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How Wisconsin’s prison staffing crisis contributed to lockdowns, death

As state lawmakers debated a pay raise for prison guards to fill a growing number of vacancies in 2022, a Dodge Correctional Institution sergeant made an alarming prediction.

“It’s only a matter of time until a staff or inmates are going to be killed based on these staff shortages,” he wrote.

Two years later, that’s exactly what happened.

Wisconsin’s prison system has been rocked by the deaths of six prisoners at Waupun Correctional Institution and a guard at Lincoln Hills School for Boys, all within a 14-month time span. At Waupun, nine former staff members, including the former warden, face criminal charges in two of the deaths.

Interviews with former and current prison staff and court documents point to understaffing — a long-known problem in the state’s prisons — as a key factor in the tragedies.

The staffing crisis can be traced back over a decade to the 2011 passage of Act 10 under former Gov. Scott Walker. During Gov. Tony Evers’ tenure, the shortage led to lockdowns and what some current and former employees called substandard training. The problem persists even after state lawmakers approved prison guard pay raises in June 2023, though it’s showing signs of improvement.

In a letter for the 2022 committee hearing, the sergeant described how a single officer had been in charge of watching 144 prisoners during an overnight shift the previous October.

The prisoners were divided into two separate areas, so at any time, 72 prisoners were unattended.

“Thank God nothing happened,” he wrote. “I urge you to please do something before this type of staffing gets any worse and someone gets seriously hurt, or loses their life.”

State data shows a correlation between prisoner assaults on staff members and vacancies.

Last year, the department had the highest number of prisoner assaults on staff members since 2013, when the Department of Corrections began tracking that data across all prisons. That same year, the share of vacant security staff positions across the agency also peaked with more than 1,500 unfilled jobs, about 35% of the total.

For those who live in Waupun, a city of about 11,000 people, and who work at one of the three state prisons located there, the ultimate blame for the tragedies lies 50 miles away, in the state Capitol.

Signs in front yards around the city have the same message:

“Madison knew.”

Prison guards left the job in the aftermath of Act 10

In March 2011, Walker, then the governor, signed Act 10, which all but ended collective bargaining for most public workers, including correctional employees.

Prison staff had to pay more for their benefits, reducing their take-home pay. Their unions were also no longer able to negotiate over any issues except raises, and any negotiated raises were capped at the rate of inflation.

Correctional staff also lost a worker-management committee to address workers’ safety concerns, had fewer protections against retaliation from management and had a reduced ability to file grievances.

Some lawmakers who supported Act 10 have said recently that corrections faced similar workforce challenges as other industries during the COVID-19 pandemic, while Walker told nonprofit news outlet Wisconsin Watch earlier this year that Act 10 did not impact state lawmakers’ ability to improve recruiting or raise wages.

Still, some correctional workers maintain the legislation played a role in staffing challenges.

“The whole landscape just changed,” said Joe Verdegan, a former correctional officer at Green Bay Correctional Institution who retired in 2020 after almost 27 years.

Working in prisons has never been an easy task, current and former workers say, but in the 1990s and early 2000s, the job offered a family-supporting wage and good benefits.

Waupun Mayor Rohn Bishop, a lifelong city resident, said he recalled many friends applying to be correctional officers after high school and receiving rejections.

“They only took a certain caliber of people. It was just a job that people wanted to have back then,” Bishop said.

Once in the job, people rarely quit, and there was a waiting list to work at some of the state’s prisons, Verdegan said.

“After Act 10, that all changed,” he said. “We had constant openings, and the staffing shortage just got worse and worse every year.”

Newer workers treated a corrections job as a steppingstone to other professions, such as working in a police or sheriff’s department, whose unions were exempt from Act 10, Verdegan said.

By 2021 and 2022, prison staff who wrote to the state Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee said DOC employees were routinely working multiple 16-hour shifts each week — sometimes as many as four. Many described concerns with working in a dangerous environment while so short on sleep.

Some of the letters talked about the strain the job put on their family life.

“My Christmas Eve and Christmas Day will be spent working 16 hours with coworkers and (prisoners) instead of children and family,” one Kettle Moraine Correctional Institution guard wrote in late 2021. “I myself have been asked several times after missing family events to reevaluate my career choice.”

Another Kettle Moraine prison guard, who had 30 years of experience, wrote “the burnout rate in corrections is higher than ever.”

Verdegan left his job at the Green Bay prison a year earlier than he planned, frustrated by the changes and job conditions.

He wasn’t the only one.

“Some people would take a break, go to their car to have a cigarette,” he said. “They’d never come back.”

Understaffing led to lockdowns and less training

Steven Davis went to prison as a 17-year-old in 2000. For the first few years, a DOC social worker regularly advocated for him and offered support. Most of the correctional officers were helpful and friendly, too.

As he finished up schoolwork inside his cell at Green Bay Correctional Institution, guards walking by would answer his spelling questions or give other basic help, he said.

That changed around 2012 and 2013.

“Nowadays, it’s like, if they ask about your family and all that, they automatically consider this fraternizing versus just a concerned human being,” said Davis, who was released on parole in 2023.

In his last few years in prison, he saw experienced staff whose families had worked in corrections for generations regularly get replaced by young guards who did not stay long.

Current and former DOC employees say the constant turnover in recent years has resulted in inexperience among the guard ranks and less thorough training.

In court documents related to a recent prisoner’s death, a Dodge County sheriff’s detective wrote that staff at Waupun were “poorly trained on many policies and procedures” — including on making a record of if and when a prisoner missed meals. Randall Hepp, the former warden charged with misconduct in public office, told investigators “this is the inevitable outcome of a long-term staffing deficit,” the complaint says.

