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Public Sector Gulags / Crisis at Lincoln Hills juvenile prison years in making
« on: January 16, 2017, 12:07:16 AM »
Crisis at Lincoln Hills juvenile prison years in making
Patrick Marley , Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Published 10:00 a.m. CT Dec. 17, 2016 | Updated 3:49 p.m. CT Jan. 6, 2017
Red flags raised to Walker, others but abuses continued
Irma — Shirtless and handcuffed, the 17-year-old inmate stood in the hallway of the segregation unit, refusing to go into his room.
“You want to do something, do it now!" Kenyadi Evans snapped at two guards.
When a third guard arrived, Evans sized her up. “I'll beat your ass, too,” he said.
Guard Jeff Butler had heard enough that chaotic night, one like so many other nights at the trouble-plagued Lincoln Hills School for Boys. He shoved the teen into the room and slammed the door, smashing his foot.
Out of frustration, Butler punched the metal door so hard that he broke his hand.
Before driving himself to the hospital, the four-year Lincoln Hills veteran sat in his truck and cried, prison records show.
Inside his room, Evans screamed and held up his foot so the staff could see the bleeding. The Milwaukee teen had lost parts of two small toes, but it would take prison officials nearly two hours to take him to a hospital 15 miles away.
He would eventually require multiple surgeries and the partial amputation of the two toes.
It was Nov. 29, 2015.
It had been 46 months — nearly four years — since a judge alerted Gov. Scott Walker that prison officials had waited hours to take an inmate who had been sexually assaulted to a hospital. Twelve months since the Department of Corrections had launched an internal investigation. Ten months since criminal investigators had opened their own probe. One month since prosecutors had told a court they believed children were being abused.
Six days after Evans' toes were crushed, state agents descended on the facility, located 30 miles north of Wausau. The raid began to lay bare problems that would result in the departure of a dozen employees, spark an FBI investigation and deepen concerns about the state's justice system for juveniles who commit serious crimes.
The night Evans was injured made clear that public officials — from front-line guards to the governor — had for years missed or ignored numerous warning signs about a facility descending into disorder.
On the way to the hospital, Evans boasted, said the guard who drove him there.
“He was talking about how much money he was going to make,” retired guard Doug Curtis recalled. “‘Boy, I’m going to make some money off of this. You’re going to pay.’”
Indeed, within a year taxpayers would give Evans a $300,000 settlement to avoid a lawsuit.
Problems fester
For years, officials knew or should have known about the thicket of problems at Lincoln Hills and its sister facility on the same campus, Copper Lake School for Girls.
“It all went on in plain view of the Department of Corrections, but nobody at the Department of Corrections knew how juvenile corrections worked or how Lincoln Hills operated or what was going on," said Troy Bauch, who until recently was the union representative for workers there.
“Nobody cared.”
The sweeping criminal probe, now nearly 2 years old, is examining allegations of prisoner abuse, child neglect, sexual assault, intimidation of witnesses and victims, strangulation and tampering with public records. A separate internal investigation uncovered four incidents where inmates' bones were broken.
The crisis at Lincoln Hills is rooted in systematic breakdowns, lax management, confusion over policies, a lack of communication and chronic staff shortages, a review of more than 1,000 pages of records and dozens of interviews by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found.
Officials trained staff improperly, failed to preserve video evidence, didn't document serious incidents, and often shirked their duty to report matters to parents, police and social service agencies.
The shortcomings intensified in 2011 when the Walker administration shut down two youth prisons in southeastern Wisconsin to save $25 million a year. The move put all of the state's serious teen offenders in one facility — hundreds of miles from most of their families.
“The entire climate went from mildly hellish to the ninth ring of hell," said Timothy Johnson, a former guard.
While a developing crisis quickly became apparent, no one moved to address it.
After nearly six years in office, Walker has yet to visit Lincoln Hills.
A prison with an unassuming name
Opened in 1970, Lincoln Hills is surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Inmates live in dorm-style cottages that dot the campus near the small town of Irma. They attend school year-round in a central building.
