Wisconsin Public Television

Transcript: In Wisconsin

Original Air Date: November 23, 2006

Patty Loew:

Hello and Welcome to "In Wisconsin." I'm Patty Loew. This week, just as these teens have begun to master one of the biggest challenges of their lives, find out what happens to put it all in jeopardy. Follow this wildlife detective on a search for clues to why this little critter is in trouble. And discover what happened in this college professor's past that makes him thankful for his life and driven to share his bounty. We'll also take you on a walk through a quiet stand of oak on an early winter day, "In Wisconsin."

Loew:

Most Thanksgiving celebrations are centered around family. In good times and bad, family has an undeniable influence on our lives. That's something that was brought home to the group of teenagers we've been following in our Challenge Academy series. The Wisconsin National Guard program rewards the cadets around the halfway point with a family day. The teens get to see their parents for the first time in months. They get to show their families just how much they've changed. But as Frederica Freyberg reports, while the cadets may be on a new road, some of their families are on the same old path.

Frederica Freyberg:

Parents anxiously await the sight of their children, now known as cadets. Marching in formation, military cadence, and clothing, and comportment. But these young men and women are different from the teenagers parents said goodbye to three months ago. Most of the 200 or so teens who end up at Challenge Academy every year have either already dropped out of high school, or were on track to. The military school run by the National Guard gets the kids back on track in a hurry.

Instructor:

Let's go, let's go. No time for walking around here. Let's go.

Peter Blum:

The comment that I always hear from moms and dads is, "You gave us our child back." And that typically brings tears to my eyes.

Freyberg:

And there is no shortage of tears on this day, because for this one day, the tough love practiced at the academy is softened. Cadets are allowed to melt in to a familiar embrace.

Mom:

First, I would say six weeks were devastating. We didn't know what to do with ourselves.

Freyberg:

But now, in reunion, there are family photos, and forbidden treats, a happy holiday from rules and rigor. 17-year-old Randi Wetzel came to Challenge Academy after getting expelled from her high school for partying. Her mom says she sees a change.

Mom:

She thought the biggest problem she had was getting, not what she did, but getting caught at what she was doing. And that everything we ever told you was exactly what they taught her here. I'm going to feel a lot better when she takes off now with her friends, because I think she's going to make better friends and better choices.

Freyberg:

But nearly lost in the festivities of the day, the cadets whose parents are not in attendance. DeShawn Jackson busies himself with cleaning detail on parents day, putting a game face on the fact he has no family willing or able to visit from Kenosha. Challenge Academy staff hope the skills learned here will help him through.

Blum:

Part of what we're doing here with these kids is to teach them that they are much tougher than they believe they are.

Freyberg:

Teaching these kids how to rise above mistakes and disappointment. Jackson has had plenty of both. He was a high school dropout, in and out of foster homes for much of his life. He was living on his own, before his former high school counselors suggested the last-chance school at Fort McCoy.

Kevin Aronin:

He has some intrinsic drive to him, and something like this structure, he needs that.

Danielle Smith:

He's getting strong.

Freyberg:

For Joey and Danielle Smith, this day off from strict structure means getting to see each other for the first time since boys and girls split up the day they arrived. The brother and sister came to Fort McCoy together, together, like always. They say in their broken home, they are each other's only strength. When they both began failing in high school, they both wanted to pull out of their tailspin together.

Danielle Smith:

We're very healthy kids.

Joey Smith:

I think before I came here, I was kind of slouchy and kind of lazy.

Freyberg:

The pair is now filled with pride, and anticipation. Joey and Danielle watch and wait for their mother to arrive to share their successes. But as the minutes turn to hours and other families talk and laugh around them, it's clear their mother is not coming.

Danielle Smith:

This is how she's been all me and Joey's life. She just shows up when she wants to.

Freyberg:

Joey was allowed to leave the family festivities.

Danielle Smith:

Joey's upset, but I know that he's keeping it all inside because he doesn't want the other cadets to see him cry.

