Marketplace Today Blog

By Steven Walters
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Consultants today recommended that the state spend more than $1.2 billion over the next decade to expend and update its prison system.

The consultants said that 8,920 new prison beds and 2,681 replacement beds for juveniles and adults will be needed.

State Corrections Secretary Rick Raemisch said the report from the Mead & Hunt consulting firm will be used to help develop the agency’s future goals and options, but said state government cannot afford everything recommended by the consultants.

“Given the massive [budget] deficit Wisconsin is facing, the plan provides a blueprint of where we don’t want to be in 10 years,” Raemisch said in a statement. Gov. Jim Doyle has estimated that state government faces a $5.4 billion deficit over the next 30 months.

“The plan reaffirms that unless something changes, the demand for prison space will continue to grow over the next decade, bringing with it a high price tag for new prison space,” Raemisch said.

In their report, the consultants said several prisons — including Dodge and Waupun in Wauupun, Kettle Moraine in Plymouth, Green Bay, Fox Lake and Oakhill in Oregon — are so old that they pose major daily maintenance, equipment and staff problems. And emergency barracks-like dormitory prisons built in the mid-1990s “have reached the end of their useful life,” the consultants said.

One other problem, according to the report, is assigning two inmates to cells in Waupun and Green Bay prisons that were built for individual inmates — cells with up to 54 square feet of space each. That practice “is far below current accepted correctional standards and this practice should be discontinued,” the consultants said.