By David Gordon, associate editor
Wisconsin’s overburdened parole and probation systems send a needlessly high number of people back to prison, often only for technical violations, and this costs state taxpayers millions of dollars each year, according to a report released on Tuesday.
The report, by the Justice Lab at Columbia University, was discussed Wednesday afternoon at a meeting hosted by JONAH, a local faith-based organization with a focus on social justice issues.
David Liners, state director of WISDOM (the umbrella organization to which JONAH belongs) noted in a press release that people on parole and probation lack the right to vote and such other basic rights as the one entitling them to due process before being punished.
“Our report contains troubling findings that Wisconsin is wasting money and wasting lives by supervising and violating thousands of people not for new crimes, but for technical violations of supervision,” said Vincent Schiraldi, one of three authors of the Justice Lab report.
“Wisconsin should now follow the example of dozens of states and focus community supervision resources on those most in need of it, stop returning people to prison for ‘ticky-tack’ rule violations, and use the savings from such reforms to fund programs and opportunities that help people turn their lives around,” he added.
Schiraldi is an adjunct professor at Columbia’s School of Social Work, co-director of the Justice Lab and a former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Probation.
National probation/parole population about doubles prison population
The executive summary of the Justice Lab report says that, nationally, supervised populations – those on probation and parole – “skyrocketed from the late 20th century to their peak in 2007, at which time over 4.3 million people were on probation and another 800,000 were on parole.” Even with declines since then, “the total supervised population is still about twice as large as the incarcerated population” nationally, it added.
“The conditions of supervision are often numerous, onerous, confusing, and void of public safety justification,” the summary noted. This “lowers the threshold for failure,” it said, making it easier to send people back to prison “for supervision violations that do not involve criminal behavior.”
The summary said that “Wisconsin offers a unique lens through which to research and examine this issue,” in part because its parole population is 1.5 times larger than the national average and – contrary to national trends – is continuing to climb. In addition, the state’s high rate of revoking parole or probationary status and the large racial disparities n both population and revocations set it apart from many other states.
Moreover, the time spent on parole in Wisconsin averages 38 months compared to a national average of 22 months. Only Alabama (48 months) ad Oklahoma (40 months) have average parole stays longer than Wisconsin.
“The report shows that this extraordinary level of community supervision is a deprivation of liberty in its own right and a significant contributor to incarceration in Wisconsin,” according to the executive summary.
Wisconsin situation stems from ‘truth in sentencing’ and parole-expansion laws
It said that much of the Wisconsin situation “is a consequence of truth in sentencing and parole-expansion laws that were passed in Wisconsin in the late 1990s. Together, these laws mandated that people serve the entirety of incarceration sentences, followed by post-release supervision (referred to as parole) sentences that are at least 25% as long as the incarceration sentence.”
These requirements have led to “steep increases in prison and parole populations,” the report said.
“As of 2017, nearly half of the adult prison population in Wisconsin was comprised of people who were on community supervision. Over one-fifth of the adult prison population were incarcerated for a supervision violation without a new conviction,” it added.
In 2017, 36% of the state’s prison admissions were people sent back to prison for technical violations of their parole or probation, rather than for any new conviction, according to the report.
Other key findings
Other key findings from the report (“The Wisconsin Community Corrections Story”) include:
- One in eight Black men in the Wisconsin population is under community supervision.
- One in 11 Native American men is under community supervision in Wisconsin, four times the rate of white men in the state.
- Black women are supervised at three times the rate of white women, and Native American women are supervised at six times the rate of white women.
- Wisconsin imprisons Black people at 11.5 times the rate it incarcerates white people. Wisconsin has the fifth worst ratio in the country of racial disparities in incarceration.
- People reincarcerated in Wisconsin for technical violations of parole or probation, rather than for a new offense, will spend an average of 1.5 years in prison, costing taxpayers $147.5 million.
The other two authors of the report, in addition to Schiraldi, are Jarred Williams, director of research at the Katal Center for Health, Equity and Justice, a Soros Justice Fellow at Open Society Foundations and a formerly incarcerated researcher; and Kendra Bradner, a senior staff associate with the Justice Lab.
The Lab’s website says that it works for “community-centered justice, in which incarceration is no longer used as a solution to probleems that are often rooted in poverty and racial inequality.” Founded in 2017, the Lab combines original research with the development of policies and community engagement, toward a goal of changing the justice system.
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