Temperatures inside the MSDF in Downtown Milwaukee can often reach up to 100 degrees in the summer.
Thousands of people return from prison to Milwaukee every year. Many successfully rebuild their lives despite difficult hurdles. Imagine finding a job with a blank resume and a criminal record, rebuilding or replacing damaged relationships, adapting to social norms and technologies that have changed dramatically after years in isolation. The success stories of people re-entering society after prison can be very inspiring. This isn’t one of those stories.
This is the story of someone who maxed out his prison sentence on June 8 and was released from years in solitary confinement in a restrictive housing unit (RHU) at a Wisconsin prison. He doesn’t want his name shared, so I’ll refer to him as John. John had no family, home or money, just an extended supervision sentence that put him under the control of a Division of Community Corrections (DCC) agent. Five weeks later, without committing any crime, this agent re-incarcerated John.
Every inspiring story of someone jumping hurdles to regain their footing after prison is matched by more who get pulled back in on crimeless revocations by DCC agents. Prison officials and tough-on-crime politicians blame the captives; they paint “recidivists” as incorrigible “habitual offenders” and threats to public safety, a justification for mass incarceration. In reality, John, like many others cycling in and out of prison, was sent back for his mental health disorder, a problem prison only makes worse.
John had suffered terribly in the RHU. He harmed himself and attempted suicide repeatedly, coming out of prison on medication for bipolar disorder and iron pills for low red blood cell count. Before release, he’d requested help, especially mental health treatment, but he got none. His agent claims he wouldn’t work with her on a release plan, so she landed him in a house funded by the Department of Corrections (DOC) at a city where he knew no one. John calls the house a temporary lock up (TLP). There, he lived in fear of going back to prison, and his agent stoked those fears. One morning, she had him walk across town with an hour’s notice for an emergency meeting with her about a charge that prosecutors dismissed long ago. She hassled him for smoking cigarettes and keeping a messy room. After years in solitary, John felt uncomfortable leaving his room and preferred storing clothes on his bed. Fortunately, he had an advocate. Peg Swan, the founder of Forum for Understanding Prisons (FFUP) helped him navigate through these conflicts. Then, on July 15, his agent put him in a catch-22.
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Overcrowding the County Jail
That day, after weeks without any counseling, John’s agent signed him up for a treatment program. Trouble is, she scheduled it after the house’s curfew. I asked the agent’s supervisor about the curfew and he said John’s movement was supervised by an electronic ankle monitor and the house wasn’t a TLP, just a house the DCC rents from a private landlord. No one from the DCC would allow me to speak with people who worked there, but John describes extensive exchanges between himself, his agent and staff at the house, who told him that he “didn’t have the hours” to leave for therapy. They said, if he broke curfew, they’d arrest him. The next day, his agent arrested him instead. Failing to attend was a violation of John’ supervision rules.
Sudden arrests are common with DCC agents, they’re the first step toward reincarceration. In Milwaukee alone, DCC-caused incarcerations overflowed the county jail so frequently that Wisconsin built the Milwaukee Secure Detention Facility (MSDF) in 2001 to accommodate them. Then, they started overflowing MSDF.
Reasonable excuses, like a death in the family or being in the hospital for emergency treatment, are ignored. DCC agents will also reframe miscommunication as lying to justify revocation and send people back to prison for months or years. Those who manage to evade revocation are still put on “investigation hold” for up to 15 days. All it takes is two or three to cost a person their job. If a hold comes when rent is due, people might lose their housing. If they’re parked in a short-term space, their car may be towed and impounded. Investigation holds have even cost people custody of their children.
For John, the arrest cost his recovery. In the County Jail, he suffered a relapse back to traumatic years in the RHU. He dismantled his ankle monitor and used metal pieces from it to cut himself severely. Jail staff responded by putting him in a restraint chair then sending him to a mental health institute, one that failed three inspections last year. There, a social worker talked to him, then sent him back to the jail where he had another breakdown, this time blocking his cell window with toilet paper, arguing with staff and re-opening his wounds. They put John back in the restraint chair for at least 20 hours, forcing him to urinate and defecate on himself.
John’s agent was on vacation during much of this ordeal, but she later told me the arrest and incarceration were just an investigation hold, it was John’s conduct in jail that justified revocation. She didn’t explain why John needed to be incarcerated while she investigated her own scheduling error.
Verbal Violations?
Now, John is at Wisconsin’s intake facility, awaiting a revocation hearing. His papers cite eight rules violations, including missing the meeting, breaking rules at the “DOC-funded home,” refusing to take medication (he insists it was not prescribed to him), tampering with his ankle monitor (as though he was trying to abscond while locked in a cell) and breaking the jail’s rules. The revocation also claims he threatened his agent, jailers and “admitted to jail staff that he had threatened to burn down a DOC-funded home.” John denies threatening anyone and says these violations must derive from conversations he had with social workers.
In those conversations, John was encouraged to talk about his feelings by someone in a presumably confidential therapeutic role. He says he discussed feeling bullied and having “violent… sensations that made me so mad and uncomfortable that I began to cut and feel suicidal.” He also spoke about staying “up for four days straight losing my mind and voices that were telling me to burn down the TLP because housemates were trying to kill me.” He resisted acting on these feelings and thought talking about them with social workers was a healthy choice, part of transforming destructive thoughts into productive actions. Instead, his feelings were twisted into threats, which is a violation of Supreme Court precedent.
If John is revoked, he’ll only cycle through more prison trauma, then be released to try again.