Freyberg:

Danielle wanted to talk about this latest and perhaps greatest disappointment. She wanted the heartbreak committed to tape for her mother to see.

Danielle Smith:

My mom was never there for me when I was a kid, and I never grew up with her. I finally want her to be here for me and she doesn't show up. It just upsets me.

Freyberg:

But it is with new resolve, born of lessons learned about courage, honor and integrity that Danielle Smith vows to rise above the mistakes of her mother.

Danielle Smith:

I'm going to show her that it doesn't matter what she does to me, that I don't need that. I can still be a strong person and get through it.

Loew:

Find out next week if Danielle and the others will make it through to graduation. It's the final chapter in our Challenge Academy series. Will these teenagers, who've already changed so much sabotage their own futures, as they've done so many times before?

Blum:

What we see is fear. The kids are afraid. They're going right back to those environments where they had trouble, where drugs were present, where abuse was present.

Loew:

Tune in next week to find out who's going to make it. In the meantime, you can log on to our Web site: wpt.org/inwisconsin to watch the first three reports in our Challenge Academy series.

Loew:

We turn now to a wildlife mystery. Wildlife biologists have released hundreds of martens, an endangered animal into the wilds of Wisconsin. But yet, the population continues to decline. Why? To answer that question, producer JoAnne Garrett spent time with researcher Jonathan Gilbert last fall and winter as he trapped the elusive, tiny mammal.

JoAnne Garrett:

You're looking at something quite remarkable.

Jonathan Gilbert:

You're only talking about a few hundred in the whole state.

Garrett:

You're looking at something very few people have seen, a marten in the wild, that's marten, the mammal. Jonathan Gilbert is a wildlife biologist for the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission.

Gilbert:

I think they're both on a scent trail.

Garrett:

And for the past 15 years, Gilbert has followed this animal by track, down trails, deep into the heart of the forest, leading fellow researchers on a quest to learn more about this little-known native.

Gilbert:

Martens are big weasels.

Garrett:

Martens are rare in this state, and meaningful.

Gilbert:

They're a state and tribal endangered species. It's also an Ojibwe Clan animal. Marten Clan members are the defenders of the village, warriors in their society. And we can see that from a marten's behavior sometimes. When we get them in a trap, they're very feisty and really aggressive. You know, that's kind of like, I think the tribes took that energy and feistiness and used that when deciding what Clan to choose for the warriors.

Garrett:

The ferocity comes in a very small package.

Gilbert:

They're little animals. They're 18-20 inches long.

Garrett:

This pint-sized predator disappeared from Wisconsin by 1925, pushed out by the twin pressures of too much trapping and the clear-cut of the northern forests. Our forests rebounded. And in the 1950s, this animal, the fisher, which is related to the marten, was reintroduced in the state to great success.

Gilbert:

Now we have 10,000 in the state and it supports a nice trapping season. So, fishers are doing really well. The thought was well, the same thing should happen with martens, because they're very related animals. Well, it has not.

Garrett:

Some 200 martens were reintroduced in the Nicolet National Forest in the 1970s. Over 150 were reintroduced in the Chequamegon, the site of Gilbert's current research, in the early '90s.

Gilbert:

We put 150 out ten years ago. Now we have maybe 40 or 50 around, so we're on a downward trajectory. Why is that martens are not doing as well as we thought they should, and certainly not as well as fishers. That's what this research is about.

Garrett:

To study an animal, first you must find it. There are 1.5 million acres in the Chequamegon National Forest, and an estimated 40-50 martens.

Gilbert:

That's why snow is so wonderful. That's why winter is the best time.

Garrett:

Snow, the scientists best friend. Watch what Gilbert can do with good old-fashioned tracks.

