The following program is a PBS Wisconsin original production.
How will a $13-an-hour pay raise for correctional officers ease conditions at Wisconsin prisons?
How border communities are dealing with marijuana crossing through?
And more university campuses feel the budget acts.
I'm Frederica Freiber, tonight I'm here and now.
Why short-staffed state prisons means more lockdowns than Zach Schultz reports on legal
marijuana surrounding Wisconsin.
A former vice chancellor urges caution when it comes to closing two-year campuses and
the next Wisconsin in black and white.
This week health divides.
It's here and now for October 27th.
Funding for here and now is provided by the Focus Fund for Journalism and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.
Three Wisconsin prisons have such a shortage of correctional officers they are on some form
of lockdown or as the agency prefers modified movement.
For example at the maximum security while pun prison the vacancy rate for guards sits
at about 53 percent.
At the Green Bay prison it's a 41 percent vacancy rate and it's Stanley it's nearly
44 percent.
Democrats looking to attract people to become corrections officers have been hitting airwaves
and online recently.
The Department of Corrections expects to be able to recruit and retain more officers
with the newly approved pay bump from $20 an hour to $33.
A raise that went into effect this week.
The Wisconsin policy forum just released a report titled Prison Blues which explored
prison spending in the state.
Research director Jason Stein joins us on this and thanks a lot for being here.
My pleasure thank you.
So the Department of Corrections describes a dire staffing shortage in its prisons as
evidenced by the lockdown of inmates.
Max Cadywapon as we just mentioned with that 53 percent vacancy rate.
How should this pay bump ameliorate this problem?
It's going to help obviously across the labor market we've seen employer challenges turn
over rates rising and that's across the government but in our state institutions
our 24 seven institutions that's where it's been most acute.
I think the challenges in 2022 they were more than 2000 vacancies within the prison system
so when you think about and you can't simply bring someone in off the street put them in
a place like Wapon and have them walk the line.
You have to train these people so they're going to turn the ship in the water but it's
a big ship at a long turn.
How long a coming has this pay raise been?
It took us years to get in this position of across the government and particularly within
the prison system having these vacancies and this gap between what the state was willing
to pay and what people were willing to do because coming to work every day in a prison
is new slash a very difficult job and so it's going to take time to get out of this hole.
According to that problem the state's 37 prisons are over capacity with those incarcerated
and this has long been the case and we incarcerate more people than neighboring states.
Why this mismatch with our neighbors?
Going back to the 90s Wisconsin built a large prison system and despite the fact that it's
a large system it's been over capacity even when we dipped in population during the pandemic
we remained over capacity.
It comes down to we incarcerate at higher rates than our neighbors higher rates than
national average and that leads to per capita spending on corrections being higher in Wisconsin
than in our neighboring states.
This is again something that you cannot change overnight but there are things that the state
can do and the state has the resources now to try and bend this curve over the next generation.
How do you bend this curve in that way?
You know one the biggest contributor to incarceration in the state has been revocations so it's
not people that are committing a crime for the first time it may be a crime but there
are people who have been released on extended supervision into the community and something
whether it's substance abuse whether it's a mental health challenge whether it's new
criminal activity is landing them back in the system and so the state has been testing
methods and has actually lowered that revocation rate and so that will make a difference going
forward but then we also have to ensure that public safety is maintained while those revocation
rates are lowered as well.
Right and I can imagine that's the kind of effort that takes a while to bring those
numbers down.
Correct I mean you know substance abuse mental health challenges these are very difficult
problems to deal with for anyone in the population and you know one area where the state one
bright spot as the state does have within its large state surplus the ability to invest
in targeted you know to experiment and invest in targeted methods to try and deal with these
problems.
So Wisconsin is spending 2.76 billion dollars on corrections in the current state budget
again more per inmate than surrounding states and is it a function of just having more
inmates and more prisons that we're spending more than our surrounding states.
Yeah it's largely a function of that and the thing that people need to understand is state
prisons are not something that the federal government is going to give you money for it's
not something that any other state is going to give you money for you're going to have
to pay for that as a state with your own tax dollars and so finding ways to ensure public
safety but also minimize corrections spending over time is going to the savings is almost
entirely going to go to taxpayers if you can thread that needle.
Hopefully people will start threading that you know Jason Stein thanks very much.
Thank you.
Wisconsin is surrounded by legal marijuana with both Illinois and Michigan legalizing
the recreational use of marijuana in the last few years and Minnesota voting to do
the same earlier this year.
