This past Friday, I had the opportunity to take a trip to Oak Hill Correctional Institution, a minimum-security prison located in nearby Oregon, Wis. Now, I know what you're thinking: minimum security? Thoughts of that Simpsons episode with the escalators over the prison walls and revolving doors immediately come to mind. And they did for me too. But what I witnessed while at Oak Hill made me think twice about the way Wisconsin deals with its prison population.
Oak Hill was originally built as the \Wisconsin School for Girls"" in 1941 and was converted to a male correctional institution in 1976. Originally equipped to handle roughly 300 male prisoners, more than 600 inmates now call Oak Hill home. You can imagine the difficulties encountered in feeding, housing and educating 600 full-grown males in a compound originally constructed for teenage girls. It's obvious after touring the ""cottages,"" as the respective prison houses are called, the feeling was similar to a smaller, stuffier dorm. The inmates, now essentially all double-bunked, are crammed into rooms about half the size of our dorm rooms. On a beautiful day like the day I visited, I found that the majority of the inmates spent their time outdoors, playing basketball, handball and lazily sprawling in the shade of the numerous trees in the area. In winter, the season that seems to refuse to release its death grip on this state, I wonder how such a place manages?
The pride and joy of the institution is the school, where 100 of the inmates are involved in GED or vocational certification programs. In a place that felt similar to my middle school, grown men hunched over computers as archaic as the Apple II and pored over the preapproved literature in the library that lacked a librarian (budget cuts).
These luxuries were provided to the prisoners who maintained good behavior, but in visiting the ""iso"" area, the scene was much bleaker. We were allowed to ""tour"" a room, if by tour you mean walking in and walking out. The cell was roughly 6 feet long and 3 feet wide and was furnished with a toilet, sink, mirror and one-inch tall slit that allowed prisoners to see the outside world. The sole possession in the room of the inmate we visited was a used Dixie cup.
As about 60 percent of the prisoners there suffer from permanent medical infirmities, more than 250 of the inmates maintain ""idle"" status, meaning they are not working. The wage for those who do? Eight cents an hour. To give you an idea, a single trip to the UW Hospital, which many of them frequent, costs $7.50.
In such a place, I was surprised to learn, weapon-supported force was essentially never an option, as Oak Hill in particular maintains a policy of no officers being armed. As the warden remarked, ""the weapon we use most is right between our ears."" The philosophy is more accommodating than suppressive and the officers' actions and the way they interact with prisoners reflect this.
You might ask why this is so. You are, after all, dealing with hardened criminals, right? Hardly. Wisconsin criminalizes an insane amount of offenses that now require jail time, whereas 20 years ago would have only required a fine. Mostly relating to drug possession or intent to sell drugs, many inmates are charged with a year or more of jail time and with the advent of the ""Truth In Sentencing"" laws, the inmates will serve what their original sentence required of them.
Professor Howard Schweber, who teaches constitutional law among other things here at UW-Madison, made a seemingly ironic point to me the other day: While we will all agree the current system doesn't work, criminalizes an unnecessary amount of offenses and seeks to shelter and separate criminals rather than rehabilitate them-no one in their right mind would make such an argument come election time.
Legislators and corrections officials can ill afford to present a ""soft on crime"" approach when running for office, as it is tough to tell the diminutive grandma in your ward that you intend to allow criminals to run freely throughout her neighborhood. Common sense takes a back seat to nicer agenda-building garbage such as this and that is largely the source of the problem of the prison system in this state. Prided as always being within the top five in the nation and known for its progressive methods in dealing with crime, Wisconsin has become handcuffed in the past 20 years in attempting to solve an ever-growing problem that it has, essentially, created for itself. Instead of keeping in its tradition of preventative and corrective legislation, the state has instead opted to give in to cries of concern from its citizenry. Such a strategy represents a bonehead move and is responsible for the overcrowding of prisons the likes of which Oak Hill faces. To the detriment of all involved, we seek to lock up what we don't like and don't understand. But as the warden of Oak Hill intelligently noted, ""One day they're incarcerated, the next day they're your neighbor.""
