State Senator Leah Vukmir (R-Brookfield) wants to increase your property taxes. It doesn’t matter where you live—Democratic Party stronghold Milwaukee County, ultra-Republican Waukesha County, or Up-North’s Sawyer County—Vukmir is looking to dump a significant share of one of the worst in a long time “tough-on-crime” bills straight onto the backs of county governments.
Translated, that means that local property tax payers will, if her proposal is adopted by the State Senate, help pay for a piece of opportunistic legislation that Vukmir hopes will help her beat out Kevin Nicholson in the Tuesday, Aug. 14, Republican Primary for U.S. Senate. Vukmir’s bill, Senate Bill 54 (SB54), mandates that the Wisconsin Department of Correction (DOC) recommend revocation for anyone on DOC supervision who is simply charged with a new violent misdemeanor or any type of felony. The bill already was approved by the State Assembly.
The DOC estimates that SB54, if passed, would result in an additional 2,135 revocation recommendations each year; the people included in that number will sit in local jails at local expense while they wait for revocation hearings and decisions. It will cost millions of dollars. Also, if each of those alleged offenders spends 50 days in jail while they wait, total annual jail time in the state will rise by 106,857 days—about 293 inmate-years. Just how much each county will spend supporting all of them (and Vukmir’s political ploy) will depend on how many new inmates each county gets, how long each inmate is held in jail and how much per day each inmate costs.
The Financial Cost of Incarceration
Let’s say each inmate costs $40 per day. About $4.3 million in costs would get spread around the state, added to property tax payers’ bills. If the cost is $50 per inmate, the total rises to $5.3 million. These estimates assume that not a single jail in the state will have to add capacity to handle the increased volume.
It’s possible that the existing property tax levy limits the state slaps on counties won’t allow some counties to raise the full amount needed to pay for housing their new jail inmates. Those counties will have to cut services instead. Maybe some of those services help keep people alive; with Vukmir’s proposal, the state would instead spend the money locking up individuals who were simply charged, not convicted.
The DOC developed scenarios projecting possible state costs to implement the bill (local costs were not considered as they are generally not in state estimates). The most widely cited scenario put the state costs at $57 million per year (the scenarios, however, range up to $201 million per year) and assumes that hearing examiners will ultimately reject 48% of the new revocation recommendations. The rejections, though, will come only after the inmates have spent their time in jail and after the county involved has incurred its share of the costs. That money would be totally and utterly wasted, thanks to Leah Vukmir and her friends in the State Legislature.
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The Human Cost of Incarceration
And let’s not forget the most important cost: the human one. Too many people who don’t deserve revocation—those charged with felony second-offense marijuana possession or felony bail jumping for some petty rule violation, for example—will end up caught in this draconian system. (A felony bail jumping charge could result in the absurd situation of a revocation recommendation resulting from a felony that doesn’t involve an actual crime!)
If the DOC’s estimate is accurate, about 1,000 people per year will spend time in jail. Their lives (and those of their families) disrupted, and their jobs very possibly slipping away—only to be released when the revocation request is denied. And, no surprise here, a disproportionate share of the people recommended for revocation under the bill will be brown and black.
Vukmir’s vision is dark and mean. The cost to Wisconsin—financial and human—is simply too high.
Gretchen Schuldt is executive director of Wisconsin Justice Initiative Action, Inc. WJIA advocates for independence and integrity in criminal and civil legal systems, policies, practices and personnel to improve the quality of justice for all the people in Wisconsin.
