By Kimberly Wethal
The Wisconsin State Journal
WAUSAU, Wis. — The state’s two youth prisons, Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake correctional schools, are in compliance with more than four dozen court-ordered reforms after allegations of child abuse surfaced nearly a decade ago, Gov. Tony Evers announced Thursday.
Bringing the two juvenile prisons into compliance is a “major milestone” for the state in its plans to remove youth offenders from those facilities 30 miles north of Wausau and turning them into adult facilities, Evers said in a statement.
The latest report found no youth inmates were confined to their rooms for more than three days; all who were placed in confinement had access to a mental health assessment; and youth were getting sufficient time outside of their cells.
“This is the culmination of years’ worth of hard work, a consistent commitment to treatment and rehabilitation, and earnest dedication to repairing relationships and rebuilding trust,” Evers said in the statement, adding that moving juveniles out of the facilities “must be a bipartisan priority if we are going to be successful.”
A new youth corrections facility is expected to open in Milwaukee late next year, and another facility is under design for Dane County at the Oregon Correctional Campus in Fitchburg. More small, regional facilities around the state will need to be built in order to fully vacate the Wausau -area facilities and house them closer to family.
In 2015, an investigation was launched into the facilities after reports of child abuse by correctional officers. Among other things, officers were alleged to have repeatedly and needlessly pepper-sprayed inmates, sometimes with sprays meant to stop bears, and put up to 20% of the prison’s population in solitary confinement.
Those allegations resulted in multiple lawsuits, a federal investigation and millions of taxpayer dollars spent to settle the suits and close the prisons, which hasn’t happened yet despite being mandated in 2021.
As a result of the reports, the state Department of Corrections was required by a court order to make dozens of improvements to the troubled facilities, including eliminating the use of pepper spray, reducing the use of solitary confinement and excessive force by staff and creating more programming for youth housed there.
A court-appointed monitor now visits the prisons and interviews inmates quarterly to track compliance. The DOC needs to maintain those standards for multiple monitoring visits to no longer require court monitoring and supervision, Evers said in the statement.
The youth prisons lost some ground on compliance last year after a guard died when an inmate shoved him and he hit his head on the ground.
In Evers’ latest capital budget request, he called for multiple aging state prisons to close and turning the youth facilities in facilities to house adults. Evers’ budget had called for $500 million to demolish the Green Bay Correctional Institution , a maximum-security prison built in the 1890s, and to transform the Waupun prison into a medium-security prison focused on community re-entry programs.
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