We're rolling, right?
So I guess let's start with you.
You knew there was an investigation and you did you,
there were parallel investigations,
there's internal Governor Evers made a reference
to a federal investigation.
So how many different, how long, I mean,
is it since October, since the first death
that they were talking about that this has been going on?
Or how long has this kind of been brewing?
It's been brewing for a while and October might be right.
I didn't know there was an internal investigation.
I knew the FBI, the feds got called in for one
and I knew the Dodge County Sheriff's Department
was doing one too.
I guess in my head, I thought the FBI and the Dodge County
were kind of one and the same and working together.
And that may not have actually been the case,
but I did know there were investigations going on
to the different deaths that were happening
at what Pine Correctional.
And going back to March of 2020,
what would it have been?
What years did it now have forced?
So March of 2023 when they did the,
it wasn't really a lockdown, the modified movement.
I knew since then there's been a lot of media coverage
and issues that have been happening there.
So I wasn't surprised at the investigations going on.
One weird thing about when you're the mayor of Wapon,
when they put in the modified movement
or lockdown stuff last year's spring,
people started calling me and sending me mail and emails
from all over the state in the country
who have loved ones in the prison.
They didn't like some of the stuff being done
and they thought there was more that I could do.
But as the mayor of the city,
I don't run the prison in any way.
I just work to have a really good working relationship
with the prison staff because it's a very unique thing.
If you drive around the state of Wisconsin,
most of your prisons are out in the country somewhere.
But the city of Wapon has three prisons
and they're in our city limits.
And it's a unique thing to Wapon.
It's something we're used to,
our police departments used to,
and our fire departments used to,
but it's just something that we do deal with
and we work with and we think nothing of it.
But they're here and we just try to have
a really good working relationship.
So when you look at what the press conference brought
with these charges, what was your reaction
to charging that many people for these incidents?
I was surprised at that.
I think I'm not saying the sheriff, the anything writer,
I'm not going in there.
But I think most of the people who work at the prison
are almost all of them, or all of them.
They're going to work, they have a tough job.
Correctional officers and as the mayor of Wapon,
I've been trying to raise a stink on their behalf
for a few years now.
And I hope that I played a small role
in helping Representative Schrod
push through the pay raise they got.
It's a thankless job.
People see correctional officers,
like you run them in the local courtship.
They've got their blue shirt on and all that.
Then they go to work.
But unlike a police officer,
you don't see them out working
because they're on the other side of the wall.
And they do a thankless job and it's a hard job.
And I've toured Wapon Correctional Institution
and there's some really bad people in there.
And they will insult you, they will swear to you,
they will throw things at you.
And there's only so much correctional officers can do.
It's a high stress job.
It can be a thankless job.
It can be a miserable job.
But at the same time, it can be a great career.
But I don't think they ever got enough respect
and it's a hard job to do.
And so I was sad to see so many people get wrapped up in it.
And on a personal note,
I did not know the warden until I became the mayor.
But having, I'm in my third year as the mayor.
In my relationship with Randy Hupp was phenomenal.
He gave me and my staff for last year a tour of the prison.
And his love for Wapon Correctional,
the history of it, what it means to the city.
He knew everyone who worked there by their first name.
Most of the inmates he knew and they knew who he was.
There were times where the tour stopped
and we'd have like a group of people
that was almost like a town hall and he'd answer questions
and try to make life better for the prisoners
that were in there.
And just the way we would work together
on city issues dealing with corrections,
I was really sad to see his name get wrapped up in it
because I think Randy put in 40 years for corrections.
I think he loved what he did.
I think he loved Wapon Correctional.
He could have retired a while ago
and he stayed around because I think he truly wanted
to fix the problem over there.
And so when I was called by the sheriff
and given a heads up what was coming,
I hung up the phone and then walked on my hallway
and literally went through up.
I was really sad to see that
because I do believe Randy's a good guy
whose intentions were good
and he tried to really, really hard.
And I wonder why it stops with him.
Like I get state statute puts the word in charge
of everyone there.
So I see where that's coming from.
But at the same time they're boxed in
by the policies from up above.
And I mean the last few governors,
I don't think have done much for corrections.
You can go back, Scott Walker never came to Wapon
and never visited a prison.
Tony Evers has done that,
but I don't think he's taken the bull by the horns
and fixed any of these problems.
I think you go back to the Tommy Thompson era
and Scott McCallum.
