Monday, February 27, 2017

Clarke, Walker running incarceration hellholes in Wisconsin

Recent stories about Milwaukee County's absentee, talk radio lauded and Trump-travelin' Sheriff David Clarke,
David Clarke by Gage Skidmore.jpg
and his like-minded, right-wing mentor and Trump-travelin' WI GOP Gov. Scott Walker, have exposed patterns of neglect, disregard and outright hellhole-ish incarceration in the formerly civil State of Wisconsin:

*  There's litigation Clarke can't slip out of:

Clarke Can’t Delay Class Action Suit
Pregnant women shackled in county jail, could be as many as 300 in suit.
*  Some of the stories are grisly:
Federal lawsuit filed after newborn baby died at Milwaukee County Jail; 1 of 4 deaths in 6 months
*  There's a pattern to it:
Death in County Jail ruled homicide; cause of death was dehydration 
*  And Walker has let inhumane conditions fester for years at state youth corrections facilities after he moved them and their heavily minority and urban southern Wisconsin inmate population to faraway, rural Northern Wisconsin:
Walker's office heard multiple warnings about Lincoln Hills
*  Some of the details are grisly:
Lincoln Hills youth had toes amputated after run-in with staff
*  The retired former Milwaukee County chief juvenile court judge recently weighed in via Letter to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Editor: 
As the past presiding judge of the Milwaukee County Children’s Court, I have been following the news reports about the Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake Juvenile Correctional Facilities with increasing horror, for lack of a better word....The movement from Wales to the northern parts of Wisconsin has been a disaster by anyone’s standards... 
* And speaking of Copper Lake, the female prison unit, there's that familiar, grisly pattern:
Girl gravely injured in suicide attempt at Copper Lake prison
*  And this humanitarian crisis, as I've called it has been known to Walker since at least 2012, as the Racine Journal Times reported: 
Retired Racine judge calls out Walker on Lincoln Hills incident
Retired Racine County Circuit Court Judge Richard Kreul was caught off guard when he heard a 2012 letter he sent to Gov. Scott Walker about a sexual assault at Lincoln Hills had surfaced.
That surprise turned to outrage after learning the governor never saw the letter and that years passed until investigations into problems at the Irma youth prison began.
“I guess the expression would be, ‘They swept it under the rug,’” Kreul said this week in a phone interview from his home in Texas, where he moved after retirement.
These officials are treating people in their custody as disposable.

That is wrong. 

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