INMATES FIND SHELTER FROM BUDGET STORM

'Club Fed' Reflects State's Prison Cost Debate

Duluth, Minn. - The first time Mario Martinez was served steak and
lobster in federal prison, he was thrilled. By the fourth time, the
disbarred Milwaukee lawyer was just plain angry.

"What am I doing here? I could be home working, making restitution to
my victims," the 42-year-old inmate says. "This makes no sense."

In an era of fiscal restraint, with budget problems festering in
Madison, Martinez and others - including judges, lawmakers,
prosecutors and even victims - are arguing that Wisconsin taxpayers
need to rethink more than ever whether they can afford to incarcerate
so many criminals, especially those convicted of non-violent crimes.

Martinez, a Milwaukee native, was convicted in 1999 of stealing more
than $75,000 from his clients and sentenced to eight years in state
prison. For most of the past 15 months, Martinez has been doing time
at Duluth Federal Prison Camp under a contract the state has with the
federal government.

In addition to occasional steak and lobster dinners, the former Air
Force base features tennis and racquetball courts, a machine shop, a
300-seat movie theater with a popcorn booth, a computer lab, classes
on self-esteem building and a cafeteria with a fieldstone fireplace.

"Today is chef salad day," Martinez says, shaking his
head.

Martinez regularly avails himself of the Blockbuster video offerings.
Recently, the inmates viewed a film titled "Burglary." But he has
opted out of the municipal softball league team that plays across the
courtyard from the library.

Martinez has plenty of company at the prison. Todd Graham Smith, 37, a
native of Stillwater, Minn., is serving a six-year sentence for
forgery after he was convicted in St. Croix County of writing $3,100
in bad checks by improperly signing the names of his former boss and
girlfriend.

"The taxpayers of Wisconsin are footing the bill for my time here, and
I've never paid one dime in property tax," he said. "Tell the people
of Wisconsin thanks for the lobster. We are very well taken care of up
here."

Ricardo Shavaz, the warden of the minimum-security prison that is
dubbed Club Fed by some, defends the programs as appropriate for
keeping the prisoners busy. As for the lobster, Shavaz says his food
service director bought it wholesale for $1 a pound.

"It was a tremendous bargain," Shavaz says.

That's the same argument Wisconsin prison officials use to defend
sending inmates to Duluth - the cost is $44 per day, compared with an
average $73 for prisoners held in state. But that doesn't take into
account the cost of transporting inmates back and forth. More
important, it sidesteps the question of whether some should be
incarcerated for as long as they are.

The budget for the Department of Corrections in 2001 topped $910
million, making it one of the state's most expensive budget items.

That's too much money and too many people, says Thomas Barland,
retired Circuit Court judge from Eau Claire, who headed two recent
gubernatorial task forces on prison reform issues.

"We are sending people to prison who could be handled in ways other
than going to prison without endangering the public and for less
money," he says.

But often judges are reluctant to do anything short of imposing long
prison sentences, for fear of being perceived as being "soft on
crime," he says.

Judges are doing what they think the public wants them
to.

"There is a cultural barrier against probation," he
says.

Playing Politics

Wisconsin has one of the highest inmate population growth rates in the
country, according to a report by the Governor's Task Force to Enhance
Probation completed in September 2000. The state's prison population
has nearly tripled in the past 10 years to about 21,000 inmates.
That's 4,000more than there are beds to house them. So the excess
inmates, such as Martinez, are shipped out of state to prisons in
Minnesota, Tennessee or Oklahoma. Wisconsin now exports more inmates
than any other state.

Complicating matters further, say Barland and others, state
legislators have passed only half of the "truth-in-sentencing"
legislation. In the past, judges handed down sentences with the
understanding that a convict would spend only part of the time behind
bars. Lawmakers eliminated the possibility of parole for anyone
sentenced after Dec. 31, 1999, but did not adopt new guidelines that
would have shortened sentences proportionately. Without them, convicts
are staying in prison longer than ever.

That second part of the equation has been mired in partisan politics
for the past three years, with the Republican-controlled state
Assembly and the Democrat-controlled Senate stalling on passing one
another's version of the guidelines.

Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen blames the Democrats and State Sen. Gary
George, senate president pro tem, in particular, for derailing the
issue in hopes of bankrupting the state prison system. George is a
candidate for governor.

"Here are the cards they are playing: They want to make the costs so
extraordinary that the state will be forced to undo truth in
sentencing," Jensen says. "It is an extraordinarily reckless gamble."

George, who was out of town on vacation, was not available for
comment. His spokesman, Dave Begel, says: "Democrats are determined to
provide some flexibility for modifying sentences, either upward or
downward, when the conditions warrant. Otherwise, Republicans will get
their wish, which is to build a dome over Wisconsin and call the
entire state a prison."

As the politicians spar, the number of inmates - and the associated
costs to taxpayers - keep climbing.

"It's very frustrating," Barland says.

He warned of such a phenomenon when his task force first recommended
truth in sentencing four years ago.

"I cannot emphasize more strongly the need to reinvent and enhance
probation now, so that the state can have an attractive alternative to
prison when judges begin sentencing under truth in sentencing next
year," Barland wrote in 1998 in his foreword to the report.

He noted that intensive probation, with drug and alcohol counseling,
cost roughly $8,000 per person per year at the time. Regular probation
ran around $1,500 per person per year.

In addition to forming a committee to revise criminal penalties,
then-Gov. Tommy Thompson commissioned a committee to consider ways to
enhance probation as a cheaper alternative to prison for non-violent
crimes. Four years later, the enhanced probation committee report has
not yet been formally received and reviewed, though it was completed
over a year-and-a-half ago.