The state tries to give the facility a different atmosphere than adult prisons. Inmates are referred to as youth, guards as youth counselors. Residents hang Halloween and Christmas decorations to try to give it a homey air.
Lincoln Hills generally holds inmates as young as 13 and as old as 25, separated by treatment and education needs. Most inmates are in their mid to late teens; some adults are being held for crimes they committed as juveniles.
About 145 boys are in Lincoln Hills and 20 girls in Copper Lake. The two areas are separated by fences. Holding an inmate costs more than $100,000 a year.
Most of the inmates are African-American and come from Milwaukee — 215 miles and 3½ hours away. The staff is largely white and from the rural north.
Unlike the state’s overpopulated adult prisons, there is plenty of room at Lincoln Hills. The prison was built to hold more than 500 inmates.
Typically, the inmates have committed serious, violent crimes — including homicide and robbery — or have had repeated run-ins with the law and didn’t turn their behavior around after being sent to group homes.
'A caged dog'
The mother of one Milwaukee teen had mixed feelings when her son was sent to Lincoln Hills in 2014 at age 15. She worried about him being there but knew he needed serious intervention.
“(He) was at that point of no return,” said the mother, who spoke to the Journal Sentinel on the condition that her name not be used.
The boy was first arrested at 13 after breaking into a friend’s house. Before long, he broke into a school to try to steal computers. He ran away from group homes, once stealing a car.
At Lincoln Hills, he was frequently sent to segregation for beating others. Guards often doused him with pepper spray, his mother said.
"It felt like my son was a caged dog, not a child or a man,” she said.
In August, a staff member filed a report claiming the boy had attempted suicide by tying a shirt around his neck.
No one from Lincoln Hills notified the mother — a problem that repeatedly has cropped up at the juvenile prison.
She found out three months later, from a delinquency services official for Milwaukee County.
“When I got this letter, I almost had a heart attack,” she said. “My child tried to commit suicide and nobody told me? I would’ve walked, if I had to, up to Lincoln Hills and been there for him to find out what would make him want to harm himself.”
Her son, now 17, later said he had not attempted suicide but had covered his face with a shirt because he was about to be hit with pepper spray. She said she believed her son because he had never tried to hurt himself before.
A Department of Corrections spokesman said parents are notified only if an injury occurs.
When she contacted Lincoln Hills to find out why she hadn’t been told of the incident, she was told she would get a call back that day.
She is still waiting for that call.
Shutting down a prison
Numbers drove the decision to consolidate the state's juvenile inmates at Lincoln Hills.
In 2004, the state’s youth prisons held 668 inmates on a typical day. By 2011, the figure had dropped to nearly half that.
The reduction, which mirrored national trends was due to several factors. Fewer juveniles were being arrested. When they did get in trouble, they were increasingly being placed in community-based settings instead of prisons.
It no longer made financial sense for the state to run three secure facilities — Lincoln Hills, Ethan Allen School in Waukesha County and Southern Oaks Girls School in Racine County. In 2010, Gov. Jim Doyle formed a task force to figure out what to do and concluded a juvenile prison should close.
Ethan Allen was older, its grounds were smaller and the facility was more expensive to run than Lincoln Hills. At the time they were closed, Ethan Allen and Southern Oaks together cost nearly $33 million a year to operate. Lincoln Hills cost about $19 million.
It was also easier to close Ethan Allen than Lincoln Hills. A state law requires a juvenile prison to be maintained in northern Wisconsin.
Former Republican state Sen. Clifford "Tiny" Krueger, a tavern keeper in Merrill who had performed in the circus because of his girth, inserted the measure into state law more than 40 years ago, recalled Jim Moeser, a former juvenile corrections official.
No such law applied to southeastern Wisconsin, even though most juvenile inmates come from the state's most populated region.
Doyle's task force said if a facility was to be closed, there should be careful planning for the transition.
When Walker took office in January 2011, he moved quickly to close Ethan Allen and Southern Oaks.
