Pamela Oliver
Columnist Daniel Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel broke the news last week that Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Patience Roggensack has been sitting on a year-old study that showed a clear pattern of racial disparity in Wisconsin prison sentences. Specifically, the study shows substantial racial differences in the likelihood
Read moreThere is a great deal of discussion about the best ways to reduce mass incarceration. One topic that has received significant attention is the need to revisit parole for people who have been incarcerated for a long time. Some argue on moral grounds, that there should always be hope, and
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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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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
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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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Dane County has the highest Black/White rate of prison admissions among Wisconsin counties with large Black populations, but it does NOT have the highest Black prison admission rate. That dubious honor goes to Kenosha County. Milwaukee County has high racial disparities in prison admissions and has over 70% of the
Read moreDid Bill Clinton’s policies cause the mass incarceration of Black people? Since I’ve done a lot of analysis of incarceration trends in the 1990s, I thought I’d bring some facts into this discussion. Short version: The steep increase in the mass incarceration of Black people happened before Bill Clinton took
Read moreAdministrative segregation–solitary confinement–in Wisconsin prisons and the Dane County jail are issues today. Extended periods of solitary confinement (defined as 15 days or more) is considered torture by many human rights conventions, as is any time in solitary confinement for a mentally ill person. US prisons and jails routine use
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