by Eric Howland | Jan 7, 2025 | Advocacy, Community Issues, Featured, JSRI Justice System Reform Initiatives
In early 2025 the JSRI reviewed the current issues in Dane Counties Criminal Legal System and identified issues that are both going to be part of the public discussion and where public education will play an important role. The following 7 established issues and 3 new issues were identified for our attention.
Ongoing Initiatives:
- The Crisis/Triage Center is an essential reform that will both help to keep people out of the criminal legal system and be an important resource for some individuals who are having a mental health crisis. Capital and some operational funds have already been budgeted. It has been held up pending a State law change. We are waiting for the administrative rule to be issued in 2025 so that the project can move forward. Securing permanent funding of operational costs will be essential.
- The Community Alternative Response Emergency Services (CARES) program has been well received in Madison and is being expanded to Sun Prairie. We support CARES because it provides a non-law enforcement response to a variety of needs including mental health crises. We recognize the difficulty of county-wide expansion and we support a strong debate to look at a variety of options for doing so.
- The Dane County Department of Public Safety Communications (911 Center) has just added the Mental Health and Call Diversion Division. This new division will be run as a pilot 8:00 am – 8:00 pm Monday through Friday. The purpose is to have staff who are specifically trained and dedicated to handling mental health crisis calls. It is anticipated that these staff will be able to resolve some of the calls without having to dispatch a mobile team. We strongly support this pilot and hope that it will be made permanent and expanded to 24/7 coverage. It is a cost effective way to immediately provide an important service county-wide.
- Dane County has multiple jail and prison diversion programs. The largest program is the Deferred Prosecution Program. We support these programs. We feel that they should be evaluated on a regular basis to determine which are effective, which are not, and to make changes as needed.
- MOSES supports the Jail Consolidation Project. The current jail is out-of-date and inhumane. The project has come with many commitments around solitary confinement, training, reentry, mental health, family visitation, data, and others. It will be critical for the County Board to provide sufficient oversight to ensure that these commitments are realized and that it is transparent to the public.
- Expanding data collection, analysis, and reporting about all aspects (arrests, court, jail, prison, etc.) of the Dane County criminal legal system was one of the the top priorities of County sponsored work groups over the last ten years. We feel that progress has been made and that data is available to the public.. For instance, there is currently much more information by race. We frequently access data from various places such as the Sheriff’s website, the Community Justice Council (CJC) website, the Clerk of Courts website, and others. Recent public discussion of the City of Madison’s Office of Independent Monitor, has publicized how their data analysis position will deepen the community understanding the effects of Madison Police’s operational rules and procedures, particularly the effects on arrests and minority communities. These efforts are to be commended, but more needs to be done such as developing more information about crisis response and mental health.
- In the 2025 budget, two vacant positions were eliminated from the Sheriff’s department. Much of the discussion was focused on the long term vacancies in the Sheriff’s department. In our view this should be focused on the workload of the Sheriff’s department. In the last few years the Sheriff’s department has reduced staffing responsibilities due to the following decisions: 1) the closure of the Ferris Center, 2) the closure of one of the 4 housing units in the City County Building, 3) stopping the practice of checking people on Huber release into the jail each evening. In the future, the remodeled jail should allow for more efficient staffing when the portion of the jail in the City-County Building is closed. The challenge both before and after the jail remodeling is completed is to right size the staff at the jail and reinvest any savings in criminal legal reform.
New Initiatives:
It is essential that a series of new initiatives get going in 2025 and receive sufficient attention and priority. These include:
- The Community Justice Council (CJC) which has not been meeting for many months but will be restarting early in 2025. The CJC members include the leadership of the criminal legal system and community representatives. This is an important body because it sets the reform agenda for Dane County. The criminal legal system consists of many independent parts of government. Therefore, the CJC operates by consensus, collaboration, and cooperation. The Dane County Board is represented on the CJC. It is important for all Supervisors to follow the work and the direction of the CJC. We find the CJC website to be very helpful.
- The new Dane County Office of Justice Reform which is in the process of filling staff positions. This is significant because we now have an office that is dedicated to the implementation of reforms. One of the first new initiatives that they will manage is the pilot of a community justice court in Dane County. It will be based on the successful Redhook, Brooklyn New York model which provided a one-stop and caring approach to justice, sometimes referred to as procedural justice. If the pilot is successful, we hope that it will be made permanent and expanded.
- The Dane County Board is reviewing its prior commitment to move the Huber program to the Human Services Department. While there does not appear to be much appetite for this move from Human Services, we feel that the most important part of the reform is to have more services available to Huber individuals who are living in the community on electronic monitoring (CAMP program) and after they have completed their sentence. These services should also be available to individuals who received a probation sentence.
