State representatives concerned about reducing government spending should take a hard look at Wisconsin’s prison system. The size of our criminal legal system has grown exponentially thanks to decades of gross fiscal irresponsibility, and it’s time that we, as taxpayers, do something about it.

Year after year, Wisconsin pours billions of dollars into the criminal justice system, siphoning public funding away from essential community services in an effort to extend the failed project of mass incarceration. Between 1985 and 2017, spending on corrections in the state rose by an unparalleled 302%, and it continues to rise. Even as budgets for public services like education and healthcare face increasing financial pressure, funds for jails and prisons continue rolling in, using a seemingly endless supply of tax dollars regardless of their lack of success.

Our corrections system, which has proven for decades to be an abject failure, continues to benefit from strong financial support that it simply hasn’t earned. There is now even bipartisan agreement on the need for change, but instead of enacting policies that would bring about that change, our lawmakers continue to throw more and more money at incarceration. Each dollar we spend imprisoning someone for drug possession or violating parole, for instance, is a dollar we can’t spend on legitimate public safety priorities or getting people the treatment and support they need to get back on their feet. 

With the 2021-22 state budget process already in the works, now is a great time to start rethinking how we pay for our prisons. 

The most obvious way to reign in reckless corrections spending is to make the system smaller. The ACLU has long supported closing select state prisons. As part of our state budget advocacy campaign, we are asking Gov. Evers and the state legislature to close Green Bay Correctional Facility, which has been at the center of some Republican-led reform efforts due to its outdated and dilapidated conditions. Closing Green Bay Correctional would save the state an estimated 38.8 million per year. 

The state should also consider reallocating funding that typically goes toward incarceration into other more effective, cost-friendly solutions, including substance abuse treatment. In 2018, 20% of all Wisconsin prison admissions were due to drug offenses, a 13-fold increase over the past two decades. The Treatment Alternative and Divestment Program offers an opportunity for people to get help to overcome substance abuse disorders. Keeping people with drug offenses out of prisons would promote healing, lessen prison overcrowding, and cut incarceration-related expenses.

Reforming community supervision practices, such as crimeless revocation, would reap huge rewards for Wisconsin. Each year, thousands of people are thrown back into prison for technical probation and parole violations, like missing an appointment or taking a job without prior approval from the state. Wisconsin’s harmful practice of crimeless revocation is perpetuating a vicious cycle of mass incarceration that destroys lives, destabilizes communities, wastes taxpayer money, and fails to make us safer. 

The bottom line is that prisons are a terrible investment that will never pay off, and we need to spend our hard-earned taxpayer dollars on services that will build communities, not tear them apart. We can and must do something different, and the ongoing state budget discussions present a perfect opportunity to do so. We can build a system that keeps us safer and saves us money in the process.

By: Tomás Clasen, Community Engagement Manager

After decades of bipartisan fearmongering and draconian crackdowns on marijuana use, the United States has finally begun to reckon with the damage that criminalizing cannabis has done. To date, 15 states have legalized recreational marijuana use, aiming to undo the broken law and order policies that gave rise to the War on Drugs. 

Wisconsin, one of the few places where even medicinal marijuana remains illegal, now has an opportunity to join the growing legalization movement. Gov. Tony Evers announced a plan to legalize marijuana in his biennial budget proposal. The legislation would stop the vicious and costly cycle of arresting and incarcerating people for simple possession of marijuana and generate upwards of $150 million dollars in tax revenue -- money that would then be reinvested back into underserved areas, particularly communities of color most impacted by the disparate enforcement of marijuana laws and rural communities. It would also reduce or repeal sentences of people with marijuana possession convictions whose convictions would be legal under the new legislation.  

While a great deal of work is left to be done, cannabis legalization in Wisconsin would deal a major blow to the state’s mass incarceration crisis, as well as serve as a concrete step in addressing the pervasive racial inequality that continues to plague our criminal legal system. A 2020 ACLU report looking at national arrest rates for marijuana possession found that Black people are 4.2 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession in Wisconsin, despite comparable usage rates. Wisconsin ranked 14th in the nation for the largest racial disparities in arrests for marijuana possession and was among 17 states where arrests for marijuana possession increased from 2010 to 2018. 

Despite increasing levels of acceptance here and across the country, the state recorded more than 20,000 marijuana-related arrests in 2018 alone, the vast majority of which were for possession. That means thousands of Wisconsin residents, disproportionately Black and brown people, are being pushed into the criminal legal system and thrown into prison, their lives upended over a drug that is widely-used and rarely policed in white, wealthy neighborhoods.

This data confirms what we see each and every day in our communities: Black people being disproportionately harassed, arrested, and imprisoned because of racially-biased policing and enforcement. The War on Drugs was never about preventing drug use or making us safer. It was designed as a mechanism to control Black people, an intentional system of racial oppression that lives on to our present day.

Whatever comes of Evers’ bill, one thing is clear: what we’re doing right now isn’t working. Exceedingly harsh drug enforcement has caused immense suffering in our country’s most vulnerable and disadvantaged communities, fueling a mass incarceration epidemic that relentlessly preys upon Black, brown, and low-income neighborhoods. The people of Wisconsin already recognize that the tough-on-crime approach to marijuana has failed, and nearly 60% of Wisconsinites now support legalization. 

The profits made from the taxation of marijuana would also provide a significant and desperately-needed boost to an economy decimated by the pandemic, one that could offer a lifeline to the thousands of Wisconsinites who have lost their jobs or are otherwise struggling to make ends meet. At a time in which jails and prisons have become COVID-19 hotspots, and when the economy is in freefall, making weed legally available has never made so much sense.

Legalizing marijuana won’t solve systemic racism or end the War on Drugs, but it seems like the most logical place to start.  By passing full legalization, commuting existing criminal sentences for possession, and investing in neighborhoods hardest hit by drug enforcement, Wisconsin can take a meaningful step down the road to repair.