Photo credit: Wisconsin National Guard
In 1981, I was invited to give a commencement address to a department ceremony for journalism students graduating from Marquette University. I’m not claiming to be “a very stable genius” or anything, but I’ve got plenty of witnesses that more than 35 years ago I was warning future journalists never to engage in fake news.
“Let’s get the most important issue out of the way right from the start,” I began. “You should not make up the stories you write. Of course, those of you graduating in advertising or public relations may disregard this.”
1981 was the year Janet Cooke, a feature writer for The Washington Post, won the Pulitzer Prize for the heartbreaking story of an 8-year-old heroin addict. Two days after winning, The Post returned the Pulitzer publicly announcing the reporter had fabricated the story.
It happens rarely in journalism, a profession that emphasizes accuracy and exposes lies, but every few decades incidents actually have occurred. A far more serious problem is the one I joked about—the difficulty of separating the truth about what politicians are doing from all the misleading public relations they put out.
Just in Time for the Election
I thought of that when Gov. Scott Walker announced he was totally reversing every action he has ever taken to create hellishly inhumane conditions for children incarcerated in Wisconsin. Walker is trying to remove as an election issue all the violent physical and sexual assaults taking place in Walker’s juvenile prisons. He suddenly sounds like a progressive Democratic politician. That’s because his proposal was lifted directly from a bill introduced by Milwaukee State Rep. Evan Goyke, a rising, young Democratic activist.
Walker now proposes closing the notorious Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls in northern Wisconsin and converting the complex into an adult prison. He claims he’d build five smaller regional juvenile facilities around the state including three in southeastern Wisconsin, nearer to the families of most incarcerated offenders.
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Holding youths closer to home reduces recidivism. Young people have support from family and access to community services. It’s even possible to employ staff experienced in dealing with children of different races growing up in urban neighborhoods. For years, Walker ignored Milwaukee judges and political leaders pleading for such an intelligent change. So Walker’s election year conversion is great news, right? Well, maybe. Maybe not.
Walker claims he’s radically reversing his incarceration policies in an election year, but he won’t introduce anything until the next budget in mid 2019. That’s a lot like doing nothing for a year and a half as violent assaults and suicides continue at the Houses of Horrors Wisconsin calls “schools” of incarceration for boys and girls.
Walker’s Disastrous Record
Walker would be more believable as an advocate for decentralized facilities closer to home for young people if that wasn’t exactly the juvenile system he intentionally destroyed as soon as he became governor in 2011. He closed Ethan Allen Boys School in Waukesha County and Southern Oaks Girls School in Racine County to send children hundreds of miles away, the equivalent of the other side of the moon.
There are terrible reasons Republicans build prisons in remote, rural locations. It provides jobs for white people in small towns guarding black and brown people from larger cities. That can lead directly to violent abuse, something best kept hidden far from pesky journalists. Small town locals often view black and brown children in cages like a frightening subhuman species. They’re fearfully prepared at all times to use violence to protect themselves.
The horror stories started coming back from Lincoln Hills almost immediately. In 2012, a Racine judge wrote directly to Walker he could no longer in good conscience send children to the complex. Walker claimed he never saw the letter, but even when stories of child rape, brutal assaults, broken bones, suicides and attempted suicides became public, Walker refused even to visit the facility and introduced no reforms other than shuffling staff.
It took a lawsuit from the ACLU of Wisconsin and the Juvenile Law Center for a humane federal judge to stop the state from torturing children physically and psychologically with the routine use of blistering pepper spray and solitary confinement extending for months, practices long discredited and discontinued by corrections professionals elsewhere.
Immediately shutting down the Lincoln Hills complex and assisting counties in housing juveniles in their communities are measures long overdue. Waiting a year and a half is unnecessarily cruel. There’s also absolutely no reason to restart prison building for adults. Other states are finding ways to reduce adult prison populations that grew to absurd, wasteful proportions under the War on Drugs destroying lives and livelihoods. Wisconsin should provide drug treatment, not join U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions in viciously restarting a drug war on American citizens.
Walker needs to show his election year conversion isn’t just public relations or, worse, fake news.
