If Walker knew about it, why didn’t he act to solve the problems?
Lincoln Hills for Boys is the state’s only remaining correctional facility for youthful male offenders aged 14 to 21. Its mission is to house them securely while providing education and rehabilitation services. But in recent years, as former Department of Corrections employee Jamie Taylor told the Lakeland Times, Lincoln Hills has had a “Fight Club Culture,” where there are youth “on almost a daily basis that have been assaulted by another youth.”
The problems at Lincoln Hills, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has documented, include youth who’ve been victimized through sexual assault, strangulation, suffocation and other physical abuse, including having their arms broken. Staff has used pepper spray to cause bodily harm or discomfort and intimidated victims and witnesses.
These horrors have prompted an FBI investigation of Lincoln Hills and its sister institution, Copper Lake School for Girls, to determine not only if laws were broken, but if there was a pattern of civil rights violations against inmates. “Wisconsin could find itself facing the same kind of formal federal civil rights investigation being conducted into police departments in cities such as Ferguson, Mo.,” as the Journal Sentinel has reported.
Gov. Scott Walker has claimed he only recently learned about the problems at Lincoln Hills, but there is a mountain of evidence suggesting otherwise. Back in February 2012, Walker received a letter from Racine County Circuit Judge Richard Kreul about Lincoln Hills, as the Journal Sentinel has reported. The letter included a copy of a memo detailing the beating and sexual assault of a boy and the failure of Lincoln Hills staff to notify law enforcement and child protective services. “The indifference in this sordid tale is absolutely inexcusable,” Kreul wrote.
Walker, however, says he never saw the letter. We are supposed to believe his staff didn’t feel this horrific story — from a judge! — was important enough to give the governor a quick summary, much less suggest he read it.
Nor, apparently, was Walker aware that Racine County officials, in response to the situation, decided to stop sending youthful offenders to Lincoln Hills. That’s a red flag to state officials that something is seriously wrong.
Nor, apparently, was Walker aware of complaints about Lincoln Hills from union representatives. Rick Badger of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees told the Journal Sentinel its members have for years complained to the state about “multiple youth-on-youth assaults and assaults on Lincoln Hills staff and failing to report these violent incidents to local law enforcement, as required by law.”
And back in November 2014, Thomas Wanta, administrator of the Milwaukee County Division of Delinquency and Court Services, told the Journal Sentinel that his agency, Milwaukee County prosecutors and Circuit Judge Mary Triggiano met with state Department of Corrections officials about an allegation that inmates’ arms had been broken. Yet this, too, wasn’t shared with the governor?
Then there was Rep. Mary Czaja (R-Irma), who met with DOC administrators in March 2015 to discuss her concerns, as the Wisconsin State Journal reported. Czaja gave the newspaper a DOC report for fiscal year 2014 that showed there were 16 assaults on its staff, 12 of which were referred to law enforcement, seven of which resulted in injuries. Half occurred at Lincoln Hills.
After weeks of the governor insisting none of this was shared with him, the Journal Sentinel did a public records request asking the Walker administration for documents related to Lincoln Hills. The documents showed Walker’s office “was told multiple times over the past year about problems...including claims of violence against youths and staff...and the need to improve sexual assault safeguards,” the newspaper reported.
When you pile up all the evidence showing state officials and the Walker administration had known for years of the horrors going on at Lincoln Hills, you have to ask, why wasn’t something done? Perhaps because they didn’t want to devote more resources to the problem.
In 2011, the Walker administration shut down the Ethan Allen home in Wales and transferred the inmates to Lincoln Hills. As the State Journal reported, that meant Lincoln Hills had far more inmates in 2014 — 241 — than it or Ethan Allen had housed before, 160 and 184, respectively. But the shuttering of Ethan Allen and a correctional facility for girls dropped state costs from $49.5 million in 2011 to $25.9 million in 2015, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
The situation at Lincoln Hills raised huge questions about this strategy and left an opening for advocates of more social service funding to argue that Walker’s priorities were all wrong. So the problem was simply hushed up. For more than a year, and more likely ever since 2012, when that letter arrived from the Racine judge, the complaints were not addressed.
This goes beyond negligence and suggests a complete disregard for the health and safety of the teen boys in state custody. The first and most important rule for public officials is to protect the lives of those they serve. By this simple standard, Walker has failed, and heartbreakingly so for those teen boys and their families.
Bruce Murphy is the editor of UrbanMilwaukee.com.