Thompson, who left office during his fourth term to become President
Bush's secretary of health and human services, often pushed for an
increase in the number of state prisons and stricter sentences.
However, Barland, says, toward the end of his tenure as governor,
Thompson called him into his office and told him the trend needed to
stop or prison costs would take up too much of the state budget.

"He said he didn't want any more prisons built," Barland says. "He
wanted to turn it in another direction."

Thompson could not be reached for comment, according to his aide Tony
Jewell.

States across the country are rethinking the
"lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key"
policies of the 1980s and 1990s, says Marc Mauer, who co-wrote a
study, released last month by the Sentencing Project, a national
non-profit organization dedicated to criminal justice advocacy.

"Budget shortfalls in nearly every state have driven many states to
consider cutting corrections budgets," Mauer says. "Fiscal realities
are hitting hard."

The fiscal reality in Wisconsin is that the state is facing a $1.1
billion budget shortfall.That makes inmates such as Martinez wonder
all the more why they need to be locked up for more than $26,000 a
year.

Martinez, raised in a house at S. 16th St. and W. Greenfield Ave. on
Milwaukee's south side, was a football star at Thomas More High
School. He went to UW-Milwaukee and graduated from Marquette
University Law School in 1986, much to the delight of his mother,
Maria, a longtime clerk for Circuit Judge Robert Landry. A glib man
with a ready smile, Martinez went to work defending petty criminals on
such matters as battery and drug possession.

If it was not a way to get rich, Martinez enjoyed a comfortable living
with his wife and their son, particularly when those same clients
would hire him to represent them in other matters.

Jim Mullins, 32, had hired Martinez in 1994 to help him after he was
charged with drug possession. Two years, later, when Mullins was
arrested again, this time with $12,000 in his pockets, he again hired
Martinez. Police figured the money was from a drug sale, when, in
fact, it was an inheritance that Mullins was carrying with him, having
been evicted that day from his former girlfriend's apartment. The
police seized the money; Martinez's job was to get it back.

But Martinez was quietly getting himself into trouble. He gambled on
sports games, using money from his clients' trust funds to pay off his
debts. The more he lost, the more he drank, and the more he bet, and
the deeper he dug into his clients' accounts.

In Mullins' case, Martinez did, as it turns out, get the money back -
but he pocketed it for himself, telling Mullins it was being held as
evidence.

By the time the white-collar crime unit of the district attorney's
office caught up with Martinez, he had stolen more than $73,000 from
more than 20 clients, including Heidi Barczynski, a 10-year-old girl
who was badly disfigured in a car accident. Martinez admitted spending
$50,000 of her money from an insurance settlement that was to have
been set aside for medical expenses and college tuition.

Martinez sobbed at his sentencing hearing.

"I've hurt a lot of people," he said.

He blamed his financial problems on his diabetes and coronary artery
disease, which forced him, he said, to scale back his work time to 25
or 30 hours a week.

The probation and parole agent from the Department of Corrections
recommended a sentence of one year in the county jail. The district
attorney's office pushed for five years.

Martinez begged the judge for leniency, noting that he had been
disbarred.

"My responsibility is to get employed," he said. "My responsibility to
is pay these people back. My responsibility is to restore the name
that my wife and my child still use, and I beg you for that
opportunity."

But, in the end, Circuit Judge Bonnie Gordon sentenced him to eight
years in prison, saying, "members of our community have the right to
be protected from persons who use their professional position to
reward themselves unjustly at the expense of their clients."

After three weeks of getting his affairs in order, Martinez reported
to Dodge Correctional Institute, where he was put in a locked cell and
administered a battery of psychological tests.

A month later, he was sent to Columbia Correctional Institute, a
minimum-security prison. Ten weeks later, he was transferred to Duluth.

Mixed Feelings

It's a common complaint of critics of out-of-state placement that
inmates lose any sense of family support because visits are so
difficult. Indeed, the seven-hour car ride has put an additional
strain on Martinez's marriage. His wife, Donna, told him recently that
she would be seeking a divorce.

Like the 564 other inmates there - about 100 from Wisconsin - Martinez
is assigned to a barracks and given a bed and a desk. There are no
doors in the barracks bedrooms; nor are there bars on the walls or
windows.

For two hours each weekday, Martinez teaches a class on law. He has
some menial chores to perform, but the rest of the time, he says, is
pretty much his own. He reads a good deal and watches some TV. Each
barracks is equipped with a television.

He was up for parole in August. After a telephone hearing, the parole
commission denied his request, saying he was an unreasonable risk for
flight, and that he had not served enough time for his crime.

His sister, Rebecca, died Jan. 13 in California of complications from
diabetes. She was 45. Martinez could have attended the funeral but
said he could not afford the airfare.

"There is nothing more that the Department of Correction can do to me
that I haven't already done to myself," says Martinez, sitting in the
visiting room at the prison. He adds that he has a job lined up on the
outside, if he could get out.

Like many who know of his case, his victims are divided. Mullins, the
man who lost the $12,000 in his pocket, says he'd like to see Martinez
serve "every second of those eight years." But Sammy Storm, 36, a
scientist at S.C. Johnson & Son Inc., feels differently. Martinez was
convicted of taking $5,800 from him.

"He's a snake and a crook," Storm says of Martinez. "But I don't see
what good it is doing having him stay in prison any longer. I say get
him out and get him back to work. He should be paying us. We shouldn't
be paying for him."