Green Bay Correctional Institution (Fox 11 Online)
ALLOUEZ, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — Governor Tony Evers and state legislators have been invited to meet with the Allouez Village Board to nail down a plan to close Green Bay Correctional Institution.
Jim Rafter, president of the village of Allouez, is one of many local leaders who have been advocating for years for GBCI to be shut down. He said at a Tuesday night meeting that the next biennial budget includes a few big steps forward, but some frustrations still remain, too.
“The state did commit to closing Green Bay Correctional in this budget. They committed $15 million to get the planning going for Green Bay Correctional. That is something we should all celebrate,” Rafter said. “The disappointment was that the governor vetoed a line item in the budget proposed to close Green Bay Correctional by 2029.”
Evers attributed that veto to the state’s “painful experience” with trying to close prisons without a fleshed-out plan. He objected to setting a specific date for closure without a clear bipartisan plan in place for getting it done.
“Green Bay Correctional will close,” Evers said last week. “It’s not like we could close it tomorrow and say, ‘Okay, where are all these people gonna go?’ We have to have all that in place, simple as that.”
Despite the 2029 deadline being eliminated from the budget, Rafter is optimistic. He knows both sides want GBCI to close; it’s just a matter of Republican and Democratic lawmakers in the state legislature making compromises in a plan to accomplish the closure.
“I am of the opinion that we should just focus on getting it closed by 2029. Everyone agrees, so let’s go do it,” Rafter said.
While the closure remains authorized, we have no closure date and that’s got to be unacceptable to the village. We are left with uncertainty, yet we still have the responsibility to plan. And so for that, if we proceed with the mindset to get it closed by 2029, we have to start communicating.
That’s why Rafter is inviting Evers, as well as legislators who represent the area around the prison, to attend a village board meeting. Community members are also encouraged to attend.
“Let our leaders show that they’re going to start collaborating, communicating, working across the aisle, doing everything they can to focus on the prize, and that’s to make our corrections system better, and part of that is to close Green Bay Correctional,” Rafter said. “We want them to know that the village of Allouez isn’t going to sit back and wait.”
GBCI opened in 1898. It has been the subject of years of complaints of inhumane conditions, including an infestation of mice and a recent hate-crime cellmate murder.
While several dominoes need to fall before GBCI can close, the budget takes the first step.
It provides more than $130.7 million to build a new youth prison in Dane County. That prison would replace the troubled Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake juvenile facilities in northern Wisconsin. Lincoln Hills would then be converted into an adult facility.
“A lot of the medium-security prisoners that are held improperly at Green Bay Correctional, because it’s a maximum-security facility, would go to a place like a refurbished Lincoln Hills, and then you could kind of shuffle around the maximum-security guys to other maximum-security prisons and close GBCI,” State Sen. Eric Wimberger, R-Oconto, previously said.
There are still sticking points, though, as to the next steps. Evers released a corrections reform plan last winter, but Republican lawmakers remain skeptical.
“The Evers correction plan expands earned release to people who are not now eligible, to even criminals like carjackers and robbers,” Wimberger said. “And his plan to ultimately close Green Bay Correctional is a policy change that will let criminals into your neighborhood on electronic monitoring if they do just some rehabilitative programming.”
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