a guard there first took out the trash before responding to her call for help as she hanged herself.
Jammerson called it "the worst experience of my whole lifetime."
"Going away from my family, miles and miles away — five hours away," the Racine native said. "Then tortured by staff and kids — it was just a horrible scene for any teenager to be in."
The staff has suffered, too. One guard narrowly missed being electrocuted by a group of inmates and police were never told. A teacher was brutally assaulted by an inmate. Guards have been forced to work 16 hours in a row as staffing shortages plague the facility. Female workers received threats of rape.
At one point in 2015, the employee union drafted a press release calling the prison a "gladiator school" but worried about reprisal from state officials and never released it.
"Not only is management at the facility failing to prevent repeated episodes of violence between inmates, it also is ignoring clear legal requirements to report assaults to local authorities," the workers wrote. "It’s time to break the silence before somebody gets killed."
The conditions — festering for years — prompted a state and federal investigation and a number of lawsuits, including one class action federal challenge that forced major changes to the prison's practices.
Even then it took until 2018 for former Gov. Scott Walker and lawmakers to seek changes — six years after the governor's office was first notified of trouble at the facility.
But while the will is now there to close the prison and open smaller facilities across the state, the 2021 deadline to make it happen keeps getting pushed back as reality sets in for lawmakers and for the proposed new prisons' neighbors.
"The costs ... we’re trying to figure out what that's going to be," Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, said. "But we’re also trying to figure out a location because people are not happy with the location – and we need to build two (state facilities)."
Lawmakers agreed to replace the Lincoln Hills prison with a group of county-run facilities and two state-run facilities for more serious offenders — one in Milwaukee and one in the town of Hortonia, in Outagamie County.
Neighboring property owners and town leaders told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin in a story Thursday that the state never consulted them before deciding to place the facility in Hortonia.
"I don’t know if we can fight it or not but we gotta put up a little fight," said Nancy Willenkamp, a beef farmer and Hortonville Area School District bus driver who has lived in the town of 1,100 her entire life — 73 years.
Willenkamp, a town supervisor, said she learned about the prison coming to the area through a radio broadcast. She's most concerned about prison visitors committing crime in a town with just one constable.
"All the constable does is get called once in a while for a stray cat or dog," she said. "There's no crime or nothing here — so we're all worried."
Neither community selected for the new state-run facilities is happy about the idea of having a prison nearby, but in Hortonia the opposition includes prominent Republican lawmakers who have great influence in the Legislature including the Senate President Roger Roth and Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke.
"We would advocate that the Administration justify their determination of the location of this facility," Roth, Steineke and five other lawmakers wrote to the Legislature's finance committee leaders in April asking them to delay approving funding to build the new state-run youth prisons.
The committee agreed and on Tuesday voted to wipe out millions in funding proposed by Evers for the Hortonia and Milwaukee facilities and instead made it available to county governments to start work on their facilities.
Wanggaard said lawmakers likely wouldn't know until September how much bonding authority to seek from taxpayers.
Wanggaard and other authors of the original bill to close the prison, including Reps. Evan Goyke and Michael Schraa, are seeking legislation to move the January 2021 closure date to July of that year.
And Evers has said it might be impossible to meet any deadline in 2021.
"We know what we need to do. We know there's a need there. There wasn't any debate or confusion — we just gotta act and do it. And we got to act and do it without delay," Goyke said before the finance committee approved removing funding for the state facilities in the next state budget.
But juvenile corrections experts say the original bill was rushed and didn't provide a realistic timeline or amount of money to avoid replicating the problems at the Lincoln Hills prison elsewhere -- concerns aired when the law was moving through the Legislature.
"It was absolutely rushed from the beginning, so we're buying more time to make sure the right things happen for young people," Sharlen Moore, director of Youth Justice Milwaukee, said. "We don't want to create one traumatic place for young people and just transplant it to another traumatic place."
Kenneth Streit, a University of Wisconsin Law School professor who specializes in juvenile justice policies and has represented juvenile offenders, said the bill passed in 2018 "budgeted an unrealistically low number -- but one that both parties could live with."
"Closing a correctional facility needs bi-partisanship. The crisis at Irma provided the critical moment that otherwise would never have come," Streit said. "I think (Walker) didn't want anything to do with it and wanted it to be 'done' so as to take it away as an election issue."
Streit said putting a 2021 deadline into the bill "kept it as a crisis act" and created momentum in the Legislature to avoid more involvement from federal officials in the state's juvenile correctional system.
"If the deadline had gone later, many would have said was that really urgent and that instead of taking the risk of developing new facilities, they should just invest in a more thorough overhaul of Irma," he said.
Predicting how many offenders to prepare for also complicates lawmakers' work. Streit said the average number of inmates at the Lincoln Hills prison was artificially low when lawmakers created the replacement plan.
"The terrible problems there had led many judges to do everything possible not to send a kid there because it was so dangerous and nasty," Streit said. "If smaller, more locally accessible facilities with diverse and effective staffing was available, there's every reason to believe that the cumulative average daily secure population would double or triple."
You can find out who your legislators are and how to contact them here.
Contact Molly Beck at molly.beck@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @MollyBeck.