The consolidation saved $25 million a year. Like other changes the Republican governor made early in his tenure, the move was overshadowed by the mass protests spawned by Act 10, which weakened collective bargaining for most public employees.
As juvenile justice experts around the nation were recommending smaller, more localized facilities, Wisconsin went in the opposite direction, consolidating operations in a remote setting.
"This is a 19th century or early 20th century model, where you have a large state-operated facility hours away from the urban centers," said Jeffrey Butts, director of a research center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
"It is profoundly ineffective and wasteful."
A rocky transition
More than 100 inmates were transferred to Lincoln Hills over several months in 2011, almost doubling the population.
Lincoln Hills got approval to bring on more than 100 new employees, but the institution was chronically short-staffed because of the challenge of hiring prison workers in a sparsely populated area. Supervisors forced employees to work double shifts, and living units were often operated with fewer employees, providing workers with less backup.
There were so many double shifts employees sometimes had trouble staying awake on their drives home, guards said.
“We got people walking around like zombies,” Curtis said in a recent interview as he reflected on his time as a guard there. “They want to know when they’re going to sleep again.”
The influx of new inmates created fights and arguments, as the teens sought to establish where they stood in the prison’s pecking order.
“I would come in at 6:30 and by 6:31 I’d have a couple guys on the floor in handcuffs,” said Johnson.
Guards, meanwhile, were angry because Act 10 made them pay more for their benefits, cutting a typical worker's take-home pay by 8.5%. With the loss of collective bargaining, they also had less say in how the prison was run.
Around this time, prison officials instituted a philosophy that calls for using restraints less often and trying to talk inmates through their problems when they act up instead of isolating them. Guards were skeptical.
Paul Westerhaus, who for years played key roles in running Lincoln Hills, admitted to internal investigators in 2015 that he didn't recognize the scope of the problems that were developing or move to fix them. The abrupt consolidation threw the staff into disarray, and the institution didn't have a solid training program to deal with it, he said.
He also attributed the problems to an inmate population that had more mental health issues and was increasingly aggressive. Having one facility made it tougher to separate inmates who clashed because they couldn't be transferred to another prison.
“It's almost like it began a perfect storm, and it just sort of went and grew from there,” he said.
Warnings arrived early
In February 2012, Racine County Circuit Judge Richard Kreul did something he'd never done during 18 years on the bench. He wrote the governor a letter about one of his cases.
"I'm sure reading the attached memo will shock you as much as it did me," he wrote.
The memo Kreul sent to Walker described an incident in which an inmate from Racine was forced to perform oral sex on his roommate and then beaten unconscious.
Workers learned of the assault at 4 p.m. They didn’t get the victim medical treatment for three hours.
The delay happened in part because other inmates were playing a basketball game, according to a Racine County human services report.
“What did you want us to do, stop the game?” Lincoln Hills psychologist Paul Hesse asked with a chuckle when a Racine County official inquired about the sexual assault and beating, according to county records.
That night, more than six hours after the assault was discovered, hospital workers — not prison staff — reported the assault to the Lincoln County Sheriff's Department. The offender was ultimately convicted of the beating and sexual assault.
Racine County officials were tipped to the assault by another youth, but only got details from Lincoln Hills officials after making repeated inquiries. In response, Racine County dramatically scaled back sending juveniles to Lincoln Hills.
The day after the assault, Lincoln Hills officials sent the victim to segregated housing for disruptive behavior. It was that detail — punishing the victim — that prompted the judge to write the governor eight months after Ethan Allen School was consolidated into Lincoln Hills.
His memo was addressed to the governor, but Walker's aides said they never showed it to him. At the time, he was fighting for his political life during a recall election sparked by Act 10.
No one was disciplined for the handling of the assault. Department of Corrections officials told county workers they were retraining employees, but they did not get back to the judge himself.
"Zero," said Kreul, who is now retired. "I got nothing back. I would not have sent the letter if I thought it was going to go to the circular file. ... I thought somebody would say, 'This merits some real investigation.'"
At the time of the sexual assault and delayed response, Westerhaus was the prison’s superintendent and John Ourada its deputy superintendent.
