Summary of JSRI Activities in 2023
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.