County Youth In State Prisons Declining Again

Lincoln Hills School and Copper Lake School. Photo from the Wisconsin Department of Corrections.

The number of Milwaukee County youth who are incarcerated in state juvenile prisons went down in 2023.

In 2022, the number of youth in the State Department of Correction’s two juvenile facilities — Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake — spiked to above 50 after years of consecutive declines, imperiling the county’s plans for alternatives to incarceration by the state, and for alternatives to incarceration in general.

The uptick in youth coming into contact with the justice system began in late 2021, in the wake of the massive societal disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The county’s Vel R. Phillips Juvenile Justice Center was frequently at or above capacity in 2022, causing officials to make a deal with Racine County to send youth to the juvenile justice center there as overflow.

The county also saw the number of youth being ordered to state juvenile prisons increase, as the waiting list for an incarceration alternative program filled up. The state charges the county per child it incarcerates, and the rising numbers and high costs for that were putting a hole in the county’s budget for its Division of Children, Youth and Family Services (CYFS), which oversees juvenile detention. Department of Health and Human Services officials told policymakers that the cost of sending children to state prisons could begin to cannibalize the agency’s budget for a program that reduces incarceration time for youth convicted of crimes.

These programs are often called alternatives to incarceration. The county’s programs involved a shortened period of detention, followed by community monitoring, and allowed a youthful offenders to avoid being sent several hours away to a state prison and further from their home and family.

In 2019, there were 109 Milwaukee youth incarcerated by the state and by 2021, that number had been reduced to 32. Then in 2022 it spiked to 57, the highest number since 2017. Now that has dropped: A CYFS report from early December 2023 reported there were 37 Milwaukee youth incarcerated by the state in 2023 as of Dec. 11.

In 2022, as the county was struggling with an overcapacity detention center for youth awaiting trial, and a spiking number of youth in state prisons, it was trying to finalize a plan to develop a new youth detention facility that will allow courts to order children to a facility in the county to serve their sentence. This new facility is part of a 2017 effort to reform the state’s youth correctional system after after allegations of abuse at the state juvenile prisons and a federal investigation.

The county is planning for a 32-bed facility, which, based on the number of youth sentenced to state prisons in 2023, could put the county in a good position to realize its stated policy of having zero Milwaukee youth in state facilities. The $31.3 million facility, paid for in large part by a $29 million state grant, will allow for an expansion of the county’s alternative to incarceration program.