Criminal Justice Council listens to prison reform advocates in Milwaukee

Prison reform advocates are calling on the Governor’s new Criminal Justice Council to recommend spending more on drug and mental health treatment, and less on locking people up.

The State’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council heard some impassioned testimony at a listening session in Milwaukee Tuesday. Most of it came from members of the church based group MICAH that has launched a campaign to cut the state’s prison population in half over the next three years. Fifty-nine year old James Wilborn spent nine years in prison on a drug conviction. He didn’t receive any treatment until he got out. He asked the council to spend more on treatment and job training, and stop warehousing inmates. “I am working in a store selling clothes now and working as a custodian in a church. I am being productive,” he says. “Given that opportunity of rehab fixed my life and changed my life. I think of more inmates are given rehab it would be a lot different even in prison. “

Others who testified called for increased spending treating prisoners with mental illness. Barbara Beckert of Disability Rights Wisconsin listed off problems faced by both inmates and parolees. She says her agency gets lots of desperate phone calls from offenders families. “There loved one is in the system,” she says. “They don’t have access to their medication and I mean this again has both a human cost and it has a fiscal cost because they’re destabilized when they come back into the community they’re not able to resume life and be productive in the way that we’d like.”

The Governor appointed the 1-member council in May and asked them to recommend reforms that would increase public safety efficiently and effectively. The council headed by the Attorney General hasn’t decided yet whether it will eventually propose new legislation. . The council meets again in September in Madison.