Walker's team promoted the pair two years later, in 2014.
Patrick Marley , Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Published 10:00 a.m. CT Dec. 17, 2016 | Updated 3:49 p.m. CT Jan. 6, 2017
Red flags raised to Walker, others but abuses continued
Irma — Shirtless and handcuffed, the 17-year-old inmate stood in the hallway of the segregation unit, refusing to go into his room.
“You want to do something, do it now!" Kenyadi Evans snapped at two guards.
When a third guard arrived, Evans sized her up. “I'll beat your ass, too,” he said.
Guard Jeff Butler had heard enough that chaotic night, one like so many other nights at the trouble-plagued Lincoln Hills School for Boys. He shoved the teen into the room and slammed the door, smashing his foot.
Out of frustration, Butler punched the metal door so hard that he broke his hand.
Before driving himself to the hospital, the four-year Lincoln Hills veteran sat in his truck and cried, prison records show.
Inside his room, Evans screamed and held up his foot so the staff could see the bleeding. The Milwaukee teen had lost parts of two small toes, but it would take prison officials nearly two hours to take him to a hospital 15 miles away.
He would eventually require multiple surgeries and the partial amputation of the two toes.
It was Nov. 29, 2015.
It had been 46 months — nearly four years — since a judge alerted Gov. Scott Walker that prison officials had waited hours to take an inmate who had been sexually assaulted to a hospital. Twelve months since the Department of Corrections had launched an internal investigation. Ten months since criminal investigators had opened their own probe. One month since prosecutors had told a court they believed children were being abused.
Six days after Evans' toes were crushed, state agents descended on the facility, located 30 miles north of Wausau. The raid began to lay bare problems that would result in the departure of a dozen employees, spark an FBI investigation and deepen concerns about the state's justice system for juveniles who commit serious crimes.
The night Evans was injured made clear that public officials — from front-line guards to the governor — had for years missed or ignored numerous warning signs about a facility descending into disorder.
On the way to the hospital, Evans boasted, said the guard who drove him there.
“He was talking about how much money he was going to make,” retired guard Doug Curtis recalled. “‘Boy, I’m going to make some money off of this. You’re going to pay.’”
Indeed, within a year taxpayers would give Evans a $300,000 settlement to avoid a lawsuit.
Problems fester
For years, officials knew or should have known about the thicket of problems at Lincoln Hills and its sister facility on the same campus, Copper Lake School for Girls.
“It all went on in plain view of the Department of Corrections, but nobody at the Department of Corrections knew how juvenile corrections worked or how Lincoln Hills operated or what was going on," said Troy Bauch, who until recently was the union representative for workers there.
“Nobody cared.”
The sweeping criminal probe, now nearly 2 years old, is examining allegations of prisoner abuse, child neglect, sexual assault, intimidation of witnesses and victims, strangulation and tampering with public records. A separate internal investigation uncovered four incidents where inmates' bones were broken.
The crisis at Lincoln Hills is rooted in systematic breakdowns, lax management, confusion over policies, a lack of communication and chronic staff shortages, a review of more than 1,000 pages of records and dozens of interviews by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found.
Officials trained staff improperly, failed to preserve video evidence, didn't document serious incidents, and often shirked their duty to report matters to parents, police and social service agencies.
The shortcomings intensified in 2011 when the Walker administration shut down two youth prisons in southeastern Wisconsin to save $25 million a year. The move put all of the state's serious teen offenders in one facility — hundreds of miles from most of their families.
“The entire climate went from mildly hellish to the ninth ring of hell," said Timothy Johnson, a former guard.
While a developing crisis quickly became apparent, no one moved to address it.
After nearly six years in office, Walker has yet to visit Lincoln Hills.
A prison with an unassuming name
Opened in 1970, Lincoln Hills is surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Inmates live in dorm-style cottages that dot the campus near the small town of Irma. They attend school year-round in a central building.