Those were the last governors
who cared about corrections and really fought for.
When Tommy Thompson was the governor,
our corrections was the envy of the country.
And like we would send people from our prisons
to train around the country how to run a prison.
And correctional officers respected him and morale was high.
And these things didn't happen.
I'm not Tony Evers and I'm not here to give him advice.
But if I was in his shoes, I'd call Tommy Thompson
and see if he'd be willing to be the corrections secretary
for a year and fix this.
Because I know the correctional officers
respect the heck out of him.
But a lot's changed since Tommy Thompson's era.
Funding for the prisons and also act 10
taking away the unions for prison workers
has changed the climate inside those facilities
dramatically.
Can you remove the, is there a line coming from the states
under investment in the prison system?
The lack of rights for prison guards
in terms of their union rights?
And then draw that to what we see here
in terms of short staffing, modified movement issues,
low morale, all the problems that lead
to these kinds of incidents.
Definitely.
And there's two sides to that too.
I've always been on the Republican side of things.
And when act 10 happened, I supported it.
And it did a lot to give local city governments like me,
school boards, more control over their local stuff.
And that's good.
It saved taxpayers a lot of money.
I understand why they went on corrections too.
They needed to kick in on the pension benefits
and the health insurance because of the cost
and we were in the state budget deficit.
I didn't say it's 2020, but at the time,
I did say I wished that they could have found a way
to let correctional officers still union.
I want to recognize for safety and security reasons.
Their number one concern is their safety
and getting home safe.
And then the politics of it, like,
correctional officers, they were supporters
of Republicans in the Thompson area,
they fell away from that.
I think Republican elected officials didn't care enough
because they weren't voting for them.
And the Democrat party is more soft on crime
for lack of a better way of putting it.
And I think there was no one looking out for them.
And that went on for 14 years.
It led to their pay wasn't very good for what they were doing.
The benefits weren't as attractive as they were.
Morale went down.
And in corrections, it used to be it was a generational job.
My dad worked there, I worked there,
then their kid would work there.
What happened after 2010 is people were like,
don't come work here, just don't do it.
And that got out into the community
and people stopped doing it.
And that wasn't a good thing.
The very sad thing too about this is
after these new pay raises that came through
in the last eight budget,
you can see in the corrections academy classes
the numbers are up.
People are coming to work for corrections again.
They're getting there,
I would say within two years,
the vacancy rate is gonna get down to where it's manageable
and the prison can go back to the way it used to be.
And then this hits the news.
And I can see why this would deter people
from wanting to work in corrections
because a lot of these are just people going to do their job.
And I think they got swept up in something bigger than them.
And I don't know Secretary Carr
and I've never met the governor,
but I do hope that they at least take
some of the responsibility and do something to fix this.
When you, have you read the criminal complaint?
Yeah, most of it.
I got it yesterday.
Yeah, so when you read through
some of the individual charges,
a lot of them, especially for the most recent death,
the starvation exposure death,
a lot of those are for negligence
in terms of checking on inmates,
falsifying records of whether they made their rounds.
And there, all of them are saying,
well, I was doing a different job at the same time.
They're almost being coerced into covering up
that they weren't doing these things.
And it makes you seem like,
if someone else had had that shift,
they would have been doing the same sign off
on that made their rounds
and doing another job at the same time.
It just happened to be them
that was on the shift where someone died.
Well, one of the persons that was charged,
their shift was ending.
I think it was one of the nurses that the sheriff referenced
and they didn't follow up on it
because their shift was ending,
but they'd been there for 16 hours or just tired.
I worked at a local car dealership in Tana.
We sold a vehicle to a correctional officer
who crashed his car because he fell asleep.
He just worked three doubles in a row.
You can't run a prison at 48% vacancy rate.
But my thing is the mayor of Wopan
is the prison isn't at a 52% vacancy rate
because there's anything wrong with the prison.
It needs some modifications, don't get me wrong.
But they needed to take better care
of the people who were working there
and the pain and the benefits are the way you do that.
And you can see that coming back.
One of the things that really frustrates me in my role
is there's two prisons that they're always talking
about closing.
It's Green Bay and Wopan.
Wopan's the oldest prison in the state
and Green Bay is the second oldest.
Fun fact, Wopan prisoners built the Green Bay prison.
But Green Bay wants to close the prison up there
for their own reasons.
It's prime real estate.
It's on the Fox River.