It's estimated more than half of all state residents over the age of 21 live within a
75 minute drive to a legal dispensary and that number will only increase.
Here in now senior political reporter Zach Schultz explains how this leaves Wisconsin
residents and law enforcement caught in a gray area where a product purchased legally
in another state becomes illegal the minute it crosses the border.
The highway 41 bridge travels over the Menominee River carrying you out of Wisconsin and into
Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
Take the first right and you're in the parking lot of a recreational marijuana dispensary.
If you go through the drive through you don't even need to exit your car to purchase legal
marijuana products and start the drive back across the river.
Yeah just a really optimal location.
Lindsay Martwick is the director of retail operations for higher love.
She says most of their customers are from over the border.
A good majority are folks from Wisconsin.
They're currently operating out of a trailer but are building a permanent location next
door.
The folks that are coming to us from Wisconsin we get to bring more people into the higher
low family and we're just happy to be able to provide the products and services and
supports for people from other states and be nice and close to the border for convenience.
But when their customers cross the bridge into Marinette the product they just bought is
illegal.
It's pretty consistent that cars that are stopped have marijuana products especially
if they're traveling through the area not necessarily from the area.
Patrick Kellehan is a narcotics investigator for the Marinette County Sheriff's Office.
In my office we are charged with enforcing the laws.
Marijuana is against the law in the state of Wisconsin in any form.
Deshae Moro is the Marinette County District Attorney.
Together they're trying to figure out how to handle the surge of Wisconsin residents
taking day trips for recreational marijuana.
You know that 141 corridor within the drug unit kind of had the nickname of the Green
Highway or the Green Corridor just because it was very well known for several years
now since those suspensions opened up that that was kind of the quickest access point
for legal weed for you know close to near a million people residents of Wisconsin.
So far most people pulled over with small amounts of dispensary marijuana have avoided
arrest instead they likely receive a citation and the confiscation of their purchase.
There's always been a triage approach there has to be in this line of work and so yes
if it's a small amount of weed that may be treated differently than a small amount
of heroin.
On April 20th of this year a Marinette Sheriff's Deputy pulled over a car with two men and
seized a backpack full of recreational marijuana.
When the Sheriff's Office displayed the bust on their Facebook page the post attracted
thousands of comments ranging from ridicule to support.
I don't think people really realize that that's not everything that we got.
We had four or five other interdiction stops that day and that was just one one traffic
stop.
So you know there was a lot of feedback but you know we revert to the District Attorney
and the laws of the state of Wisconsin.
The two men received ordinance citations for two hundred sixty three dollars.
They had traveled from Oshkosh more than a hundred miles away.
In many ways it's not surprising as some of the dispensaries start advertising on billboards
as far south as Fond du Lac.
The more we can advertise and let people know that we're here the better.
Lindsey Markwick says the risk belongs to the customer and it's a risk they're clearly
willing to take.
They know that where they're heading it's not legal and no one wants to be in that
light.
So we do make sure to try to express to our customers what to pay attention to if they
are crossing that line.
It's clear that the most dangerous thing about cannabis in Wisconsin is that it is illegal.
Senator Melissa A. Garde is a Democrat from Madison.
We are an island of prohibition and prohibition did not work in Wisconsin when it came to
alcohol or margarine.
It's not working when it comes to cannabis.
She's been traveling the state under her grassroots tour promoting her bill to legalize
recreational marijuana in Wisconsin and it is clear nearly seven out of ten people in
Wisconsin support responsible adult use policy for cannabis with the medicinal component.
However, Senator Agar doesn't have any Republican support for her bill which means it may not
get a hearing much less get a vote on the floor.
So for the last three sessions I've been working on a bill around medical marijuana and it's
slowly gaining.
Acocuses are very much more open to it.
Senator Mary Falskowski is a Republican.
Her district includes most of Marinette County.
Her proposal would legalize medicinal marijuana which would require a patient to see a doctor
to get a prescription.
As a cancer survivor she wants to see more options for pain management.
I'm trying to help patients, you know, I know people who have had very debilitating medical
conditions, our veterans, the PTSD, MS and I have firsthand knowledge of what opioids
do to you as a side effect.
But she's facing stiff opposition from her Republican colleagues who see medical marijuana
as a gateway to recreational marijuana.
She says Agar's bill doesn't help.
And Melissa is very much in favor of this and she can do, you know, whatever, but it
does make it harder in our caucus.
And I think a lot of our caucus members are looking at this going, you know, we don't
want to be Illinois, we don't want to be Minnesota.