The state tries to give the facility a different atmosphere than adult prisons. Inmates are referred to as youth, guards as youth counselors. Residents hang Halloween and Christmas decorations to try to give it a homey air.
Lincoln Hills generally holds inmates as young as 13 and as old as 25, separated by treatment and education needs. Most inmates are in their mid to late teens; some adults are being held for crimes they committed as juveniles.
About 145 boys are in Lincoln Hills and 20 girls in Copper Lake. The two areas are separated by fences. Holding an inmate costs more than $100,000 a year.
Most of the inmates are African-American and come from Milwaukee — 215 miles and 3½ hours away. The staff is largely white and from the rural north.
Unlike the state’s overpopulated adult prisons, there is plenty of room at Lincoln Hills. The prison was built to hold more than 500 inmates.
Typically, the inmates have committed serious, violent crimes — including homicide and robbery — or have had repeated run-ins with the law and didn’t turn their behavior around after being sent to group homes.
'A caged dog'
The mother of one Milwaukee teen had mixed feelings when her son was sent to Lincoln Hills in 2014 at age 15. She worried about him being there but knew he needed serious intervention.
“(He) was at that point of no return,” said the mother, who spoke to the Journal Sentinel on the condition that her name not be used.
The boy was first arrested at 13 after breaking into a friend’s house. Before long, he broke into a school to try to steal computers. He ran away from group homes, once stealing a car.
At Lincoln Hills, he was frequently sent to segregation for beating others. Guards often doused him with pepper spray, his mother said.
"It felt like my son was a caged dog, not a child or a man,” she said.
In August, a staff member filed a report claiming the boy had attempted suicide by tying a shirt around his neck.
No one from Lincoln Hills notified the mother — a problem that repeatedly has cropped up at the juvenile prison.
She found out three months later, from a delinquency services official for Milwaukee County.
“When I got this letter, I almost had a heart attack,” she said. “My child tried to commit suicide and nobody told me? I would’ve walked, if I had to, up to Lincoln Hills and been there for him to find out what would make him want to harm himself.”
Her son, now 17, later said he had not attempted suicide but had covered his face with a shirt because he was about to be hit with pepper spray. She said she believed her son because he had never tried to hurt himself before.
A Department of Corrections spokesman said parents are notified only if an injury occurs.
When she contacted Lincoln Hills to find out why she hadn’t been told of the incident, she was told she would get a call back that day.
She is still waiting for that call.
Shutting down a prison
Numbers drove the decision to consolidate the state's juvenile inmates at Lincoln Hills.
In 2004, the state’s youth prisons held 668 inmates on a typical day. By 2011, the figure had dropped to nearly half that.
The reduction, which mirrored national trends was due to several factors. Fewer juveniles were being arrested. When they did get in trouble, they were increasingly being placed in community-based settings instead of prisons.
It no longer made financial sense for the state to run three secure facilities — Lincoln Hills, Ethan Allen School in Waukesha County and Southern Oaks Girls School in Racine County. In 2010, Gov. Jim Doyle formed a task force to figure out what to do and concluded a juvenile prison should close.
Ethan Allen was older, its grounds were smaller and the facility was more expensive to run than Lincoln Hills. At the time they were closed, Ethan Allen and Southern Oaks together cost nearly $33 million a year to operate. Lincoln Hills cost about $19 million.
It was also easier to close Ethan Allen than Lincoln Hills. A state law requires a juvenile prison to be maintained in northern Wisconsin.
Former Republican state Sen. Clifford "Tiny" Krueger, a tavern keeper in Merrill who had performed in the circus because of his girth, inserted the measure into state law more than 40 years ago, recalled Jim Moeser, a former juvenile corrections official.
No such law applied to southeastern Wisconsin, even though most juvenile inmates come from the state's most populated region.
Doyle's task force said if a facility was to be closed, there should be careful planning for the transition.
When Walker took office in January 2011, he moved quickly to close Ethan Allen and Southern Oaks.
The consolidation saved $25 million a year. Like other changes the Republican governor made early in his tenure, the move was overshadowed by the mass protests spawned by Act 10, which weakened collective bargaining for most public employees.
