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 The current jail is out-of-date and inhumane.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.