New Youth Prison is Not the Answer

In light of the latest monitor’s report outlining deteriorating conditions at Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake Schools, it should be abundantly clear that constructing a new $42 million youth prison is not the solution to our state’s youth justice problems. As I predicted back in December, our institutions are failing due to delays in funding and lack of foresight from our state Legislature solving the youth corrections crisis. We must do better, and we must hold our state elected officials to their past commitments to true, meaningful youth justice reform. A new youth prison will only commit us to the status quo of a broken system.

Youth prisons are a dangerous relic of a bygone era. We have learned over the last several decades that incarcerating young people is not only harmful to those youth and their families, but also fails to advance safety, and in fact, ultimately puts the public at greater risk. Studies have consistently found that 70 to 75 percent of youth incarcerated in juvenile correctional facilities get rearrested within two or three years of release. Even controlling for offending behavior and other relevant factors, incarceration during adolescence can increase the likelihood of subsequent adult incarceration by nearly four times. Carceral facilities also continue to be places that disproportionately inflict harm on youth and families of color, perpetuating centuries-long cycles of systemic racism and oppression.

It is wrong to assume that the problems at Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake are exclusively the result of staffing and workforce challenges related to its location. Changing the geography will not solve the problem. As a member of Governor Doyle’s 2010 committee charged with recommending whether to close Ethan Allen School or Lincoln Hills School, it was clear to me at the time that Lincoln Hills was the safer and more effectively run institution. Indiscriminate use of pepper spray and punitive confinement were common practices at Ethan Allen, just as they had become at Lincoln Hills School. These problems are endemic to prisons and have resulted in legal action and prison closures all around the country.

The lessons learned from the tragedies at Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake Schools are salient today, but not durable enough to withstand the test of time. To be sure, Lincoln Hills shocked our collective conscience with its use of solitary confinement, pepper spray, and practices that caused horrific physical and emotional harms to its residents. But higher staff ratios, increased therapeutic programming, and staff development and training on trauma informed practices inside facilities are all vulnerable to future budget cuts, union pushback, and political backtracking. Form and function will predetermine an eventual return to abusive prison conditions if a new prison is indeed what we build.

Our governor and Legislature propose to spend $42 million – an enormous amount of money – on an approach that has been shown to be ineffective over and over again. Instead, we should be thinking about how to invest in what we know does work: supporting young people and their communities by targeting the stresses, traumas, and marginalization that cause crime in the first place. All of these risk factors have been greatly exacerbated during the pandemic, and if we want crime and violence to go down, we need to make meaningful investments in our communities, not incarceration. Studies across the country have shown time and again that young people who engage in programming with evidence-based therapy, mentoring support, employment and education resources—particularly when these programs are led by youth advocates and credible messengers who can identify and empathize with them—are far less likely to reoffend and far more likely to go on to graduate from high school. This is in stark contrast to the results that incarceration produces, which include astoundingly high recidivism rates and abysmal education outcomes. Forty-two million dollars could go incredibly far and create a safer and healthier Wisconsin if we redoubled our efforts to expand pro-social supports and assist our youth in healing and growth.

Our state elected officials must recognize this moment as an opportunity to move youth justice away from our harmful and punitive past and invest in a more trauma-informed, fair, equitable and developmentally appropriate approach.

Without a focus on eliminating youth prisons and replacing them with more effective therapeutic and community-based alternatives, we are conceding that real transformation of youth justice is too complicated and fraught with political risks to be tenable in our polarized state. We should not accept that when we can do so much better.

Mark Mertens, MSW, is Executive Director of the Norris Adolescent Center, member of the Youth Corrections Leaders for Justice and Former Administrator of the Children, Youth, and Family Services Division of the Milwaukee County Health and Human Services Department.