Agar says Falskowski's last version of the bill didn't go far enough.
So devil is in the details with all policy making and Senator Falskowski has been outspoken
about her support for medicinal cannabis in Wisconsin.
But while the debate hasn't even started at the Capitol, the car still head north on
Highway 41.
Amorro says they'd appreciate some clarity from Madison.
They need to look at laws that are going to protect our young people and also to send
a very clear message to people in the state but also the law enforcement to give us bright
lines on how to enforce this.
I don't really have advice for them.
I feel bad that they're put in this position.
I think they're in an untenable situation where what is the win here?
I mean, there really is no win.
Falskowski says she's hoping to get a public hearing on her bill and maybe a vote on the
floor.
But final passage may still be a long ways off.
It's a heavy lift this session, I'm not going to say it's not, but I'm optimistic.
I'm optimistic.
Reporting from Marinette, I'm Zach Schultz for Here and Now.
In education news, UW-Plattville announced this week it is cutting 111 positions to make
up a more than $9 million deficit.
And the University of Wisconsin President J. Rothman has already announced the closure
of in-person instruction at the Fondelac and West Bend two-year campuses and the definitive
closing of UW-Rischland.
We sat down this week with Steve Wildak, Vice Chancellor Emeritus of UW-College and
UW Extension, who is critical of this move.
We should note, PBS Wisconsin is part of UW-Madison.
We started by asking his reaction.
I think my reaction was not total surprise.
My concern was at those campuses was that they were convenient casualties of enrollment
challenges at the four-year institutions.
When the UW colleges and UW Extension were dissolved by the UW system leadership in 2018,
that began a very precipitous drop in enrollments at the two-year campuses starting in 2019
that brought us to the current day.
And if you look at, again, those campuses that were attached at that time to UW-Milwaukee,
Oshkosh and Plattville, the connection is very, very clear that that did not help those campuses.
So how should the UW respond to following enrollment and with it budgets that are in
the red, not just on two-year campuses, but across the system?
Well, this didn't happen overnight.
I would contend that enrollment is not the problem.
Enrollment is the symptom that evolved from the problem of not adequately managing as
a UW system the supply and demand across its universities.
And that's called enrollment management.
And we have not had a system-wide enrollment management strategy literally since 2004-2005.
Do you think, though, that the state of Wisconsin and its public UW institutions, are there
too many of them given the demographics?
Before we begin shutting doors forever and backing out of our agreements with communities
who put up real money to build and maintain these campuses, we have to step back and put
a moratorium on any more door closures and have this conversation about where we're going
with this in higher education in Wisconsin.
In fact, you said that what you're seeing is the disintegration of the system and you
are concerned that it will get worse.
How so?
I think that the two-year campuses are in a very vulnerable spot.
They have been attached to four-year campuses who will continue to see enrollment pressures.
And I think that the commitment and the promise that the UW system and the Board of Regents
made to those communities back in the 1960s in exchange they got these campuses all on
the local property tax dollar, I'm afraid that commitment and that partnership has been put
off to the side and out of the conversation.
We have to put that right back in the middle of the conversation because that's how these
communities came to be.
What is the best path forward?
I have not seen a willingness to have a broad public strategic conversation about where we're
going with higher education in Wisconsin.
I am calling on the legislature to throw that yellow flag on the field to use a football
metaphor.
To say time out, we're doing things that are permanent.
We're doing things that will have lifelong negative consequences on communities for which
we have a high level of obligation.
And we're closing doors to higher education at a time when this state needs a higher level
of degree holders.
It needs better paying jobs.
We are becoming much less attractive to high school graduates in the UW system than we
were even seven years ago.
We have to open that can of worms to really take a close look at what we're doing and
how we want to move forward as a state.
And whether or not the existing structures of the UW system and the technical colleges,
which again are very different from those in other states, are serving our citizens and
our residents in Wisconsin the very best that they can.
All right.
Steve Welder.
Thanks very much.
Thank you.
As to the closures, universities of Wisconsin president Jay Rothman said in a statement,
quote, it's time for us to realign our branch campuses to current market realities and
prepare for the future.
The status quo, he said, is not sustainable.
Starting now to our series of special reports on race with Wisconsin in black and white,
in partnership with the Nehemiah Center for Urban Leadership Development.
Over the last three weeks, reporter Nathan Denzine explored disparities in home ownership
and the racial wealth gap in Wisconsin.
Tonight, we continue our reporting with the first of four stories on racial health disparities,
starting with why the social determinants of health are so important to outcomes.
