In 2017 Sawyer County aimed to lower its jail population; by 2024 it’s down by nearly 40%

Alternatives to incarceration drastically cut the jail population in Sawyer County, which used to have the fourth highest lock-up rate in Wisconsin | Getty Images

(This article is based on stories reported by Frank Zufall for the Sawyer County Record since 2017 and used with permission.)

In 2015 Sawyer County, a rural county in northwestern Wisconsin with a population around 18,000 at the time, had one of the highest incarceration rates in Wisconsin.

According to a report by the Vera Institute of Justice ,  Sawyer County ranked fourth in the state behind Menominee, Shawano and Forest Counties. As recently as 2019, the average number of persons in the jail each day in any month was 100.95. By August 2024, that number had fallen to 61.25. The trend is clearly downward.

When so many county jails are bursting at the seams and struggling to recruit guards, why did Sawyer County’s jail population drop so much?

The biggest single reason is a decision made in 2017 to reconvene the county’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council (CJCC), a group representing judges and district attorneys along with law enforcement, probation and representatives of social services, with the goal of looking for alternatives to incarceration, focusing on programming and therapy.

Another factor that began around 2017 and gained momentum in 2018 was the pursuit of a second judge for the county. From 2014-16, Sawyer County Circuit Judge John Yackel had the highest caseload for one judge in the state. Because of the sheer volume of felony cases, many people who had charges pending waited weeks or months in jail for their court appearances.

A second judge was approved for Sawyer County and then a second courtroom was constructed for over $10 million. In August 2023, the second judge, Monica Isham, was sworn into office.

Background

In March of 2017, Brenda Spurlock, Bayfield County Criminal Justice Coordinator, asked Sawyer County to participate in a Department of Justice planning grant called “Bridges to Treatment.” The program diverts inmates with mental illness or substance abuse from jail to community treatment programs.

The proposal, she said, called for the participants – including Bayfield and Ashland counties along with the Red Cliff, Bad River and Lac Courte Oreilles Tribal bands – to try new strategies to  divert eligible offenders into community treatment.

“If you don’t start doing things differently, you are going to keep adding to your jail,” said Bayfield County Circuit Judge John Anderson months later at the May Bayfield County CJCC meeting after Spurlock made her pitch to the Sawyer County Public Safety Committee.

Anderson said he was quoting a jail designer who had spoken at a jail-building committee 20 years previously.

Taking to heart the words of that consultant, Bayfield County leaders formed their CJCC to look for alternatives to jail. In 2017, Bayfield County’s jail population had fallen significantly enough that it had room to take the overflow from Sawyer County’s crowded jail.

Members of the local LCO Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, including two – Tweed Shuman and James Schlender, Jr. – both of whom were also Sawyer County supervisors in 2017 (Shuman is still in office), raised concerns about the high jail population, with over 70% of the residents being Native Americans.

In July 2017, then-Sawyer County Administrator Tom Hoff announced that Sawyer County would reconvene its CJCC, which had been disbanded for years. Hoff said the primary goal of the Sawyer County CJCC was to lower the daily jail population.

Schlender, who advocated for the CJCC and also for hiring a full-time coordinator, said the point of the council was to have the judge, district attorney, sheriff and jailer in the same room to look at trends, such as a high revocation rate for driver’s licenses, and see what could be done to ensure the same people don’t keep returning  to jail. Schlender also noted that many were in jail because of drug and alcohol problems.

“Rather than having them sit in jail with no services offered to them, maybe we can get a diversion program working with (Sawyer County) Health and Human Services and get them off to a treatment program and then you are going to see a reduction in the jail population,” he said.

County Supervisor Iras Humpreys, an advocate for reconvening the CJCC, pointed out at the July 2017 meeting that Sawyer County had spent $70,000 in 2017 to pay for housing jail residents in other counties, notably Bayfield County.

Humpreys also noted that among the 90 residents in the Sawyer County jail at the time, only 26 had been sentenced while 31 were sitting in jail because they were not able to pay for a cash bond as part of their bail.

Judge Anderson said it took years for the Bayfield County CJCC to have a positive impact because there were some stakeholders committed to the punishment mode but others to rehabilitation, and the two sides were not working together. “At first, if you said ‘evidence-based practice’ you’d see people rolling their eyes,” he said. “It took a lot of years of saying, ‘This is what the evidence is showing.’ It took a lot of years to change people’s way of thinking.”

