By David Gordon, associate editor
Reform of Wisconsin’s criminal justice system should be a top priority for the state and citizens should organize and bring pressure to accomplish this goal, according to participants in a Monday night panel discussion sponsored by JONAH’s Criminal Justice Reform Team (CJRT) and EXPO (Ex-Prisoners Organizing).
That reform could start with the parole system, which currently denies the possibility of early release to many prisoners who would be eligible in other states, or under the former rules in Wisconsin. A handout provided by the CJRT noted that Minnesota, with a crime rate and demographics similar to Wisconsin, has half the number of people in prisons.
More money is spent annually on the prison system than on the entire University of Wisconsin higher education system, according to the handout.
Some 50 people attended the discussion, at the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library. Nearly double that number were in the audience for the screening of the new documentary, “Milwaukee 53206: a Community Serves Time,” which preceded the panel. The hour-long documentary explores social issues in that Milwaukee zip code area that have helped to produce the highest incarceration rate of any zip code in the United States.
JONAH (Joining Our Neighbors, Advancing Hope) is a Chippewa Valley grassroots organization made up of diverse faith communities and their allies and concerned with social justice issues. Its goal is make structural changes in the social system in an effort to prevent injustice and poverty. EXPO assists formerly incarcerated people returning to the larger society, and advocates on their behalf.
“We must get involved and be adamant that our nation cannot any longer lead the world in incarceration,” said Jerome Dillard, a statewide organizer for EXPO, who noted that 25% of the world’s prison population is in the United States.
“We’re better than that,” he said.
He noted that he has spent time in both state and federal prisons, but stressed that this “is not the sum total of who I am.”
Dillard, like several other panelists, noted that many more African-Americans than whites are imprisoned, relative to their percentage of Wisconsin’s population. But he stressed that the prison population includes many whites, as well.
“It’s not just a black thing, it’s a human rights issue, in my opinion,” he said.
William Harrell, a minister who grew up in the 53206 zip code, called himself “a living example that there is life after prison.” He said “the real concern is trying to close” some of the state’s 37 prisons and added that “there’s not that much crime in Wisconsin.”
He noted that it costs the state between $35,000 and $40,000 a year for each person kept in prison, and added that part of the prison population is people who violate rules – some of them relatively minor – while on parole.
“There is too much emphasis on incarceration and not enough emphasis on rehabilitation,” Harrell said.
One result of this, he added, is the creation of a “prison industrial complex” that has a vested interest in maintaining the prison system.
Dillard said that criminal justice reform will require organized political efforts like those put forth by the LGBTQ community and organizations like Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
“We need you. JONAH needs you. EXPO needs your support,” he said, to “change the criminal justice system not only in our state, but in our nation.”
Sarah Ferber, JONAH’s coordinator for the local EXPO group, said that people coming out of prison need to become part of a new community that will welcome and support them, or else they will seek out their old community where they got into trouble originally. At the same time, they need support from peers. Having both types of support available can reduce the recidivism rate, she said.
Ferber, who noted that she was in prison two years ago, said that EXPO “gave me the opportunity to show the community that people can change.”
Mark Rice, also a statewide organizer for EXPO, said that if the costs of incarceration could be reduced, the savings could be reinvested in low income communities to provide jobs, health care and educational opportunities.
Susan Wolfgram, a local mental health professional and a CJRT member, said that part of the problem stems from the state government’s “benign neglect” of communities like the 53206 zip code area, which was a diverse and stable community until jobs began to disappear in the 1980s.
“This is not ‘us” versus ‘them,’” she said. “We are ‘them.’”
She also urged the audience to get rid of “dehumanizing labels” in discussing the criminal justice system, and suggested the use of terms like “incarcerated people” rather than “felons” or “prisoners.”
“Each person is more than the worst thing they’ve ever done,” she said.
Note: for a first-person perspective on the unrest and related issues in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood, click here. The perspective was written by Susan Wolfgram, who spent considerable time visiting her grandmother in Sherman Park while growing up in Wauwatosa.