{"id":4890,"date":"2023-08-12T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2023-08-12T12:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/?p=4890"},"modified":"2023-08-12T12:11:53","modified_gmt":"2023-08-12T12:11:53","slug":"milwaukee-county-jail-prison-sentences-have-plummeted-part-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/?p=4890","title":{"rendered":"Milwaukee County Jail & Prison Sentences Have Plummeted [Part 7]"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post originally appeared at https:\/\/www.wisconsinrightnow.com\/milwaukee-county-jail-prison-sentences\/<\/a><\/p>\n

PART SEVEN IN A 10-PART SERIES. Read parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Milwaukee County\u2019s criminal justice system has broken down at almost all levels. Although some of this can be attributed to the pandemic, all of it can not. Local officials\u2019 questionable policy decisions and their failure to develop strategies to restore effectiveness also play a role, and it\u2019s imperiling public safety.
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PROBLEM #7: Milwaukee County jail and prison sentences have plummeted. The number of sentences in Milwaukee courts fell significantly *before* the pandemic, but plummeted further during it and have not recovered.
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The number of prison sentences out of Milwaukee County courts dropped 48.6% during the pandemic and, in 2022, were still lower than before it. Local jail sentences dropped by more than 60% when the pandemic hit but the 2022 total was only 895, compared to 2,661 in 2015.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Felony prison sentences are still 15.9% under 2019. This graphic shows the trends, but indicates inaccurately that sentencings have recovered. They\u2019ve started to, but they aren\u2019t there.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We previously reported<\/a>: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Milwaukee County has joined the Safety and Justice Challenge<\/a>, a program whose \u201cprimary purpose of jails is to detain those awaiting trial who are a danger to public safety or a flight risk.\u201d The County\u2019s website explains<\/a>: \u201cJailing someone who is neither results in significant costs for families and communities \u2014 particularly communities of color \u2014 including lost income, parents separated from their children, untreated mental health and substance use challenges, a greater risk of re-offending, and wasted public dollars.\u201d One strategy of the Milwaukee Community Justice Council is listed as follows, \u201cRacial Equity<\/em> convenes system and community partners to measurably reduce disparities through decision point analysis, shared priority-setting, and training.\u201d In other words, the goal is to reduce jail populations, to some extent.
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\"milwaukee<\/p>\n

THE SERIES:\u00a0 <\/strong>We have taken the lead in exploring the problems in Milwaukee County\u2019s Criminal Justice system, breaking stories on Milwaukee police staffing declines<\/a> (which started years ago), the DA\u2019s high non-prosecution rate and new reliance on summonses<\/a>, the ACLU Collins Agreement\u2019s deleterious effect on proactive policing<\/a>, new jail and police policies restricting bookings<\/a> and arrests, and the massive court backlogs<\/a>, which leave defendants on the streets longer to re-offend and which provoke constitutional concerns<\/a>. Milwaukee is at a crisis point, with record homicide numbers and a severe reckless driving crisis.
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Now, a new August 2023 report<\/a> from the Wisconsin Policy Forum has examined Milwaukee County\u2019s Criminal Justice System in great detail, providing fresh data from 2018 (before the pandemic) to 2022. The quote and data in the opening section come from this report (although it did not mention the Justice initiative in the jail). We are excerpting some of the key statistical findings in a 10-part series to further understanding of the problem. You can\u2019t formulate solutions if you don\u2019t understand the problem\u2019s scope. The few news articles that emerged only superficially skimmed over the report\u2019s findings. <\/em><\/p>\n

Although the report deals with the context of the pandemic, it also makes it clear that, in many respects, trends imperiling public safety started before it or have continued, even escalating in some cases, in 2022, after its height. In other words, you can\u2019t blame everything on the pandemic. The report also indicates that, in a number of ways, problems that escalated during the pandemic have not been resolved by officials even as late as 2022.
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In each article, which we will run over the next 10 days at 7 a.m. every day, we will outline the problems and present the research, keeping rhetoric out of the way. After that, we will run a wrap-up article suggesting solutions. What happens in the state\u2019s largest county has an effect throughout Wisconsin. The WPF report was commissioned by the Milwaukee-based Argosy Foundation and the Milwaukee Community Justice Council (CJC). In this series, we hope to get past simplistic rhetoric (\u201cit\u2019s the state Legislature\u2019s fault!\u201d or \u201cwho cares what happens in Milwaukee!\u201d) and focus on data.
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PROBLEM #7<\/h2>\n

The DA\u2019s office \u201calso tracks sentences monthly and annually, both in terms of totals and how many of those convicted go to either local jails or a state prison,\u201d the report says. It found:<\/p>\n

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  • \u201cTotal sentences had fallen significantly prior to the pandemic, from 4,342 in 2015 to 3,202 in 2019 (-26.3%). In 2020, they plummeted further, with only 1,445 sentences handed out, a decline of 54.9% from the prior year. Total sentences increased in both 2021 (1,720) and 2022 (2,262), but have yet to return to pre-pandemic levels.\u201d<\/li>\n
  • \u201cState prison sentences were consistent from 2015 to 2019, never going below 1,600 or above 1,700. However, they fell from 1,639 in 2019 to just 842 in 2020 (-48.6%), before rising to 1,031 in 2021 and 1,367 in 2022.\u201d<\/li>\n
  • \u201cLocal jail sentences fell from 2,661 in 2015 to 1,563 in 2019, but then dropped by more than 60% to just 603 in 2020; the 2022 total was 895, still well below pre-pandemic numbers.\u201d<\/li>\n
  • \u201cThis phenomenon appears to be strongly related to the fact that nearly every misdemeanor that ends with a custodial sentence results in an individual being sent to a local jail, and misdemeanor sentencing has remained far below pre-pandemic levels since March 2020.\u201d<\/li>\n
  • \u201cMisdemeanor jail sentences had already fallen from 2,121 in 2015 to 1,137 in 2019, but then they dropped to just 392 in 2020 before rebounding modestly to 462 in 2021 and 631 in 2022.\u201d<\/li>\n
  • \u201cFelony jail sentences have also remained below pre-pandemic levels, dropping by more than half from 2019 (426) to 2020 (211), and remaining below 300 in both years since. However, while felony prison sentences also saw a nearly 50% decline from 2019 (1,620) to 2020 (832), they rose to 1,362 in 2022, just 15.9% below 2019 numbers.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This post originally appeared at https:\/\/www.wisconsinrightnow.com\/milwaukee-county-jail-prison-sentences\/ PART SEVEN IN A 10-PART SERIES. Read parts 1,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":4892,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wi-right-now"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4890"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4894,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4890\/revisions\/4894"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}