DOC to Ramp Up Early Release
With a change in the political landscape looming, Department of Corrections Secretary Rick Raemisch plans to shift his fledgling inmate early release program into high gear. “I want a program so successful and so powerful that no one would dare eliminate it,” Raemisch told the editorial board of The Capital Times Wednesday. “That’s why I feel like the demons are chasing me right now.” Report from The Cap Times.
The program faces stiff opposition from Republican lawmakers and a lack of support from all three top gubernatorial candidates. No matter who is elected, given their policy differences, Raemisch doesn’t expect to keep his job past January.
“By the end of the year I want to have a good base of people coming out,” he said, adding that he hopes to see 50 to 60 inmates a month getting out early. That would be a substantial increase in a program that, since January, has turned out 112 Wisconsin prisoners before they served their entire sentences.
Raemisch, the former Republican Dane County sheriff, said he doesn’t have much time to prove that releasing inmates early not only saves money, but makes the state a safer place. With the political landscape in flux as fall elections approach, he wants to show not only that the program has been a success, but will reap vast benefits in the future.
Provisions passed last year in the state budget allow two mechanisms for letting inmates out before their sentences are fully served: Raemisch has the authority to release inmates who have less than a year left to serve, some of them with only days to go; and the Early Release Commission, formerly the Parole Board, can review the sentences of offenders who have served a particular percentage of their sentences and meet other criteria.
The savings per inmate are substantial. It costs about $30,000 a year to house an inmate, and about $3,000 a year to supervise them once they’re out.
Raemisch says the prison beds emptied by inmates who are now leading productive lives on the street have already saved the state $900,000 and stand to save millions in the near future. Meanwhile, with the first substantial drop in the prison population in recent history, the state can avert the $1.2 billion in prison construction costs over the next decade, plus millions more in staffing and operating costs, that were projected last year if the state does nothing to stem prison population growth.
He said if the state could reduce the prison population by just 200, he could begin shutting down prison units – and that’s when the real savings would kick in. The wild card, however, is whether the state’s stiffer new drunken driving laws, which go into effect on July 1, will erase some of the gains, he said.
The two leading GOP gubernatorial candidates, Scott Walker and Mark Neumann, oppose early release. Democratic candidate Tom Barrett has said he has “serious reservations” about it.
Rep. Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford, introduced a bill last legislative session that would have repealed early release legislation, and he had a lot of GOP support in the Legislature. Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen has panned it, too.
That has Raemisch worried that a shift in political leadership could doom the program he sees as his legacy as corrections secretary.
“My concern is that there are those out there trying to sink this ship before it even gets a chance to float,” Raemisch said. “The fact of the matter is it is working and we’re being very careful with this.”
About 40 states have changed, or are in the process of reviewing, their sentencing policies to cut prison costs. Raemisch said Wisconsin corrections officials have done everything in their power to screen those eligible for early release, picking only those who have the best chances of succeeding outside prison walls. Of those released so far, only three have committed new crimes, all of them petty, he said. One committed theft at a cell phone shop; one tried to steal tools at a house construction site; and one was caught helping unload scrap metal that someone else had stolen.
Seventeen have committed violations of the terms of their release, often for dirty urine samples.
“The rest have been very successful,” he said.
Aside from the statistics, he said, the program has important but intangible benefits.
“It’s changed the climate of the institution,” he says. “Corrections officers say there’s just more of a positive attitude.”
Under truth-in-sentencing laws, which have held sway since 1999, inmates have had no incentive to behave or better themselves, Raemisch said. In addition, the prison population faces numerous hurdles to success. Raemisch reeled off the statistics: most inmates are at a 9th-grade reading level, a 5th-grade math level, 16 percent are illiterate, 70 percent have drug or alcohol problems and 26 percent have serious mental health needs.
Under early release, he said, there is a direct relationship between their behavior and their eligibility to get out of prison, which is often contingent on their participation in programs like drug and alcohol rehab, anger management, vocational education and GED programs.
And a key to the success of the program is putting more programs in place. Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle has already made some headway, Raemisch said, tripling the number of treatment beds and increasing vocational program funding by 50 percent and GED programs by 20 percent.
Still, he said, “We’ve got a waiting line for everything. We have to readjust our whole system to make sure that those that are hitting the marks and doing well have the opportunity to get into those programs much earlier than they had been before.”
Raemisch clearly has reasons to be concerned about the fate of the program. While Republicans still had the majority in the Assembly, there was a bipartisan effort to explore efforts to reduce the prison population. But since Democrats took control in 2006, Republicans have dug in their heels and taken a harder line.
It’s anybody’s guess how majority Democrats will fare in this year’s elections. If the Republicans come up winners, he said, the Legislature “could kill it in a day.”
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