Public Safety and the Dane County Jail: A Recap
Progressive Dane’s February General Membership Meeting featured a panel discussion about public safety and the Dane County Jail with Anthony Cooper, Sr., Vice President of Strategic Partnerships and Reentry Services and Nonviolent Crisis Intervention Instructor with Nehemiah, Karen Reece, Vice President of Research and Education with Nehemiah, Dani Rischall, Executive Director of Chrysallis, Inc., and housing rights attorney and Pro-Dane Endorsed County Supervisor for District 2, Heidi Wegleitner. It was a powerful, informative conversation and we are grateful to all of our panelists for taking the time to talk with us. If you’d like to hear what speakers had to say, you can find a recording of the meeting here. Read on for a summary of what attendees discussed.
There are so many alternative solutions to invest in.
Public safety is a much broader conversation than just the construction of a jail. As we’ve written about before, it’s time for Dane County to think outside the cage and invest in alternatives to incarceration that would keep people safe, housed, and healthy. We asked our speakers to think big. What programs and initiatives would they like to see fully funded that would contribute to community safety while reducing the population in the Dane County Jail?
Anthony Cooper, Sr. said throughout the meeting that reentry needs to be a consideration not one month or six months after a person leaves the jail, but on the first day of their incarceration. He spoke about Nehemiah’s reentry services and specifically its “Man Up” program, in which formally incarcerated staff with direct, lived experience with the challenges of reentry can “show people ‘Hey look, you can come from where you’re at right now and do something different with your life, if you so choose.’ And help [them] navigate what that looks like.” Staff don’t just provide a positive model of what reentry can look like, but also support individuals as they cope with obstacles and setbacks. For Cooper, the program gives people the option “when they’re having their hiccups, whatever that may be, to be able to have a person to talk to, to be able to navigate with like, ‘Man, if you’ve been stuck here, what did you do?’”
While Rischall expressed enthusiasm about already existing programs like Madison’s new Community Alternative Response Emergency Services (CARES) program and the Behavioral Health Resource Center, she also emphasized the importance of peer support saying “I just don’t see that enough right now, but I see it as an opportunity in making some change.”
“We have a long way to go to authentically listen and lift up and center lived experience. We have opportunities. We have people who have so much knowledge to share,” Rischall said.
Supervisor Wegleitner spoke about the connections between housing insecurity and incarceration, pointing out that not only can having a criminal record make it more difficult to obtain housing, but that people who lose their housing are then more vulnerable to criminalization. She would like to see more funding for housing and also well-trained, experienced support staff to help struggling individuals maintain stability so they can remain housed and safe. Wegleitner also stressed that these housing programs should be accountable to the public.
“We need the community control aspect of that housing because if we’re relying on for-profit developers and landlords to house folks that have serious and persistent mental health issues, or addiction issues, or have experienced a tremendous amount of trauma, it doesn’t work super well.”
This is not a new conversation.
Multiple speakers expressed frustration with the idea that this is a new subject. A lack of institutional memory among changing Dane County Supervisors means service providers and community members have had the same discussions numerous times over the course of a decade or longer. They haven’t forgotten past missteps and disappointments, and it’s distressing to them to see the County Board repeat its mistakes.
“One of the things that’s frustrating for me about this conversation is how much money we’ve paid to Mead & Hunt to not deliver on alternative designs,” Karen Reece said, before highlighting several frustrations with the consultant, including its failure to incorporate community input. “We already know what they’re going to give us. And it’s not reflecting any of the conversations that we’ve had about alternatives.”
When community members and service providers are ignored, it can lead to disengagement, burnout, and worse. Cooper pointed out that community members who have done valuable work around community safety, reentry, and violence prevention have left Madison when that work remained underfunded and their expertise was chronically ignored.
Rischall added that the consequences of engaging the community only to disregard its feedback can be especially hard for people with direct experience with the criminal justice system.
“We pull people in and we ask people’s opinions, and yet, a lot of times there’s not follow through and I think that can be really disheartening for folks who have given a lot, especially people who have been really affected by a lot of these systems and really traumatized,” Rischall said. “To ask for feedback in creating things that will actually support them and then to not see that happen can further traumatize a person.”
We have opportunities to create change.
Last week, in spite of the best efforts of ProDane-endorsed Supervisors Chawla and Wegleitner, the Dane County Board made the disappointing decision to pass Resolution 320, adding $16 million to jail funding. But this will not be the last time that County Board takes a vote on the jail construction project. Our work to fight for alternatives to incarceration is ongoing. Education, including meetings like this one, will be crucial to future success. All of the speakers identified growing the movement through outreach as another key priority.
“We have the facts on our side, we have the hope and the love, which is great. They have the million dollar consultants, so we really need a lot of hope and a lot of love and a lot of grassroots to overcome that,” Wegleitner said. She is excited about a growing cohort of County Board Supervisors who believe that we can and must change the way we address public safety, and are on the same page when it comes to funding for the Dane County Jail. This includes Kierstin Huelsemann and Jacob Wright, two ProDane-endorsed candidates who will join the board next month.
Reece, whose focus at Nehemiah involves educating people about how the criminal justice system really works, emphasized that we need to be pushing information about alternatives as far as we can into the community, saying, “We can’t expect different results at the polls if people don’t understand the issues that they’re voting on.”
Cooper challenged meeting participants to talk to friends and family, and invite their contacts in by sharing what they learned. He also stressed the importance of making sure that more Black and brown people are involved in these conversations and meetings.
After noting that she aligns with abolitionist ideology, Rischall reminded participants of another important task. “Part of being an abolitionist is holding hope that there can be something better and there will be something better.”