News & Commentary

Jail staff are given the exact date of the inspector’s arrival. That’s a practice that doesn’t sit well with an ACLU Wisconsin legal director Larry Dupuis, who told the newspaper many county jails are mismanaged. He said the pre-scheduled inspections allow jails to conceal things that “might otherwise raise concerns” in order to get a clean bill of health from the state. Although the announced inspections are a concern to the ACLU, state lawmakers who chair legislative committees with DOC oversight have nothing to say on the topic.

Chris Ahmuty, executive director of American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, said the proposal is problematic. “Good law enforcement doesn’t have to violate the rights of suspects in order to be effective. Don’t we lose something in terms of privacy and personal autonomy and what we expect to be reasonable police procedures?” Ahmuty said.

Other nonprofit organizations are helping to bolster the humanities for MPS students. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) received a grant of $10,000, down from $30,000 last year. Still, the non-partisan civil-rights organization hopes to serve about the same number of students as last year’s 2,700.

Young people are held in solitary confinement in jails and prisons in across the United States, often for weeks or months at a time, the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

One of the first people to speak at the public hearing was Chris Ahmuty, executive director of the ACLU of Wisconsin. He raised an issue that’s been all over the news lately – integrity within the Milwaukee police department. Ahmuty said the proposed city budget wisely allocates $850,000 to improve the police data collection system. Questions have been raised about the accuracy of the department’s crime reporting, and Tuesday, four officers were charged in an investigation of illegal strip searches.

When people are arrested and taken to jail, they don’t expect it to be easy. But a stay at the jail shouldn’t include being denied basic treatment for physical or mental health problems. This is why the ACLU of Wisconsin Foundation and Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee have been working through the courts on behalf of all prisoners in the Milwaukee County Jail and County Correctional Facility-South.

Today, the Milwaukee County district attorney’s office charged four Milwaukee police officers with crimes for conducting illegal body cavity and strip searches.  Allegations against officers in police District 5 caused the Milwaukee Police Department to reassign at least seven officers and a supervisor in March 2012. The American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin filed a public records request with the department on March 28, 2012 in an attempt to assess whether the department is following its own strip search and body cavity search procedures. The department has been largely unresponsive to the ACLU of Wisconsin’s repeated requests.

Last month, the Madison City Council voted to ban anyone from asking for donations of money or goods in large parts of the city, including all of the Central Business District. Although an ordinance barring “aggressive panhandling” has been on the books for some time, city officials claimed that stopping panhandlers – and many others – from asking for money is needed to create a more “pleasant” experience for Madison residents and visitors.

Wisconsin and Minnesota are very similar states with very different approaches to marijuana possession. The two states have roughly the same number of people and similar demographics, but Wisconsin arrests twice as many people for marijuana possession. Which makes for an interesting question: what might happen if Wisconsin cut its marijuana possession arrests in half?