We will engage with the Dane County leadership to establish strong connections between the Huber program, in whatever form it assumes, and the Department of Human Services.
by Eric Howland | Feb 1, 2024 | Dane County Jail, Featured, JSRI Justice System Reform Initiatives, Resources
JSRI spent 2023 working on the Jail (no surprise) and behavioral health.
Much of the Justice System Reform Initiative (JSRI) work in 2022 was focused on the jail. This year we had a long stretch where the jail was not an issue – but spoiler alert – it roared back in December. JSRI used the time with fewer jail decisions to continue our focus on diverting people experiencing mental/behavioral health crises from the criminal legal system.
Dane County Jail
At the end of the 2022 County Exec Parisi had vetoed the board of supervisors legislation to reduce the jail to 5 floors, a plan MOSES endorsed. This left the County with a plan to build a 6 story jail but without enough funding to build it. In late 2022 the Board of Supervisors voted down 3 methods for paying for the new jail.
Consequently 2023 started with the pressure to find more money for the jail, this legislative effort was blocked by a coalition of different groups on the Board. The coalition included a number of supervisors that are jail abolitionists that do not want any money spent on the jail, a group of supervisors that are primarily concerned about legal reform and the Black Caucus that is concerned about how jail spending limits other efforts for legal reform. This coalition was large enough to block spending proposals that required either ¾ or ⅔ majorities.
A breakthrough came April 19, 2023 when the Sheriff and the Black Caucus announced an agreement in which the Black Caucus voted for funds for the jail and the Sheriff agreed to a series of reforms. The most concrete reforms included:
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Sheriff Barrett will support removal of federal in-transit prisoners from the current jail facility. He will work with the US Marshals to place the persons currently in the facility into other facilities in the surrounding areas by November 1, 2023. This has largely happened. On Dec 9th there were two federal prisoners in the jail.
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Sheriff Barrett will support the transfer of Huber services to the Dane County Department of Human Services. This is a softer goal and there has been little or no action on this idea.
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Sheriff Barrett will submit reports per Sub 1 2021 RES-320 as amended and continue current jail population reporting. This has happened indirectly. The CJC instituted an interactive dashboard that includes race, ethnicity, and sex – characteristics that were missing from other jail reports.
As mentioned, above this instituted a period of relative calm on the Jail issue. The Mead and Hunt team finished construction documents and put the project out to bid in Sept 2023.
But the bidding process concluded in Nov 2023 yielding only a single bid and that bid was $27.6 million dollars over budget.
As this article is written it seems that the County will send the exact same bid package out to bid for a second time. This is a bit of a gamble since there is no guarantee that more bids or lower bids will respond to this new bid process. We will know by midyear.
Behavioral Health and the legal system.
For the last decade, JSRI has been advocating for a crisis triage center as an alternative to incarceration for people experiencing a behavioral health crisis. More recently we have advocated for 911 to dispatch medical and crisis workers instead of police to appropriate behavioral health crisis calls. In Madison that program is called CARES and establishing CARES was a big success in 2022. This year’s budget expands on that success.
CARES
The CARES program receives about $900,000 a year. This support comes from both City of Madison and Dane County budgets.
JSRI recently met with Che Stedman, the Assistant Fire Chief who supervises the CARES program. He told us that one reason CARES does not operate 24 hours/day is that after a certain time of evening there is nowhere the CARES team can take a person except to an emergency room, one of the outcomes CARES is trying to avoid. The CARES program is not a treatment program, rather it is a crisis response team. They do not house people, so for many of their cases they need to have a place they can transport people to a stable environment. This would be the purpose of a Crisis Triage Center (see below).
Assistant Chief Stedman also mentioned that a substantial number of the calls to 911 for CARES ask that no one physically come to their residence. CARES staff do talk with the people calling, but the 911 center is itself stepping up to handle these calls.
Starting with a pilot last year and now expanded with this year’s budget, the 911 center will have five crisis workers on staff. This program is definitely part of an effort to divert behavioral health calls from police responses and entanglement with the legal system. It also has the benefit of serving all of Dane County on a 24/7 basis.
There is strong support, both from the JSRI, politicians, and the wider public to make the traditional CARES teams (one paramedic and one crisis worker) available throughout Dane County. This budget provided $200,000 in matching funds earmarked for cities and towns outside of Madison to work with the Madison Fire Department to expand CARES beyond Madison. This funding follows a year of study by Dane County Human Services Dept. examining how CARES can be expanded county wide. Hopefully, we will see initiatives in 2024.
Crisis Triage Center
The CARES unit can meet with people, but, as mentioned above, they are not a long term solution. Consequently, an important part of their service is to transport their clients to a safer location. Despite a decade of advocacy, Dane County does not have a 24/7 facility for behavioral health crises.
The way this works in other places is that there is a crisis-triage center available 24/7 that
provides a short term stay (often 23 hours) to allow someone in a behavioral health crisis to
calm down, for the helpers to discover and engage any family support, for any prescriptions to be identified, and identification of a longer term housing.
