Judge ends court oversight of Lincoln Hills youth prison

After eight years, the court-mandated oversight of a Wisconsin youth prison has come to an end.

The Lincoln Hills School for boys and the nearby all-girls Cooper Lake School have been monitored by a court-appointed official since 2018. On Wednesday afternoon, U.S. District Judge James Peterson granted a request from Wisconsin’s Department of Corrections to terminate that consent decree.

The agreement came to be after the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin and the Juvenile Law Center sued in 2017 over conditions within Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake. That lawsuit described violations of constitutional rights, including physical abuse, “excessive” use of pepper spray and lengthy stays in solitary confinement.

“When the lawsuit started, the conditions at Lincoln Hills were really some of the worst at any juvenile facility in the in the country,” said Tim Muth, an attorney with ACLU Wisconsin, in an interview Wednesday.

Wisconsin’s Department of Corrections agreed to make reforms at Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake as part of a 2018 settlement reached under the administration of then-Gov. Scott Walker.

Over the last eight years, a court-appointed monitor has been visiting the youth prisons in Irma to assess the DOC’s progress toward meeting those settlement terms. On Wednesday, the monitor submitted a final report, determining that the prison system had met “substantial compliance” with all the settlement’s provisions. That milestone was the result of “years of deliberate and meaningful reform,” the monitor wrote.

The latest report was the second consecutive time in which the monitor found compliance with all the provisions. As a result, Wisconsin’s Department of Corrections filed a motion Wednesday asking to end the consent decree.

The ACLU and the Juvenile Law Center did not contest that motion.

Changes adopted under the consent decree have included ending the use of pepper spray against youth, cutting back on the use of restraints like leg shackles, curtailing strip searches and limiting how long youth are confined to their rooms.

Provisions set under the Lincoln Hills consent decree have since been adopted by the DOC as part of its administrative policy for youth prisons throughout Wisconsin’s system.

By adopting those policies, DOC Secretary Jared Hoy said the corrections system has embraced “a new culture and the way we do the work at Lincoln Hills.”

“It’s not a short term (shift),” said Hoy, who became DOC Secretary in May 2024. “It’s evidence of a commitment by this agency and by those staff to provide services to our kids here in Wisconsin that will set them up with the best chance to be successful in the future.”

Changes like banning pepper spray have been important to protect the health of young people at Lincoln Hills, Hoy said. But the secretary said he believes other changes, like adopting a system to incentivize positive behavior have also been significant.

“I’d really like to point more towards the system of care that we’ve engaged in with the youth up there, whether that’s a trauma-informed care approach using dialectical behavior therapy,” Hoy said. “(That’s) been proven to be one of the best approaches in working with a justice-involved youth population.”

Lincoln Hills “is a much different institution than it was in 2018,” said Muth, the ACLU attorney.

But, he added, “it’s still a prison, and children shouldn’t be in prisons. And we do call for a system that looks to rehabilitate and provide the appropriate treatment for children in community based settings.”

Following the end of the consent decree, attorneys for the ACLU and the Juvenile Law Center plan to visit Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake “to educate youth about the termination of the Consent Decree and explain that youths’ legal protections remain in place as codified in the Administrative Code,” a motion submitted by the state on Wednesday explains.

There’s currently about 70 boys incarcerated at Lincoln Hills and 10 girls at Copper Lake, according to a recent DOC tally. That’s down from when the lawsuit was filed, when there were roughly 150 boys at Lincoln Hills and 20 girls at Copper Lake.

Lincoln Hills, Copper Lake remain open years after closure deadline

But, under state law, there should be zero kids at both facilities by now.

A bipartisan law signed by Walker in 2018 set a deadline for Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake to close by January 2021. That deadline was later extended to July 2021.

Nearly five years post-deadline, those two youth prisons are still operating amid delays in funding and approvals for alternate facilities.

“There are a number of pieces to that — and we are well along our way to that ultimate goal of closing Lincoln Hills — but we’ve got to finish those pieces in order to get the kids the to the right place and receive the right services,” Hoy told WPR.

If those pieces fall into place on time, including the planned construction of a facility outside Madison, Hoy said it’s possible Lincoln Hills could close by 2028.

Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake are in rural northern Wisconsin, far from where many of Wisconsin’s incarcerated children have family. The plan moving forward has been for the DOC to replace Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake with several smaller youth facilities near more populous urban areas.

In Milwaukee, the DOC could start moving boys into the new, 32-bed Southeast Regional Care Center for Youth by the end of 2026. Another youth facility is being designed in Dane County to house 32 boys and 8 girls. That project was fully funded in the last state budget, and could break ground in 2026 before being completed in 2028.

Muth said the ACLU will be following the progress of those facilities closely.

“Do they actually incorporate community-based and appropriate rehabilitation approaches?” Muth said. “If all that happens is that the Department of Corrections creates versions of Lincoln Hills that hold just smaller populations, then there is still much work that that needs to be done.”

In 2024, a group of Republican state lawmakers asked Peterson, the federal judge, to modify parts of Lincoln Hill’s consent decree, including the prohibition of pepper spray.

That’s after a teen incarcerated at Lincoln Hills killed 49-year-old corrections officer Corey Proulx. Proulx died after hitting his head on concrete during an attack on the Lincoln Hills basketball court.

Earlier this month, 17-year-old Javarius Hurd pleaded guilty to homicide in the attack, but argued he should not get prison time because he is mentally ill.

Another teen, 18-year-old Rian Nyblom, took a plea deal and was sentenced in August to five years in prison. Nyblom had been charged with helping to plan the attack that led to Proulx’s death.

State lawmakers cited Proulx’s death when suggesting that tools like pepper spray could help protect staff at Lincoln Hills. But at the time, the ACLU said pepper spray would not make the facility safer.

“The call for pepper spray is a knee-jerk reaction to a tragic incident,” Muth said in September 2024.

Peterson did not modify the consent decree in response to that request, and the ban on pepper spray remains in place.