Temperatures inside the MSDF in Downtown Milwaukee can often reach up to 100 degrees in the summer.
On a chilly evening last November, Downtown Milwaukee was host to a small but defiant protest. This demonstration went unnoticed by almost all residents, even though the protesters were tear-gassed, restrained, deprived of most of their property and locked in a solitary confinement cell for three months. There were no trials, indictments, criminal charges or legal representation. No media covered the event, and very few people even knew it had happened at all. How can this be?
This protest has been nearly invisible until now because it occurred on the seventh floor of the Milwaukee Secure Detention Facility (MSDF). It was built in 2001 to accommodate the Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC) practice of incarcerating people for community supervision holds, sanctions and “alternative to incarceration” treatment. Its cells were originally designed to hold one person 20 or more hours a day, but community corrections officers have consistenly increased the number of people sent there and the length of holds and sanctions. For the last few years, therefore, MSDF’s cells often hold three people in a space not much larger than a walk-in closet.
Last August, MSDF began operating on “modified lockdown” status over the weekends and around holidays, citing staff shortages. This means those two or three people per cell began spending weekends held together for some 23 hours at a time (their single hour out of their tiny cell spent in a windowless, multi-purpose dayroom). Modified lockdown allows a single correctional officer (CO) to monitor each pod, while a sergeant—often called a “white shirt”—roves from pod to pod, providing back-up for the one hour people are let out of their cells.
On the evening of Sunday, Nov. 25, the white shirts were running behind, and by the time they got to 7a, they were 15 minutes late. When finally released, the captives likely hustled to the dayroom to use the phones or showers or just to get a little time away from the people they’d been holed up with all weekend. Only 45 minutes later, they were ordered back to their cells. Even though dayroom started late, staff was determined to make it end on time, shorting people a full quarter of their scant time out of their cells. But that November evening, at least two prisoners had other ideas. The CLOSEmsdf campaign received a letter from one of these prisoners (who we refer to as Sam), who told them what transpired.
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Mistreated, Lied To, Brushed Off
“We are tired of being mistreated, lied to,” Sam says he explained to Shift Captain Morris. “We are tired of the DOC taking the little we have and never giving it back. We are tired of being treated as less than human.” One other prisoner and he refused to comply with the order to return to their cells. Then they used sheets to tie the doors shut and exercise equipment to barricade it.
“We are tired of [being] brushed off every time we address the warden, unit manager or social worker, as well as captains, sergeants or other correctional officers,” Sam explains in his letter. “They always pass the buck down the line to the next person until you just give up trying to get an answer.”
Captain Morris was the main officer responding to the protest, and rather than summoning the warden or addressing Sam’s issues, he filled the room with pepper spray and convinced the men to surrender. The entire incident took less than half an hour, but the whole facility was put on lockdown in response, and word spread—eventually reaching CLOSEmsdf organizers—who called officials to learn what had happened.
It took months of open records requests and letter writing to get in touch with Sam. During those months, modified lockdown continued and led to additional severe consequences. On Sunday, March 17, it proved fatal. That was the day Bill Leary died. According to his cellmate, he’d been complaining of stomach pains for days. The pain was severe enough that even the cellmate wrote a letter out to family, seeking help on Leary’s behalf. On that Sunday, he had to half-carry Leary back to his bunk from the dayroom because he was so ill.
He says a nurse finally came but moved on after a brief check-up. Fifteen minutes later, while his cellmate pounded on the door and shouted for help, Bill succumbed to internal bleeding. Medical examiners found a note he’d attached to his clothes, it read:
Tell Chad [Leary’s probation agent] that I’m bleeding inside really badly and that HSU [Health Services Unit] is doing nothing for me. They won’t even see me, and I was already in the hospital for four days for this [expletive], and when I stand up I get dissy [sic].
