STATE LEADS NATION IN HOUSING INMATES AT OUT-OF-STATE SITES

Wisconsin Moves From Third To First Place After Tripling Prisoner
Relocations In 1998

Madison - Besides cranberries, cheese, motorcycles and winning football
teams, Wisconsin can lay claim to leading the nation in a new category:
exporting convicts.

Wisconsin ranked third among states a year ago when it came to shipping
criminals to prisons beyond its borders.

But today, with nearly 2,600 convicts in exile, it has no rival for the
dubious title.

"We don't envy them that," said Liz McDonough, spokeswoman for the Colorado
Department of Corrections, which led the nation last year. "It is your last
resort. It's not something you do unless you absolutely have to do it."

Wisconsin started busing convicts out of state two years ago as a stopgap
measure to deal with a perennial crisis: an inmate population soaring off
the chart and prisons so crowded that the safety of staff and inmates was
at risk.

Corrections Secretary Michael Sullivan now sees the quick fix as a
permanent solution to prison crowding, and critics say this policy borne of
a crisis ultimately may lead to a situation equally perilous.

"In general, it's a bad practice," said James Austin, vice president and
research director of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in
Washington, D.C.

Instead of saving money by renting cells, states such as Wisconsin will
spend more on transportation, monitoring and costly litigation when
something eventually goes wrong at a prison thousands of miles away, he
warned.

Escapes, stabbings and other problems at a Corrections Corp. of America
prison in Ohio, for example, have led to multiple lawsuits. Austin said the
company has retained him as a consultant to help resolve problems at the
prison that held convicts from the District of Columbia.

Wisconsin has inmates in a CCA prison at Whiteville, Tenn., where a guard
was brutally assaulted last August. Inmates later claimed abuse by guards.
When Wisconsin officials found evidence to support those claims and
complained of a coverup, CCA fired eight people. While state and federal
authorities investigate, attorneys for the inmates are preparing to file suit.

"If it's a prison, it's going to have problems," Austin said. "Someone's
going to get hurt there eventually, someone will probably die there
eventually, and when that happens, that's when litigation's going to kick in."

Busing inmates across the border underscores one of the most troublesome
and politically dicey issues the governor and legislators face: How do they
keep streets and neighborhoods free of dangerous criminals without building
expensive prisons to house convicts?

Rather than parole more convicts, many states have eased prison crowding by
sending inmates elsewhere. According to a federal report, the top five
states last year were: Colorado, with 1,009 inmates out of state; Oklahoma,
941, Wisconsin, 819; Idaho, 608, and Hawaii, 600.

Since then, Wisconsin has more than tripled its inmate exports, while the
other states, with one exception, have reduced the number of convicts in
exile or returned all their inmates to prisons back home.

Early next year, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics is expected to issue
a new report on state prison populations, but it's unlikely that any state
will displace Wisconsin as the new leader in inmate exports.

Not when you consider the following:

The Department of Corrections already has authority to ship another 1,500
inmates out of state. That would meet the existing cap of 4,518 contract
beds and use up nearly all the $65 million available this year for those
beds, although a small portion of that money is for 586 bunks in jails and
other cells available in state.

In the 1999-2001 budget request Sullivan sent Gov. Tommy G. Thompson, the
corrections secretary asked for an additional 4,500 contract beds. Again,
roughly 4,000 would be out-of-state beds, or double the number now allowed.

The prison population now stands at a record 17,763. Growing by leaps and
bounds, it accelerated at a brisk pace earlier this year, due largely to a
substantial decrease in parole.

With fewer inmates getting out early on parole and more criminals going to
prison, the population has been increasing at a rate of 268 a month. And a
year from now, parole will end when the state's truth-in-sentencing law
takes effect.

With the Legislature's adoption of such anti-crime measures in recent years
and huge growth in inmate population, observers said Wisconsin
policy-makers should have realized the need for more space beyond two new
prisons now in the works.

"Somewhere in state government, someone is dropping the ball in terms of
planning adequately for the bed space that's needed," Austin said.

Both Austin and Marc Mauer, assistant director of the private, non-profit
Sentencing Project in Washington, expressed surprise that Wisconsin is
shipping so many inmates out of state.

"If you've got several thousand more inmates than you can handle, either
you should decide you're going to build prisons, raise the taxes and go to
the voters and tell them that's what you're going to do, or you should
reassess your sentencing policies and sentencing options, and look at those
alternatives for some of those offenders," Mauer said.

Mauer said elected officials were trying to avoid a difficult issue at
great expense, millions of tax dollars going to other states that could be
spent on prisons, community supervision or other programs in Wisconsin.

Beyond such costs are the consequences of severing family ties when inmates
are imprisoned so far from home, he said. He said research has shown that
convicts with family support are more likely to become law-abiding citizens
upon their release.

Many inmates sent to other states had been model prisoners, said Sharon
Schmeling of the Wisconsin Catholic Conference, which had a task force
recently complete a study of corrections issues.

"These are prisoners who are playing by the rules, going through education
programs, through alcohol and drug-abuse rehabilitation," Schmeling said.
"And the reward is, 'We're going to send you away from your family.' This
sends a very dangerous message to prisoners that it is not in your best
interest to play by the rules. That's really an injustice."

Yet Schmeling said the state faced difficult choices. If all inmates
remained in state, the prison system would become dangerously overcrowded,
and sending convicts out of state on a temporary basis seemed better than
building more prisons, she said.

That Wisconsin leads the nation in exporting inmates came as no surprise to
Sullivan. He said the state must rely on prisons elsewhere until it can
better assess its own needs. That could occur as early as next year when a
state task force, studying the criminal code, makes its recommendations, he
said.

When the Legislature enacted truth in sentencing, it also called for a
review of the criminal code and recommendations on revising it to see that
punishment fit the crime.

"Redoing the criminal code will be the linchpin," Sullivan said. "You then
will be able, with a finer degree of accuracy, to project what are the
needs of the department.

"My belief is the commission will say there needs to be capacity added, not
only on the prison side, but on the community side, in order to deliver
public safety."

Checked-by: derek rea