Former guards, former inmates and lawmakers weigh in on challenges at Wisconsin's youth prison

MADISON and MERRILL, Wis. — If you ask Mark and Lisa Brener how they fell in love, they'll tell you the truth.

"We tell everyone we met in prison," Lisa said.

And they did meet in prison, but not as inmates. Lisa and Mark first connected in the break room at Lincoln Hills-Copper Lake Schools, Wisconsin's only remaining youth prison facility.

"When you work together, you have eight hours to sit and share," Lisa said.

"Your partner is everything, and you share basically your life story with this person, because they got your back, you got their back, and it's a bonding thing," Mark added. "I don't think you get that from anywhere else you probably work, because you trust this person with your life. You turn your back, you know, I mean, they got your six."

Lisa worked at Lincoln Hills for nearly a decade before Mark showed up.

"I was kind of excited, thought it was fun," Lisa said. "We didn't get all that much training back then. We could really relate to [the kids]. I never did read their files, because you don't want to get a preconceived attitude against them."

Before Lincoln Hills, Mark spent 18 years working with adult inmates at Mendota Mental Health Institute, a psychiatric detention facility in Madison run by the Department of Health Services.

"I came from a pretty hard background, and I knew how to fight, I knew how to do things," Mark said. "The people I grew up with were more like the inmates than my co workers."

But although he says working with inmates with severe mental illness was certainly a challenge, the leadership at the facility made it easier. He does not say the same about Lincoln Hills.

"The difference between Lincoln Hills and my time at Mendota was everything was so organized, and people knew what was going on," Mark said. "Everything was structured. We had paperwork, incident reports. But then I went to Lincoln Hills, and I'm like, I looked at [Lisa], and I go, 'What is going on in this institution?' Every day you go in there, every individual, your life's at risk."

Both Lisa and Mark have witnessed and experienced violence at the hands of inmates many times over the years.

"I've had surgeries, gotten in between fights, my knee, shoulder," Lisa said. "We had a girl that beat her head up against the wall constantly, and me having to put my hand back there and just, she beats it, and blood's all over the place, and you had to stop her, but you couldn't hurt her."

"I've had toilet bowl cocktail thrown in my face, which is a mixture of poop and pee doing this job," Mark said. "You're asking a lot of a human being to hold back in situations like this."

They say trying to stop outbursts like that saved lives, but they often feared being disciplined for the split second decisions they had to make.

"That fraction of a second of hesitation might cost that kid his life," Mark said.

In the early 2010s , Lincoln Hills-Copper Lake Schools faced growing scrutiny from lawmakers, activists and inmates parents for use of force at the facility. The Breners say that pressure meant decisions made by Department of Corrections leadership in Madison changed all the time, leaving staff confused about the guidelines they had to follow in everyday life and dire situations alike.

"You would be told one day you can't intervene when a kid is getting beat down by another inmate or several inmates, and you're supposed to stand there and watch till the captain gets there to get to you permission to secure," Mark said. "Well, you can kill somebody in two seconds. So you were told not to do anything. Well then you might get disciplined because you didn't intervene. But then the next day, they would change the rule and go back to this, and then a week later they go back to the rule that they had in place before."

"One minute, do everything for them," Lisa said. "Give them Play Doh, give them these headsets, you know, give them this, give them that, give them everything, and the next minute, nothing. Don't lock them up, do lock them up. Don't handcuff them, do. It was confusing for us. Your hands are just tied."

Lisa left Lincoln Hills in 2013 and Mark followed a year later, but they say what they experienced there has stayed with them to this day.

"The choices, the confusion, the psychological effects before and after, I still have dreams. I still have nightmares," Lisa said.

And even now, a decade after they retired, many of the issues they're talking about still haven't been solved. According to the Department of Corrections, there have been 150 youth attacks on staff in 2024 alone. One of them left 49-year-old guard Corey Proulx dead. Lisa and Mark were not surprised to hear it.

"It was just a matter of time for it to happen," Mark said. "The whole time we we were there, it could have happened to any one of [the staff members]. They just need to have tools and structure and guidance from a good captain or a good administrator that says, 'Hey, this is how it's going to be. This is how we're going to handle it, and we're not going to change rules from one day to the next.' That's what it's going to take."

How lawmakers are addressing the crisis

"My brother used to tell me numerous times before he died, 'Mary, you have to do something or somebody is going to die — it's not if, Mary, but when," Sen. Mary Felzkowski, R-Irma, told a group of a few dozen spread through the auditorium of Merrill High School.

The unconventional Aug. 6 hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee was moved away from the capital of Madison to the Northwoods city of Merrill in the wake of Proulx's death.

Lawmakers grilled the new secretary-designee of the Department of Corrections, and other key figures overseeing juvenile inmates, about the department's plan to move forward.

"I think the administration heard a lot of things that set them on their heels," Felzkowski said in an interview with News 3 Now.

"I was watching faces, and I don't think they were aware of how staff felt," she added, alluding to the DOC staffers watching the hearing unfold.

Central to the debate among lawmakers was the current procedures staff at the youth prison must use when dealing with inmates. Many of the policies are governed by a federal consent decree, which was agreed to during a lawsuit filed by the ACLU in 2017. The agreement limits the use of things like pepper spray and physical restraints.

Republican lawmakers asked Gov. Tony Evers to go back to federal court and try to amend the consent decree, to allow corrections officers more latitude. On Wednesday, Evers released a letter telling the judge overseeing the suit that we would not be seeking any changes.

"The court-ordered consent decree ... exists precisely because the conditions at Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake under the Walker-Kleefisch Administration were inhumane and unlawful," Evers wrote.

"There's no one solution," Department of Corrections Sec.-designee Jared Hoy told News 3 Now. "I don't think pepper spray is a magic bullet to bring back and have that fix our issues."

He said the department's policy to not use pepper spray on inmates is aligned with national standards on youth rehabilitation.

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