It's near an interstate.
It's great economic development land.
Like you could use condos, malls, whatever.
It's a ton of tax base that they're looking at.
I wish they would just be honest about it.
Instead of running out on TV and saying
it's a powder keg ready to blow, well, every prison is.
Instead of saying that, trying to scare people,
just be honest, we want the prison land
because it's prime real estate for economic development.
So then close Green Bay.
Wopan's a different story.
Our prison's on Madison Street in Wopan.
It's right in the middle of our city.
The city goes around it.
The day here my kids went to is in the backyard,
the libraries across the street were used to it.
It's part of our history.
And it's not a threat to the community.
It's been here forever.
We don't want our prison to close.
It can change or be something different.
I'll grant you all of that.
And the building needs some work.
But Wopan Correctional is a lot of our history.
It's been here for 173 years.
I have the license plate up there.
Did you know the license plate on your cars made in Wopan?
And the metal stamping division,
every license plate in the state of Wisconsin
made in Wopan.
So they made those WCI 170 plates
in honor of their anniversary a few years ago.
It's a history that this community takes pride in.
And we know people who work there and we care about them.
But an interesting thing about Wopan,
most of our churches have an outreach to the prison.
We pray for the people who live in there
in church every weekend.
Most people drive by our city,
like the prisons in Wopan.
But to those of us who live here,
the prisons in our community
and these people are part of our community.
We see the inmates mowing the lawn.
We can see them on municipal projects, painting buildings.
We're not afraid of them.
Like it's a part of who we are.
It's unique and special to Wopan.
And I'm just getting sick and tired
of being clumped in with Green Bay
because their priorities are different than ours.
We like our prison and we're not afraid of it.
So we've already seen the political game start.
That was immediate governor issue in press releases,
Republicans on joint finance, releasing press releases.
What is the danger in terms of turning this
into a partisan game in terms of actually trying to resolve
or solve or prevent these kind of things from happening?
I would say there's two dangers.
One, nothing gets fixed because they blame each other
and there's plenty of blame to go around.
And two, Wopan correctional gets closed
because it says quick, easy way to say I did something.
And then that would hurt our community
because the problem isn't the building.
The problem is it was understaffed
and there's policies from up above that need to be fixed.
There's a lot of blame to go around
and I think there's a lot of blame
to go back a good 15 years.
But in Wopan, we care about the prison
and we care about the people who live there
and the people who work there.
And one of the things I want people to know is like,
that's a hard job.
I have several friends who do it and it wears on them.
And I know people who aren't in, well, I know the warden.
I think I've met some of the people who were charged
because they look familiar.
I'm not sure if I know them, know them.
But some of the other people mentioned in the criminal,
I know who they are.
These are people who, they're good, decent people
with families and they don't want to hurt anyone,
let anyone, prisoner or anyone.
They're just, the prison was understaffed.
They're under a lot of pressure and they just,
they go to work and like,
how do you get people to go to a job like that
when you can end up in legal trouble
when you're just trying to put in your time
and do what's right.
And correctional officers don't get enough credit
for being part of law enforcement.
You know, Republicans like to talk about being tough
on crime and you see them throwing money at cops
and everything, which is fine.
My brother's a police chief in Kiwaskam.
I'm all for law enforcement.
But correctional officers, like I said before,
they do it on the other side of the wall,
they're not seen, but they keep us safe
by keeping the bad guys in there.
And that's important too.
And inmates, obviously, we gotta treat them humanely
and give them care.
But let's not fool ourselves.
A lot of these people are really awful.
When I toured the prison, I went through that sag unit.
And like one guy has oven mitts to take through his hands
because he would pull the skin off of himself.
They are, these are challenging jobs.
A lot of these people have mental health issues
and maybe they shouldn't be in a prison.
They should be somewhere else,
but they can't be out on the street.
And these correctional staff, they come in every day.
It's a high stress job.
They see the worst of the worst.
They strip search people.
People will throw their poop at you.
Like it's not a great job.
You get swore at a lot and it just wears them down.
And I just don't think they get enough credit
or respect for the line of work they do.
If I can do anything out of this story,
it's just a point out how hard working correctional officers are.
So what should be the solution?
What should the state,
if the state was functional in terms of the capital,
what should they be trying to focus on?
My solution would be everyone up in Green Bay
wants to sell their prison because they want the land.