MSDF is not the only facility the DOC operates on modified lockdown status. Anti-prison organizers report getting letters from Taycheedah, Oshkosh, Columbia, Green Bay and other state correctional facilities complaining that the facilities are on modified lockdown at least part time. Rules changes and increased cell time are destabilizing and traumatic for people incarcerated in these facilities, and it has been met with some resistance. One prisoner at Columbia Correctional Institution, recently released after 17 months in solitary confinement, wrote a letter to Forum for Understanding Prisons (FFUP)—a prison research and prisoner advocacy non-profit organization—that under modified lockdown, “general population is similar to segregation, because we’re locked in our cells a majority of the time.”
The DOC also requires staff to work mandatory overtime, often without notice. According to Sam’s letter, “Officers aren’t showing up for work because they are overworked, and MSDF is understaffed. Officers are working double shifts.” Last year, the DOC spent $50 million on overtime, and some COs worked up to 95 hours a week.
The government’s response to this staffing crisis has been to try to hire more correctional officers. In an interview with Wisconsin Eye on Monday, March 4, DOC Secretary Kevin Carr said that one in 10 jobs at the DOC are vacant and pay raises are needed to attract more guards. Gov. Tony Evers complied with his wishes, writing raises for COs into his proposed state budget. However, an open records request filed by FFUP August 2018 calls this response into question. According to the data the DOC released, the number of guards (both in total and per prisoner) has actually increased over the last five years. Meanwhile, non-correctional staff (psychologists, social workers, administrators… the people who might handle complaints or resolve issues) declined by nearly one half during the same period.
Sam’s letter reflects the lack of responsive staff. “We locked down the recreation room only to get the attention of the warden as well as the other staff to look into the matters that I tried many times to address through request forms as well as ICE [Inmate Complaint Examiner].” Hiring more COs is unlikely to prevent deaths like Bill Leary’s. Guards do not administer medical care or respond to health crises; their role in the prison is to turn keys and issue conduct reports, and that’s what happened to all the incarcerated people mentioned in this story.
Sam and his protest ally were written up and sent to disciplinary segregation for 120 days, despite the DOC publicly announcing a 90-day limit on solitary confinement four years ago. Under something termed “Administrative Control” status, Wisconsin prisoners can be held in solitary confinement indefinitely. Leary’s surviving cellmates were also sent to “the hole,” as prisoner’s commonly refer to segregation. Friends outside of prison say they were given a choice: stay in the cell and sleep a few feet from where they had just witnessed Leary’s needless, violent death or go to solitary. They chose the latter.
This lack of compassion by COs may be feeding the DOC’s staffing crisis. According to the open records request, the DOC terminated almost as many COs as they hired, with more than half of them quitting. Peg Swan, founder of FFUP, says that, over the years, she’s heard from prison staff and former staff that they’ve witnessed or are required to participate in horrible things, but they won’t share their experiences publicly for fear of retaliation.
Meanwhile, high turnover rates can aggravate humanitarian problems in the prisons. The more callous and desensitized COs are most likely to stay on the job, training and acculturating new hires. Over time, high turnover has degraded the DOC’s institutional culture and conditions of confinement, especially in segregation and mental health observation units. According to another open records release, suicide rates among people held by the DOC spiked from one or two per year to 12 a year in 2016; it has remained at an elevated level ever since (eight in 2017; six in 2018). FFUP says they’ve received many letters describing guard harassment, abuse and even assistance leading to these suicides.
If the new administration’s only solution is hiring more staff to replace the many they lose and hold more people on modified lockdown and solitary confinement longer, they’ll see these trends continue or worsen. Their other option is to reduce the prison population. In January, Columbia University’s Justice Lab released a report finding that Wisconsin’s community supervision policies are contributing to our rising incarceration rate, while many states have reformed such policies leading to significant reductions of mass incarceration and associated costs. The Justice Lab’s recommendations would depopulate and close MSDF and significantly reduce crowding system-wide, eliminating the need to lockdown whole facilities and overwork prison employees.