Gilbert:

Five toes. Five toes helps a lot. See, all dogs: wolves, foxes, coyotes have four toes. These have five toes, so that tells me right away that it's not a dog. The only other thing it could be really, the size like this, is a fisher. Here's five toes again, a much smaller track than the fisher track. The foot has a lot of fur on it, so it acts like a snowshoe to keep them up on top of the snow. So, martens can travel through much deeper snow than fishers can. So, because of the fur on their feet, you don't see the pads as well. So, it's more of a poof in the snow. The tracks are two-by-two, by two. See that pattern? That's very characteristic of fishers and martens and minks. Hardly any other animal has a gait like that. There we go, martens.

Garrett:

They follow tracks. They troll for DNA.

Gilbert:

When this is up on a tree, small animals can come in from the bottom or from the top to get to the bait. As they go by, they brush these sticky pads and it pulls out a little bit of their hair.

Garrett:

This is a hair snare. Like a big city cop sifting for evidence, Gilbert will collect these tiny hairs and send them out for DNA analysis.

Gilbert:

It's the right color. It's the right length. It's very fine hair. I would call this marten hair, and send it off to Michigan State for them to confirm it, or deny, as the case may be.

Garrett:

The hair snare helps the crew count the marten population numbers. But where does that marten population go? What do they do? A wildlife technician with the National Forest Service combines the old and the new to find out. He follows a marten's tracks backwards, and then plots the path via GPS. All to get a sense of how martens move through the forest, and what they might need to thrive.

Technician:

They go in and out of the log. They go underneath it and around it. They're searching for small mammals. He puts his paws down. He's probably scanning the area, looking around. Then, he decides he doesn't want to go that way and changes direction. Did they climb a tree? Did they jump off a tree that they're going from?

Garrett:

Where do the martens go in a day? And most importantly, what do they need to survive? What can we do to save them? To track martens every year, the crew traps up to ten of the animals and outfits them with radio collars. Cajoling the weasel into the trap isn't easy.

Gilbert:

The trap is not science, it's an art. And you need an artist who knows what they're doing to make good trap sets.

Garrett:

Ron, a wildlife technician for the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission is a Picasso of marten traps.

Ron:

Put grass in there, so he's got something to stay warm if they want to curl up, they'll stay warm in there.

Garrett:

To hide the trap, he creates a little home. It's an elaborate job, a kind of "Martha Stewart" for martens.

Ron:

They're very curious, you know, it'll be a new dark spot and they'll want to investigate it. There's good smells coming from in there.

Garrett:

They cradle the structure with pine boughs, roof it with layers of bark.

Ron:

The objective is to keep them protected in there as best we can.

Garrett:

The last touch.

Ron:

Feathers hanging in front of the trap.

Garrett:

Success. Martens are also known as pine martens. They need forests. And they need a particular part.

Joe:

This kind of stuff is really important to them.

Garrett:

They need what's called structure, downed logs, woody underbrush, places for their prey to hide, places for them to hide.

Gilbert:

Martens aren't able to, they don't store a lot of body fat, so they're not able to withstand the cold very well. So, they have to find shelter like this.

Garrett:

There's a marten in there, hidden in a winter resting site, an old white pine stump. Structure. It may be that some simple changes in logging practices might be enough to save the marten. Simple changes, like leaving some stuff on the forest floor.

Gilbert:

Cut some trees down and leave them, so we have big logs on the forest floor. Let's push some trees over so it pulls up their roots and create tip-ups. Maybe we can cut some trees with big stumps. It could be as simple as that. I'm quite sure there can be compatibility between harvesting forest products and managing for martens. We have an endangered species, so we have to figure out how to make it not endangered. They're beautiful. They're great animals. It's very much a privilege to work with them.

Loew:

Thanksgiving weekend is a good time for us to count our blessings, especially so for people whose lives have contained dramatic detours. That's the case for Professor Stephen Richards. His life took a very unexpected path, one that inspired his passion for the idea that everyone deserves a second chance.

Andy Soth:

About four miles from the UW-Oshkosh campus, is the Oshkosh Correctional Institution. But for these inmates, it must seem a world apart.

Stephen Richards:

You've seen a lot of guys leave this prison and then come back.

