Following the death of a guard at Wisconsin’s Lincoln Hills juvenile detention facility, state Sen. LaTonya Johnson, D-Milwaukee, who is a member of the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee, spelled out delays in closing the prison. On the occasion of Labor Day, economist Laura Dresser described findings from the annual “State of Working Wisconsin” report published by a UW-Madison think tank.
 

State Sen. LaTonya Johnson
D-Milwaukee

• Staff at Lincoln Hills & Copper Lake Schools, Wisconsin’s youth prison, have told lawmakers and a court-ordered monitor they feel they are in danger following the beating death of a counselor at the facility in June. Two juveniles have been charged in connection with the crime. While the monitor reported the juvenile detention center is substantially in compliance with safety measures meant to protect incarcerated youth and a federal judge has declined to take action in the absence of a formal motion, trouble continues to roil the facility. Johnson discussed the delay is in closing Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake and building new facilities, which has been in legislative limbo for years.
• Johnson: “What’s taking an exceptionally long time is the fact that the Joint Finance Committee refuses to release all of the funds that are needed to build these facilities in order to close Lincoln Hills. For example, they made their first request in 2019 in October. December, November — no response. Then it was finally denied in February 2020. And that was for about $73 million to create two Type 1 facilities in order for Lincoln Hills to close. …The Department of Corrections, they know their job, and they know what money is needed. And the longer it takes for us to process, the more inflationary costs we get. For example, the request that was originally made for the facility in Milwaukee was at $45 million, and that was in 2020. That cost is now costing us $76 million in 2024. So not only is it costing us time, it’s costing us money. And I would think it’s fair to say that it has now cost a life.”

Laura Dresser
Associate director, High Road Strategy Center at UW-Madison

• Each year around Labor Day, the UW-Madison-based High Road Strategy Center, an applied research and advisory think tank releases its “State of Working Wisconsin” report highlighting employment and wage trends. Dresser said the 2024 edition of the report shows good news for workers in the state.
• Dresser: “What we find this year is a continuation from the recovery from the pandemic shutdowns. We know we’ve been seeing high job production. That’s still true – 25,000 new jobs across the last year in the state of Wisconsin – highest ever number of jobs. We have low unemployment rates, and we had a strong wage increase at the median last year.”

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