So sell it, take whatever money you get for it,
start by putting that money to retrofitting Wopon.
And then maybe building another maximum security,
somewhere if you need to.
But I don't see any reason to close both of them.
The reality is building one mass of new prison
is super expensive and it still doesn't house
as many people as Wopon and Green Bay.
Once you can get, if they close Green Bay,
you get the money, you retrofit Wopon,
make it as good as you can.
Some of the staff from Green Bay could come to Wopon.
Then you don't have the staffing shortage
and then they can go back to the way it used to be
where it is a safe place for both the people
who work there and the people who live there.
And that's where I would start.
And then we'll see how many numbers you have
and if you have to build another prison somewhere,
I don't know.
But like, corrections has been a mess for a while.
They have the problem up at Lincoln Hills
and now you have the problem in Wopon.
And a lot of it just goes to the staffing issue.
How much of it is simply prisoners don't vote?
They're not a constituency.
So they're not what their families are
and we do hear from them.
The other thing is too, there's a lot of people
who don't care.
They're like, wow, they're prisoners.
They did something really wrong.
Why are they in there?
I don't say that.
I think you need to treat them humanely
but I do get where people are coming from on that.
But I just think a lot of it is they go
to the other side of the prison wall
and they're out of sight, out of mind and it's forgotten.
And unless something like this happens,
people don't realize what's going on.
One of the things that I hope happens
is the shock from Sheriff Dale Schmidt's press conference.
I think people are like, whoa, that's terrible.
And I hope over the next couple of weeks,
people look at how hard it is to work it too.
And I hope the truth of that comes out.
I'm not, obviously, I like the Sheriff a lot.
He's a friend of mine and I know this was hard for him.
But I also hope people also start to learn
and understand how hard it is to be a correctional officer.
And I know the Sheriff does know that
but it's a very tough job.
And like I said before, I really hope people,
they don't just crap on correctional officers.
They understand this is a tough job
and there's not an easy solution.
And so I was kind of disappointed yesterday.
I saw press releases from the right criticizing the governor.
The governor wanted to talk about fake electors.
And I'm like, really, we've got this,
this is a real problem.
And corrections is the number one, I think, budget item.
And it's like, can't we just sit down and fix this?
Cause I mean, I'm just the mayor
but I think I've got a few solutions if they want to listen.
The charging the wardens, if you don't charge him,
the question's gonna be why you're not going up
all the way up the chain.
Like the otherwise, I think a lieutenant
is the highest charged ranking officer.
He's charged in both cases.
Is he overseas, that side unit?
So you charge the warden
but then there's a question of,
the warden in his interview and the criminal complaint
clearly states like, I would love to give more training.
I would love to have more time to do hands on.
I have to send out an email
and let them know that these are the policies
on when to turn on and off water.
So is it, I mean, it sends a message to charge him
but is that actually legally
where the charge should be going?
In my opinion, no.
But I'm biased in the fact
that I've had a really good relationship with the warden
and I consider him a friend.
Like the sheriff said by state statute,
I guess the buck stops with him
but I didn't, he could have retired years ago.
I do think warden Randy have stayed around
to try to fix a prison that needed help.
And he did the best he could.
Maybe he wasn't the right guy.
To me, we just had a good working relationship
and he could have been gone a long time ago
and not going through this.
So I really feel for him and what he's going through.
The water thing is interesting too
because as I've told you in the past,
we have great water in Wapon.
The prison doesn't get the water.
They're too cheap so they have their own little
and there's pieces of rust floating in the water.
So we wanna talk about bad water at the prison
while they could have hooked up to Wapon utilities
five minutes ago, that's how easy it is.
But the state's too cheap to pay for city water.
So maybe they should look at themselves
before they blame the warden for the water.
And would any other warden have made a difference?
No, because we as a city had asked the state
to just take our water and they kept saying no.
When they were started building their water treatment plant
for the three prisons in town,
the warden didn't even know that there was all of them
that didn't know it was being built.
The communication at the state to the prison sucked,
let alone to the state to the city,
they never even came to the city for a permit to build it.
They just where the state can do whatever we want.
And they're probably right.
What are they, I need their shared revenue
so I can't complain.
But I just, to me that just shows you how they treated it.
They didn't care.
They didn't care how crappy the water is, it's cheaper.
Wapon's got the best water in the state.
It wouldn't have cost them that much money.
They're building a multi-million dollar water plant now.
Why?