A Waupun employee, who asked not to be named publicly for fear of retaliation by the DOC, said the staff training new hires often are not fully briefed on policies and procedures themselves. The employee recently witnessed a guard filling in from another prison training a new Waupun staffer.

“I specifically remember hearing an individual in our restrictive housing unit going, ‘I don’t know why I’m training you, because I’m only here for a couple weeks,'” the employee said.

Bishop said the lack of experience is a contributing factor to the prisoner deaths and misconduct allegations.

“You have people who are 23, 24 years old, they’re coming in to work at Waupun,” the mayor said. “They’ve never been in a prison before, and so when someone’s doing self-harm in a cell, they freeze and they don’t know what to do. And that’s how people will die.”

“That’s what they’re missing right now, is so much experience has left the building,” he added. “And Madison doesn’t seem to have any answers.”

The staff turnover and rising number of assaults led to lockdowns at Waupun and Green Bay in 2023.

A lockdown — or what the DOC calls “modified movement” to differentiate from emergency lockdowns involving brief periods of no movement at all within a prison — can deprive prisoners of basic needs required by state statute, including two showers a week and time outside cells for at least four hours a week.

At times, staff during lockdowns filled in for roles they were not hired to do, said the current Waupun employee. The employee said non-uniform staff sometimes distributed meals to prisoners in cells and social workers did laundry and bagged meals while other programming was paused.

When asked if staff members filled in various jobs during lockdowns, Beth Hardtke, a Department of Corrections spokeswoman, said that, in general, “security is everyone’s role in an institution.”

“Non-uniformed personnel, for example, may assist uniformed staff with supervision,” Hardtke said in an email, adding: “While these non-uniformed staff members’ primary responsibility may not be security, they may still assist with monitoring activity, identifying emergency situations, and making proper notifications.”

A former Waupun employee who asked not to be named publicly because of ongoing litigation said staffing levels had a direct effect on prisoners’ well-being, too.

“At what point are we not doing enough for the inmates that live there? Yeah, they get books, they get their meals — all the standard, basic living needs,” the former staffer said. “But I don’t see how anybody can be rehabilitated at that level of staffing, especially with the lockdowns.”

Restrictions at the two prisons have gradually lifted, something the DOC has attributed to rising staffing numbers. By the end of July, Green Bay had returned to regular movement and Waupun had reinstated in-person visits but still has reduced recreation time.

Prisoners continue to eat all meals inside their cells, a change first implemented to limit the spread of COVID-19 and use available staffing, though Green Bay plans to reopen the dining halls in the future, according to Hardtke.

RELATED: Beatings, drugs and possible solutions: What lawmakers learned about Wisconsin’s prisons

Pay raises have improved staffing numbers, but issues remain

After years of advocacy, correctional staff finally did get a pay raise.

The original 2022 bill to give pay raises to correctional staff was vetoed by Evers, the governor, who objected to the use of federal pandemic relief money for those raises, which also would have been temporary.

The following year, state lawmakers approved raising the base starting wage for correctional officers, sergeants and youth counselors from $20 to $33 an hour, as part of the governor’s budget.

Since the pay raise, the DOC has had some of its largest correctional officer training academy class sizes in years, said Hardtke, the agency’s spokeswoman.

Last year, 568 people graduated from the six-week correctional officer training academy. So far in 2024, that number is 877.

Of the 12 academy classes that have graduated so far in 2024, four have had more than 100 graduates, according to data provided by Hardtke.

That increase is reflected in the decreasing staff vacancy rates at Wisconsin’s prisons. The statewide vacancy rate is the lowest it has been since 2019, at just 12.5% as of the end of July, according to DOC data.

Still, it’s not clear how many of the new hires will stick around.

Between 2018 and 2023, nearly 10,800 staff members were employed at the DOC for more than one year, according to agency data obtained by USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin.

Of those, fewer than half — around 4,600 — stayed in the job throughout that whole six-year time period.

Jeff Hoffman, who retired in January 2023 after 22 years working as a guard at Green Bay, said even during “the good days” when most guard positions were filled, about half of the new correctional officer hires would quit after little time on the job.

Joe Carran, who retired in 2009 after 32 years as a guard at Waupun, said he saw similar turnover.

“It’s not for everybody. There always was a percentage that started there and worked for six months or maybe up to two years,” he said.

Even those who stay with the job can experience lasting effects from the high-stress environment, which has only been exacerbated by the low staffing, Verdegan said.

“I went to two funerals in the last year of friends of mine, they’re my age, at 55, they drank themselves to death. And the job was partly a reason for that,” he said. “That was their way of coping with the stress.”

Recent hearings held by lawmakers have given prison workers opportunities to share their experiences.

At a July 9 hearing in Madison, a former correctional sergeant at Oshkosh Correctional Institution described living with chronic headaches and post-traumatic stress disorder after he was beaten by a prisoner. At an Aug. 6 hearing in Merrill, a relative of youth counselor Corey Proulx, who died in June after he was assaulted by a teen at Lincoln Hills School for Boys, asked the DOC to take steps to prevent another tragedy, such as adjusting the ratio of guards to prisoners.

To Bishop, the Waupun mayor, the hearings told lawmakers what they already knew, or should have known. He criticized them for doing little beyond the recent pay raises.

“Many people from Waupun, especially who work with corrections, have been emailing and writing letters to the state legislators and governors for years: ‘This is getting worse, this is getting worse, this is getting worse,” Bishop said.

“Madison knew, so don’t pass the buck onto us.”

Eva Wen of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.

Contact Kelli Arseneau at 920-213-3721 or [email protected]. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, at @ArseneauKelli.

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