Wisconsin Awarded $15 Million for Corrections Projects

Photo: Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers addresses the Wisconsin State Building Commission on Oct. 28. | Photo Credit: Anna Ihland, Legislative Photographer, Wisconsin State Legislature

MADISON, Wisc. – On Oct. 28, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers announced that the Wisconsin State Building Commission approved approximately $743 million for statewide construction projects — including $15 million Gov. Evers had requested to begin work across several Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC) facilities.

The recently released funding will go toward implementing the governor’s comprehensive correctional facilities plan announced earlier this year. That plan involves what the governor’s office calls a “domino series” of projects at several DOC facilities that, coupled with necessary reforms to help stabilize the state’s skyrocketing prison population.

Gov. Evers’ correctional reform plans include:

• Closing the Green Bay Correctional Institution, which opened in 1898 and has been criticized for its aging infrastructure, overcrowding and safety issues
• Retrofitting the Waupun Correctional Institution into a state-of-the-art, medium-security “vocational village”
• Closing two juvenile facilities — the Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake Schools — and advancing the 2017 Wisconsin Act 185 to place youth offenders at smaller regional facilities, and then converting those facilities into a 500-bed medium-security adult facility, Lincoln Correctional Institution
• Converting the Stanley Correctional Institution into a 1,500-bed maximum-security facility with the ability to operate as medium custody if needed
• Adding 200 minimum-security beds to the Sanger B. Powers Correctional Center
• Converting the John C. Burke Correctional Center into a women’s prison and adding 300 beds to the facility

The plan also includes constructing a new Type 1 juvenile facility in Dane County to house youth formerly incarcerated at the Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake Schools.

“We’ve worked hard to come up with a common-sense plan to modernize and reform our state’s correctional facilities that will save taxpayers in the long run while keeping our communities safe, and I’m excited our plan has earned bipartisan support,” said Gov. Evers.

“I’m glad that we’ll be able to move forward with resources from our bipartisan state budget to begin work on critical projects so we can work toward closing GBCI and Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake Schools.”

Earlier in October, Gov. Evers had issued a bipartisan request that the Commission release the funds needed to move the correctional reform plans forward.

“Wisconsin is already years behind in modernizing corrections and reforming our justice system like so many red and blue states have, so it’s critically important that we begin work on projects to modernize DOC facilities without any further delay,” Gov. Evers said at the time.

While the funding action was approved unanimously, some Republican lawmakers have rejected parts of the governor’s comprehensive corrections plan. Evers has called his proposal the “safest, fastest, and cheapest” solution available, and that other options, such as constructing a new correctional facility as opposed to rehabilitating and modernizing existing facilities, would cost taxpayers an estimated $1 billion and take the better part of a decade to complete.

With the release of the latest funds, the state’s Department of Administration and DOC have begun the process of selecting an architect-engineer of record for the DOC projects.