Hopefully the enormous costs will dissuade legislators from passing a bill that would require the Wisconsin Department of Corrections to automatically recommend revocation of anyone “charged with a crime.” The bill literally says “charged with a crime.” Not a felony, not a violent crime, “a crime.” Although ordinances that are
Read moreClock restarting and Wisconsin’s Revocation Problem
A quirk in Wisconsin’s Truth in Sentencing law increases the “churning” in and out of prison via revocation and creates the possibility for massive injustice & increases costs.[i] A Wisconsin sentence has a total length that is divided into two parts, imprisonment and extended supervision in the community. If a
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Offense, Admission Types, In Prison Vs. Admitted
I’ve written several posts trying to clarify the reasons you will get a different mix of offenders in a snapshot of who is in prison versus the flow of prison admissions. This also comes up as we compare the combination of offense type and admission type. To illustrate this,
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Wisconsin Imprisonment Trends By Offense
A reporter’s inquiry led me to look into the changing mix of offenses among people in Wisconsin’s prisons 2000-2014. This is a short version of a longer report about what what I found. A report in the Wisconsin Taxpayer Magazine provides a substantial amount of analysis, including summaries of important policies
Read moreVictim or villain? Racial/ethnic differences in the portrayal of individuals with mental illness killed by police
News reports about individuals killed by police have dominated the news cycle in the past few years. But how are individuals killed by police portrayed in the media? Are there racial/ethnic differences in media portrayals? If there are differences, what are the implications for public perceptions of these killings? In
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Crimeless Revocations, part 3: Racial Patterns
Key findings: Of those leaving Wisconsin prisons for the first time, Native American Indians have about a 30% higher rate of crimeless revocations than Whites, and Blacks about 20% higher (comparable to disparity ratios of 1.3 and 1.2) while Hispanic and Asian revocation rates are lower than White. For second and
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Crimeless Revocations, part 2
Key findings In Wisconsin, an estimated 35% of first spells in prison and 50-75% of second or later spells are crimeless revocations, depending on the criteria used for “crimeless”. A careful comparison of prison records suggests that roughly a third of prison admissions with no new sentence may have anticipated
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Sitting in prison versus going through prison: interpreting prison statistics
There is a lot of confusion in understanding imprisonment data created by the failure to understand the difference between the characteristics of people sitting in prison at any one time (what are technically called the “stock”) and the characteristics of the people who have gone though prison (the flow). This
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How long do people stay in prison in Wisconsin?
It is important to understand how long people stay in prison as part of understanding revocations. The graph below shows how long people stay in prison across all admission types. The vertical axis shows the cumulative percentage who have exited after the number of months on the horizontal axis. So,
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Sent Back: Crimeless Revocations part 1
There’s a new campaign you can read about at sentback.org to stop sending people to prison on crimeless revocations. The campaign is sponsored by Restoring Our Communities (ROC) Wisconsin, WISDOM and EXPO (Ex-Prisoners Organizing). According to a report by Health Impact Partners (short web summary or PDF full report), about 1/3 of the
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