You know what they should have built in that lot?
There's an apartment complex for new correctional officers
who need an apartment to live
who can't afford one on a starting salary.
They could have lived there, worked at Wapon,
gotten some money in the bank and bought a house.
One of the reasons there's a staffing shortage
is there's nowhere to live.
Does the state build housing?
No, they build the water plant they don't need to build.
That was a dumb idea.
You got lots of farm fields around here, Wins.
Well, we do, but I just, I don't know.
I just, that took me off too.
You can, like some of these things to me
by living here, it's just common sense.
And like, it ticks me off
that they keep tying us to Green Bay
because we're two different things.
It ticks me off the building to water plant
when I could just buy Wapon water
and they should have built an apartment building
for people who will start out
as correctional officers who don't own a house yet.
What a cool job benefit that is.
Yeah.
And we need them.
In a really old-fashioned worker housing.
Yeah.
That goes back a century or more.
It does.
That was standard.
And I just, I don't know.
I just think they missed the boat on that.
And then the politicians all just blame each other.
And there's plenty of that to go around.
Like, I was always disappointed
that Scott Walker never came here.
Never visited the prison.
His corrections is such a big part of what the state does.
Tony Evers has come here.
I give him that, but he never tells us
when he's coming either.
And he doesn't talk to us.
But the warden's always did.
So I just feel like this community
likes the prisons being here.
The prisons and the management of the prisons
work really well with the community.
And it's Madison that's got everything messed up.
Like one of the other things that I always say
that I'll never go anywhere, but I do believe this.
So the state of Wisconsin pays way too much rent
for the old American family insurance building
where the DOC is headquartered in Madison.
The state owns all this land around Wapong.
So why not build a DOC headquarters
across the street from the prison farm on highway 49
and they can actually be in a city with prisons
and maybe see a real correctional officer
and a real prisoner?
So they didn't buy the building?
They may have by now.
I thought that was one of those Jim Doyle lease deals
that was controversial.
It could have been.
But you'd have to look into that.
And I'm not bringing it up to throw a doiling.
I'm just saying, why is that in Madison?
There's no prisons in Madison.
So why don't you come to a tunnel
and actual prisons in it?
Like we can show you around and tell you how it is.
The officials would have to drive up here.
That's why they don't move it.
All right.
And I know you're recording all this.
So like I know what I'm saying.
No, I know you don't.
I don't have to BS you.
No, I bet in that building anything else you want to add
along these lines?
No, I don't think so.
I just would wrap up with like,
it's the oldest prison in the state.
It means a lot to our community
because of the history of it,
because we all know people who work there.
And like I said before, people drive Bible pond.
And I say the prisons there,
but to us the prisons here,
it's part of our community.
And we care for the people who live there.
All the churches in town have outreach.
The different ministers go there different days of the week.
We don't look down our noses at the prisoners
because they're in prison,
although some of them made terrible mistakes.
We do hope that they get their lives fixed and can do better.
One of the problems with the correctional officers
at Wopon do have is,
and I don't know the percentage,
but I would guess half of them
are maybe never getting out
because you get a life sentence
and then what do you have to lose?
I met one of those guys when I toured it
and he was in the metal stamping division
making license plates.
And he's been there 30 some years.
And this is like his fifth word or something.
And it was kind of funny when I met him.
I mean, he's a nice guy.
Obviously he did something pretty terrible
to be there that long,
but it was lunchtime and he liked making the license plates
because it got him out of his cell,
gave him something to do and gave him a purpose in life.
And so I thought that was kind of neat to meet him,
but he's obviously one of those who's there
for a long time and wants to make life as good as it can be.
A lot of them just don't care.
And one of the things that was going on
is when they started the lockdown and this did work,
the lockdown started because the newer inmates
were causing the trouble.
A lot of the older guys were like, knock it off
so we can go back to getting out
and having more visitors and stuff.
And like they were policing themselves.
And I thought the warden had a pretty good handle on it.
Things were getting better from the reports I would get.
So I was a little shocked on Monday
when the sheriff called and I don't know
where it's going to go, but I do wish the warden well
because at least my working relationship with him
was phenomenal and I was pretty hurt to see how it went.
Did I ramble too much?
No, it was fine.
I think we're good here.
All right, so you want to just get a couple cutaways?
Sure.
Of him.
You guys just chatting kind of?
Yeah.
You don't really need me in it,
but just a couple more angles.