As juvenile justice experts around the nation were recommending smaller, more localized facilities, Wisconsin went in the opposite direction, consolidating operations in a remote setting.
"This is a 19th century or early 20th century model, where you have a large state-operated facility hours away from the urban centers," said Jeffrey Butts, director of a research center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
"It is profoundly ineffective and wasteful."
A rocky transition
More than 100 inmates were transferred to Lincoln Hills over several months in 2011, almost doubling the population.
Lincoln Hills got approval to bring on more than 100 new employees, but the institution was chronically short-staffed because of the challenge of hiring prison workers in a sparsely populated area. Supervisors forced employees to work double shifts, and living units were often operated with fewer employees, providing workers with less backup.
There were so many double shifts employees sometimes had trouble staying awake on their drives home, guards said.
“We got people walking around like zombies,” Curtis said in a recent interview as he reflected on his time as a guard there. “They want to know when they’re going to sleep again.”
The influx of new inmates created fights and arguments, as the teens sought to establish where they stood in the prison’s pecking order.
“I would come in at 6:30 and by 6:31 I’d have a couple guys on the floor in handcuffs,” said Johnson.
Guards, meanwhile, were angry because Act 10 made them pay more for their benefits, cutting a typical worker's take-home pay by 8.5%. With the loss of collective bargaining, they also had less say in how the prison was run.
Around this time, prison officials instituted a philosophy that calls for using restraints less often and trying to talk inmates through their problems when they act up instead of isolating them. Guards were skeptical.
Paul Westerhaus, who for years played key roles in running Lincoln Hills, admitted to internal investigators in 2015 that he didn't recognize the scope of the problems that were developing or move to fix them. The abrupt consolidation threw the staff into disarray, and the institution didn't have a solid training program to deal with it, he said.
He also attributed the problems to an inmate population that had more mental health issues and was increasingly aggressive. Having one facility made it tougher to separate inmates who clashed because they couldn't be transferred to another prison.
“It's almost like it began a perfect storm, and it just sort of went and grew from there,” he said.
Warnings arrived early
In February 2012, Racine County Circuit Judge Richard Kreul did something he'd never done during 18 years on the bench. He wrote the governor a letter about one of his cases.
"I'm sure reading the attached memo will shock you as much as it did me," he wrote.
The memo Kreul sent to Walker described an incident in which an inmate from Racine was forced to perform oral sex on his roommate and then beaten unconscious.
Workers learned of the assault at 4 p.m. They didn’t get the victim medical treatment for three hours.
The delay happened in part because other inmates were playing a basketball game, according to a Racine County human services report.
“What did you want us to do, stop the game?” Lincoln Hills psychologist Paul Hesse asked with a chuckle when a Racine County official inquired about the sexual assault and beating, according to county records.
That night, more than six hours after the assault was discovered, hospital workers — not prison staff — reported the assault to the Lincoln County Sheriff's Department. The offender was ultimately convicted of the beating and sexual assault.
Racine County officials were tipped to the assault by another youth, but only got details from Lincoln Hills officials after making repeated inquiries. In response, Racine County dramatically scaled back sending juveniles to Lincoln Hills.
The day after the assault, Lincoln Hills officials sent the victim to segregated housing for disruptive behavior. It was that detail — punishing the victim — that prompted the judge to write the governor eight months after Ethan Allen School was consolidated into Lincoln Hills.
His memo was addressed to the governor, but Walker's aides said they never showed it to him. At the time, he was fighting for his political life during a recall election sparked by Act 10.
No one was disciplined for the handling of the assault. Department of Corrections officials told county workers they were retraining employees, but they did not get back to the judge himself.
"Zero," said Kreul, who is now retired. "I got nothing back. I would not have sent the letter if I thought it was going to go to the circular file. ... I thought somebody would say, 'This merits some real investigation.'"
At the time of the sexual assault and delayed response, Westerhaus was the prison’s superintendent and John Ourada its deputy superintendent.
Walker's team promoted the pair two years later, in 2014.