Soth:

Criminology professor Steven Richards is trying to bridge that cap.

Richards:

I want you to understand that this program, which is inviting convicts to college, is our way of inviting you upon leaving prison to go to the university.

Soth:

Richards has started this pilot program, a non-credit introduction to college taught by senior UW-Oshkosh criminal science majors.

Lindsay Ejnik:

I'm surprised at how at ease I feel in here. I thought there would be more of a tension between me and my classmates, but there really isn't.

Dustin Ellwitz:

The fact that they just want to help so much and that they're doing as much as they are to help, you know, get the ball going is exciting.

Daniel Sword:

So many people just spend so much time on nonsense, or how they're going to do this when they get out. And really all you hear coming out of their mouth is how they're going to come right back here. So to find some sort of stimulating conversation, what are your real dreams? What would you really like when you get out of here? We don't get a lot of that.

Richards:

You've got to plan a new future. When you get out of here go to a university.

Soth:

Richards believes higher education is the best way to keep convicts from returning to prison. It is, in fact, his life story.

Richards:

When I look back over my life, I'm not surprised I'm a professor. I'm more surprised that I had that detour.

Soth:

Raised in a Milwaukee orphanage, Richards graduated from high school in 1969 and enrolled at UW-Madison.

Richards:

During the days of rage, the anti-war demonstrations. We thought we could change the world, and maybe in some ways we did. At least for myself, it provided detours, and I think I sort of departed from the mainstream.

Soth:

The departure included dealing marijuana. Eventually, Richards was caught up in a federal sting operation, charged with conspiracy to buy.

Richards:

I was convicted of distributing marijuana. I pled not guilty, had a jury trial, an appellate case, then a Supreme Court case. I pled not guilty, but I'm not innocent. I mean, I was involved.

Soth:

Richards received a nine-year sentence doing time at several federal prisons.

Richards:

So it was a shock for me to see beatings and death, to see gun towers shooting people, to see suicides.

Soth:

At that time parole was more commonly granted.

Richards:

So I walked out after three years and was okay. But if I had been there eight or nine, no.

Soth:

Instead, he spent those years after prison earning a doctorate in criminology.

Richards:

It would be a lot easier for me to have gotten a PhD in English or chemistry, you know, and never have to talk about it again. But because I teach courses in corrections, I have to. Just to be honest, I have to.

Soth:

Richards has brought that same honesty to his field leading a movement called "Convict Criminology."

Richards:

The Convict Criminology group is now something like three dozen ex-cons right now.

Soth:

It brings the prisoners' perspective, and it also encourages convicts to consider higher education.

Richards:

Upon serving their time, paying their debt to society, we would want them when they walk out of prison to have a fair chance to make it, to rejoin us in the community, and one of the ways to do that is to go to college.

Dustin Ellwitz:

Just to know that you don't have to go straight to construction when you get out. You don't have to be a janitor. You can be a college professor and be a felon.

Richards:

But you want to read serious books, college level material. And I know it's hard. I mean, I had to do the same thing. It's hard.

Jesse Rasmussen:

Oh, I know there's a lot more possibilities now. I mean, thanks to them, my whole world is instead of being small now, instead of being on parole now, I have a lot more roads to take that can better my future.

Daniel Sword:

I try to stay focused in that way. Education is the only thing that's going to keep me from coming back here.

Soth:

Instilling that hope is what drives Richards' work as a convict criminologist.

Richards:

I've met people in maximum security prisons who became friends, and people who I still think of, and I wonder if they're still alive, if they ever got out. There are some nights when I see their faces, I see the cell block, I see 500 men in cages. And if they read something I write, or they see me on TV, they might remember me, and they might remember that there is a way out, that there is a life after prison.

Loew:

You can find out more about the Convict Criminology program by logging on to our Web site: wpt. org/inwisconsin Information on all of this week's reports can be found there. That's our program for this week. We leave you with a wintery walk through Olsen Oak Woods in Dane County. For In Wisconsin, I'm Patty Loew. See you next time.