Anderson said there are several studies on lowering recidivism that reveal what works and what doesn’t. “Boot camps are horrible,” Anderson said. “The DARE program has made no impact on recidivism. It doesn’t mean it’s bad, but if you think the DARE program has helped reduce recidivism with people who have drug and alcohol problems — zero. There are enough studies out there to prove it.”

Another “dumb idea,” he said, is to put people who can’t pay their fines in jail and even more so to send them to another county’s jail because while they are in jail they will not be able to pay the fines.

Launch

In the first months after the new program began, instead of dropping, Sawyer County’s jail population rose, hitting a record high for daily jail population in 2019 of 101.

But Judge Yackel, a member of the CJCC, was working with the CJCC coordinator to put accountability measures in place for people convicted of drug charges, including  an aggressive schedule of drug testing as a condition of their bond and as a way to keep them out of jail. In addition, the county brought  new programming to the jail residents, offering on-the-job training in the construction trades and in-house classes.

JusticePoint: The group that made a difference

In 2018 a non-profit with expertise in criminal justice programming, JusticePoint,  did a multi-month study of Sawyer County jail residents and offered insights into the jail population.  In particular, it highlighted the high rate of unemployment of residents prior to incarceration.

Sawyer County Sheriff Doug Mrotek said he had learned about JusticePoint while attending the 2017 Wisconsin Badgers State Sheriff’s Association meeting and hearing Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney talk about its diversion and jail programming which helped reduce incarceration in his county.

In 2020, the CJCC asked JusticePoint to help with its application for the state’s Treatment and Diversion Grant to help pay program costs  for non-violent adult offenders as an alternative to jail.

The Sawyer County CJCC also began discussions with JusticePoint to see if it would be able to run programs for the county after the retirement of the full-time criminal justice coordinator.

In January 2021, JusticePoint opened an office in the county building and began administering the county’s pretrial and diversion programs.  It also helped with programming in the jail and eventually worked with the court as it reconvened its Recovery/Drug Court, while also helping the sheriff institute a deflection program.

Many of the key stakeholders – judge, sheriff, county administrator, and jailer – give much of the credit for the lower jail census in 2024 to the staff of JusticePoint, five individuals who work mostly through the state Treatment and Diversion  grant.

“I think they’ve done an outstanding job in the last three years,” said Sheriff Mrotek.

Keeping people out of jail as they await trial

The biggest program JusticePoint administers for Sawyer County is a pretrial program, probably the most important factor in lowering the jail census. As of Sept. 11, there were 150 individuals in a pretrial program.

Pretrial is for those who have been arrested, charged, but not convicted and are often on a cash bond as a guarantee they will continue to make court dates and follow prescribed conduct, such as being sober while on release. It wasn’t that many years ago that on average nearly a third of the jail residents in Sawyer County were those who couldn’t make their cash bond. Pretrial supervision offers accountability without a high cash bond.

To help people qualify for the pretrial program, JusticePoint staff does a risk assessment of the person reoffending and makes a report to the judge, DA, and defense attorneys.

“The basic goal, the foundational goal of pretrial, is to ensure that clients are in the court, showing up for court and are maintaining the condition of their bond,” said JusticePoint Diversion Coordinator Kari Dussi.

Becky Barry, JusticePoint’s program manager for Sawyer County, said they often spend time reviewing specific conditions the court has ordered for a bond because often their clients are not fully aware of those conditions, yet if they violate them they could end up in jail. Clients meet with staff on a regular schedule.

For those struggling to meet a condition, such as absolute sobriety, there will be case management referrals to Alcohol and Other Drug Addiction (AODA) counselors, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), or Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meetings or peer support – meeting with a recovering addict who has been trained to help other addicts struggling. If a person isn’t meeting the conditions of a bond, it is up to the court whether to send that person to  jail or impose a cash bond or just deliver a lecture from the judge on what is expected.

Diversion programs keep people out of jail

Another Justice Point service is a diversion program, which offers services to people charged with drug offenses or other offenses stemming from their substance use. In order for the diversion plan to proceed, the applicant has to agree to plead guilty or no contest.  If the person doesn’t complete the diversion plan, her or she will be facing punishment, but if they complete the diversion agreement, the charges are dropped.

To be eligible for diversion one must be 18 or older, a non-violent offender, have a low-moderate risk of recidivism, and be approved by the DA’s office for the voluntary program. Dussi offers an assessment of the person’s eligibility and a recommendation for the length of the program and different terms. If the DA approves, the person is accepted into the diversion program, but if the DA doesn’t approve, the case proceeds to court. One of the standard conditions of diversion is 25 hours of community service. The rest of the conditions are individualized.