Dane County has been trying to build such a center for several years. The blockage has been that Wisconsin law does not include licensing for this type of facility, at least for involuntary stays. That means that not only is such a facility unavailable to CARES as an alternative to incarceration, it is also available neither to the police nor to the general public when they are looking for help without the threat of incarceration. The JSRI has advocated that Dane County start a crisis/triage center with voluntary admissions, as other locations facing the same problems have done.
2023 has been a good year for MOSES and the JSRI. The Dane County Budget has increased support for CARES, some, but not all, pandemic policies that decrease the jail population persist, diverting behavioral health cases from the legal system continues to be a topic of public discourse. But the wheels of justice turn slowly, and in some cases, move backwards. We hope that some of these issues will resolve in 2024 and allow us to begin advocacy for new areas of the criminal legal system.
by Eric Howland | Apr 24, 2018 | Behavioral Health, Featured, JSRI Justice System Reform Initiatives, Resources
Improving Mental Health Treatment in Dane County
and Keeping People Out of the Criminal Justice System
The criminal justice system is not designed to meet the needs of people needing mental health care. Yet, today, a large portion of people in the Dane County Jail have mental health issues (nearly 40% are receiving psychotropic medications) and there is a high racial disparity in this population. Many stakeholders in the county are now working to reduce the number of people with mental health issues who are incarcerated in the jail and are searching for effective approaches to achieve this objective. As a contribution to this effort, MOSES (Madison Organizing in Strength, Equality, and Solidarity) offers the following Desired Future Conditions to describe an improved criminal justice system, an improved mental health care delivery system, and the kind of community in which we desire to live.
Desired Future Conditions
Dane County Mental Health System
- There is timely access to effective mental health care for everyone in Dane County through a coordinated system of providers, regardless of payer status. Trauma-informed care practices are an essential part of the system.
- There is a coordinated approach among service providers, referring organizations, first responders, etc. to help people navigate the system and find the services that they need, including housing, transportation, employment, and other supportive services.
- Case management (identification of needs and coordination of services) is available to all individuals who need it, bridging provider and agency boundaries. Peer support specialists are involved throughout the system.
Dane County Crisis/Restoration Center and Crisis Management
- A Crisis/Restoration Center (providing mental health urgent care services 24 hours a day) is available to anyone in the community needing such services. The Crisis/Restoration Center provides immediate triage and stabilization followed by seamless/uninterrupted access to community services for longer-term treatment as needed. These services include treatment for co-occurring substance abuse disorders as needed.
- First Responders (law enforcement officers, fire, EMS, 911 dispatchers), when responding to a call, have access to professional mental health consultation (in person on the scene, or through phone consultation) regarding background information and in making a decision on the appropriate next steps and/or facility placement for the individuals involved or needing assistance.
- The Crisis/Restoration Center provides a viable treatment option in lieu of charging people with a crime and booking them into the Dane County Jail.
- Dane County embraces and has established policies and procedures to direct people with mental illness who have a police contact to a treatment facility or program rather than into the criminal justice system. All First Responders are trained to identify and respond appropriately to people having a mental health crisis.
- The Department of Corrections, Division of Community Corrections proactively determines needs for services for those on probation and supervision and assures that appropriate clients receive treatment from the mental health care delivery system as a way of improving compliance with rules, in lieu of probation holds and seeking revocation to state prison.
Dane County Jail Policy and Procedures
- Jail intake personnel are trained and empowered to identify people with mental health issues who need to be diverted to the Crisis/Restoration Center.
- The psychiatric services contractor is empowered to identify people in the jail who need to be moved to a mental health treatment center to prevent decompensation, and to recommend such action to jail supervision.
- There are measurable definitions for identifying people in the jail who have mental health issues and these definitions are utilized by trained personnel to implement and regularly and transparently evaluate best practices. People with mental health challenges are not subjected to solitary confinement and/or sensory deprivation.
- The jail emphasizes continuity of care for people with mental health issues. This care includes connecting with providers in the community, maintaining current medications, and doing reentry planning that connects individuals to mental health and other supportive services when they are released.
Administration and Management
- Key stakeholders from the mental health system, the criminal justice system, and the community meet at least quarterly as partners in overseeing the management of these two systems.
- Data is developed and used to manage and evaluate the systems and is also shared with the public in meaningful and transparent ways to enable citizens to understand the operations of our criminal justice systems. Programs and policies are evidence-based and routinely assessed to provide accountability.
- While respecting HIPPA and other confidentiality requirements, information is shared among agencies and providers to better serve individuals with mental health issues. Family involvement is sought in order to develop and provide support for effective, holistic treatment plans.
Prepared by MOSES Justice System Reform Initiative, Crisis-Restoration Center Workgroup, April 2018