Here's the first installment of Wisconsin in black and white health divides.
Across the board, black people in Wisconsin suffer disproportionately from bad health
and or barriers to health care.
Black children in the state are four times more likely to have lead poisoning than their
white peers.
Also in Wisconsin, black people die younger than almost all other races, and black women
are far more likely to die during pregnancy or in childbirth than white women.
The statistics are so bad for black people that in 2019, Milwaukee County declared racism
a public health crisis.
We can say all health disparities are a direct consequence of being an American descendant
of slavery.
Tito Izzard is the president and CEO for Milwaukee Health Services, where he opened
a clinic in an underserved neighborhood.
He says that because racism impacts every aspect of black Wisconsinites life, it affects
their health.
Health is, again, the narrow consequence of the condition or the environment that has
been created.
Black people, indigenous people, are disproportionately likely to be impoverished and socially stratified
circumstances.
Tiffany Green is a professor for Population Health Sciences at UW-Madison.
We know that having unstable housing, not having enough food, being poor, those contribute
to outcomes.
Health is not just things that are going on in your physical body, but it is your emotional
well-being, your mental well-being, your spiritual health, even your social health.
Dr. Jasmine Zapata is the chief medical officer for community health at the Wisconsin
Department of Health Services.
She says health is much more than trips to the doctor.
The things that happen outside of the clinic walls have more of an impact on one's health
outcomes and quality of life than the very things we do in the hospitals and clinics.
All of those factors outside of the clinic are known as the social determinants of health.
Broadly, social determinants of health refers to non-medical factors that influence one's
health outcomes.
Where people are born, where they age, where they grow, where they live, where they work.
Things outside of the traditional medical model that we think of when we think about
health outcomes.
When it comes to where Black, Wisconsinites live, only a quarter of them own their own
home.
When they face one of the highest income gaps in the country, a gap that has persisted
since 1968, another important social determinant, how close you are to fresh food.
Black Wisconsinites are five times more likely to live in a food desert than white residents.
We generally don't have control of the food that we have in our community.
Grocery stores, full-service grocery stores are often times far away from our communities.
Reggie Jackson educates people about diversity.
He says that living in a food desert means much of your food comes from gas stations
or convenience stores, where the only options are highly processed.
People don't have access to healthy food or they can't afford healthy food.
We didn't just come to this place where Black and brown people are disproportionately likely
to live in resource-deprived environments.
It is, it's racism.
Despite the declaration that racism is a public health crisis, Izzard says not much
has been done in Milwaukee since 2019 that brings parity to health outcomes.
Making that declaration without subsequent steps though is disingenuous.
So for most people in the community is like, okay, well, we hear that statement, tell us
something that we don't know already, right?
For Izzard, the only path forward is to improve all of the determinants of health.
The Madison-based Nehemiah is a community group working to take those subsequent steps.
When you start to ship systems, then you start to actually impact the outcomes.
Kim Nushel is now the community outreach facilitator at the UW School of Nursing.
When she worked as a public health nurse, she enrolled in Nehemiah's Justified Anger,
Black History for a New Day course.
The nine-week course teaches the community about race, history, and justice.
I think something like this course helps us zoom out and recognize that we all are
who we are because of everything that came before us.
Nushel said the course helped her realize the full scope of how racism has affected
health care, and shifted her perspective to see patients more holistically.
Health care is important, your genetic makeup is important, but significantly more important
are the social, economic, and environmental factors, and these are the things that we
know racism is, you know, embedded within.
The course also helped Nushel's public health team find out why young black students in
one grade school were repeatedly absent from class.
And one of the main factors was the walking route to school didn't feel safe.
So the team worked to make the path safe and inviting again.
First, they installed better lighting in a tunnel that felt unsafe, but then went further.
We raised money to respond to their idea of putting them in a mural that the kids designed.
After adding the lights, the mural, and a few other improvements, absence rates improved.
And we did show at the end of that, kids' sense of safety and sensible longing and connection
both to the school, as well as to their community and that walking route really shifted for them.
That shift brought healthy change and access to opportunity in the children's lives, who
now felt safe enough to walk to school every day.
It's good to become aware, it's better to actually transform that into actual actionable
items.
What are you specifically going to do?
For Here and Now, I'm Nathan Denzine.
For more on this and other issues facing Wisconsin, visit our website at PBS Wisconsin.org.
And then click on the news tab.
That's our program for tonight.
I'm Frederica Freiberg.
Have a good weekend.