“We meet people where they are at and [assess] how it’s helping them reach their goals,” said Dussi.

“If a person has alcohol or substance abuse issues, they’re probably going to AODA,” said Barry. “If they have mental health issues, they’re going to be referred to mental health; if one of their barriers is employment, they’re going to be referred for, like, transitional job skills or training.”

A fundamental concept driving the diversion opportunity, especially for those without prior charges, is that those first few engagements with the legal system, especially jail time, can leave a permanent, negative impression resulting in future recidivism.

“I think, as a society, we have this tendency to think that when people have criminal behavior, the answer is to throw everybody into jails, into prisons,” said Barry.

“I think that we need to look at what the research and evidence is telling us,” she said. “When the people working in the criminal justice system continue to get the same results over and over and over, and the recidivism is not going down, what we’re doing is not working, so we need to look at evidence and start doing what that tells us is going to work.”

Sheriff Mrotek became an advocate for diversion when attending training in Eau Claire and heard the case of a woman who had helped her boyfriend elude law enforcement and was later arrested. She entered a diversion program and the charge against her wasn’t prosecuted upon successful completion of her program. The woman ended up finishing nursing school and became a registered nurse (RN).

“She really attributed the diversion opportunity to changing her life around in a positive way,” said Mrotek who noted she wouldn’t have been hired by a hospital with a felony charge on her record. “She was able to get her life straightened around and everything worked out pretty well.”

Recovery court

JusticePoint staff also work with the Sawyer County Recovery Court that reconvened in November 2023. Recovery Court is the newer edition of what used to be known as Drug Court, a special court meant to provide accountability and encouragement for those struggling with an addiction.

“It’s for high-risk offenders and actually treatment court is also a post-sentence option, but it’s an alternative to a felony conviction, a serious felony conviction, whereas diversion is for more low-risk individuals,” Barry explained. Those in the program have a sentence imposed on them, but that sentence is stayed pending successful completion of Recovery Court.

Pre-arrest deflection

The JusticePoint staff also wrote a grant for the sheriff’s office for a deflection program with the purpose of keeping low-risk individuals out of the criminal justice system. “It deflects them, if you will, from the criminal justice system into supportive resources and responses to mitigate risk of recidivism or become more involved in the criminal justice system,” said Dussi.

“Law enforcement has the option to decide if they want to deflect that person instead of arresting that person,” said Barry.

In the deflection program, there are a variety of different supervision levels and options developed by peer support specialists working under the supervision of Dussi.

The premise, said Barry, “is to try to get that person services proactively and keep them out of the criminal justice system, because statistics tell us that those low-level offenders are the ones that, you know, a year down the line, two years, five years down the line, are the ones that we’re seeing in the more high-level offense areas. And so the whole purpose is to try to get them early and get them out of that risk area.”

Improved outcomes after hiring a second  judge

Starting in 2017, Judge Yackel began raising concerns at the local, regional, and state level that Sawyer County needed a second judge and second courtroom to process cases in a timely manner. The second judge was approved on the  condition that a second courtroom be constructed. The county bonded over $10 million and began construction in 2022. Judge Monica Isham took the bench, presiding over the new courtroom in  August 2023.

Judge Yackel said that prior to having a second judge it might have taken him months to consider whether a person should be in the diversion program and while that person was being considered they might be waiting in jail for as long as six to nine months.  Cases “would languish because we were being crushed by the amount of cases,” he said.

With two judges, Yackel said, there is more flexibility to respond to an urgent request, such as when a defense attorney asks that a client be allowed to attend in-patient treatment at a facility that has an opening with a short window for a response. “We will modify that bond to do that,” said Yackel, “and our ability to react to that is much quicker.”

In November 2023, with two judges in the county, the Sawyer Recovery Court reconvened. A lot of what Recovery Court is about is personal accountability between the two judges – Yackel and Isham – and the offenders, along with positive feedback for little steps of sobriety and stability.

Getting through the system faster

Sawyer County Administrator Andy Albarado is also pleased to see the reduced jail population. He gives much credit to the diversion program and especially the pretrial program, as well as having a second judge

“People are able to get through the system faster,” he said, “and we’ve only had that second courtroom for a year, and I wouldn’t say that second courtroom is fully implemented. It has taken six months just to get the court calendar balanced out, to get the new judge assigned cases and get people their court dates.”

Albarado said even with two judges now available to respond to cases, there are still limiting factors such as the availability of public defenders. “People have to be represented and if it takes some time to get them a public defender assigned, they still might have to wait through the system,” he said.

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