The overwhelming benefits of locating detention facilities close to home for Milwaukee children who violate laws were hardly mentioned when angry neighborhood residents showed up at a public meeting to jeer city and state officials who are finally trying to do the right thing. So, let’s lay out the reasons why Milwaukee really should welcome a youth prison for its children in the city.
First and foremost is the indisputable urgency of reversing years of horrific physical and psychological abuse of children under Republican Gov. Scott Walker. Walker’s the one who shut down boys and girls “schools” close to Milwaukee in 2011 to send juveniles 200 miles away, into the wilds of northern Wisconsin, to be incarcerated in Lincoln Hills for boys and Copper Lake for girls.
Hiding those prisons in a remote area with little professional oversight was almost immediately catastrophic. Families could rarely travel so far to see what was happening there, and Walker didn’t seem to care. Stories came back about child rapes and brutal physical assaults resulting in broken bones, internal injuries and even an amputation. In 2012, a Racine judge refused to send children there and wrote to Walker detailing the horrors, but Walker avoided ever visiting the prisons.
The U.S. Justice Department and the FBI raided the prisons in 2015, seizing records to investigate allegations of sexual assault, physical brutality and falsification and destruction of records to cover up crimes against children. Unfortunately, nothing more came of the federal investigation after President Trump appointed Jeff Sessions his attorney general.
No More Torture
In 2017, thanks to the ACLU of Wisconsin and the Juvenile Law Center, a federal judge ordered the prisons to stop punishing children by drenching them in blistering pepper spray and psychologically torturing juveniles by holding them in solitary confinement for months at a time. During 10 months in 2016, there were 135 attempted suicides among the 20 to 35 girls at Copper Lake, about one every other day. During the same period, pepper spray (sold for protection against wild animals) was used 198 times against boys at Lincoln Hills, often for minor infractions.
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I thought about all those years of crimes against children—Milwaukee’s own children—when angry Milwaukeeans began denouncing city and state officials for selecting a 17-acre site at North Teutonia Avenue and Mill Road to house 32 juvenile offenders. They raised the usual exaggerated fears about property values and threats to public safety. It shouldn’t be news to anyone that prisons are extremely safe, heavily guarded community institutions for anyone on the outside. Those shouting at Mayor Tom Barrett might have missed him describing the advantage of a 17-acre site with any buildings far removed from surrounding homes.
An even greater contribution to public safety is finally ending the permanent psychological damage done to incarcerated children in Walker’s black sites of torture and abuse. Violence feeds violence. Savage acts of cruelty inflicted upon children by the state are likely to create dysfunctional adults and more violent crime.
Cleaning Up After Walker
Some responsible adults who are doing their best to clean up Wisconsin’s sins against children in its custody are caught in the middle. They include Gov. Tony Evers, newly appointed Secretary of Corrections Kevin Carr, Mayor Barrett and Common Council president Ashanti Hamilton.
A last-minute switch from a previously publicized Mill Road site in a different aldermanic district created unnecessary political tensions, although neighborhood controversy was probably inevitable for any site. Hamilton, who represents the new site, said he was left out of the state decision. Surprising area residents without any public hearings further inflamed the not-in-my-backyard reaction, Hamilton said.
Inevitably, too, the fact that Hamilton is publicly considering running for mayor in 2020 creates tensions with Barrett. Hamilton walked a tightrope presiding over the public hearing on the Mill Road site. He criticized the state for unnecessarily adding to the controversy by leaving neighbors out of the decision. But, like Barrett, Hamilton knows the value to the community of locating the detention facility for children in Milwaukee.
The driving political force behind Republicans imprisoning children and adults from Milwaukee and other urban areas in distant communities is to create jobs for white people with few opportunities guarding black and brown people. An added political bonus is those communities gain more representation in the legislature, as prison inmates count as part of their population.
Evers, a professional educator, knows what corrections professionals know—all incarcerated people, but especially children, benefit from regular contact with families who love them and an extended community support system. Also, he knows that positive rewards are far more effective in changing behavior in children who have started down the wrong road than violent punishment. The first step in rebuilding the state’s corrections system for children from one of child abuse to provide young people with a better future is to house them near people who care about them.
