Pamela Oliver
Key findings: Of those leaving Wisconsin prisons for the first time, Native American Indians have about a 30% higher rate of crimeless revocations than Whites, and Blacks about 20% higher (comparable to disparity ratios of 1.3 and 1.2) while Hispanic and Asian revocation rates are lower than White. For second and
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Key findings In Wisconsin, an estimated 35% of first spells in prison and 50-75% of second or later spells are crimeless revocations, depending on the criteria used for “crimeless”. A careful comparison of prison records suggests that roughly a third of prison admissions with no new sentence may have anticipated
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There is a lot of confusion in understanding imprisonment data created by the failure to understand the difference between the characteristics of people sitting in prison at any one time (what are technically called the “stock”) and the characteristics of the people who have gone though prison (the flow). This
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It is important to understand how long people stay in prison as part of understanding revocations. The graph below shows how long people stay in prison across all admission types. The vertical axis shows the cumulative percentage who have exited after the number of months on the horizontal axis. So,
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There’s a new campaign you can read about at sentback.org to stop sending people to prison on crimeless revocations. The campaign is sponsored by Restoring Our Communities (ROC) Wisconsin, WISDOM and EXPO (Ex-Prisoners Organizing). According to a report by Health Impact Partners (short web summary or PDF full report), about 1/3 of the
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A few days after Donald Trump won the electoral votes for president, some people started suggesting that pro-immigrant people in the US wear safety pins in emulation of the movement in Britain after Brexit to signal support for immigrants. A social media debate quickly ensured about what this might mean,
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Madison and Dane County have an affordable housing crisis. On the west side of Madison, one new owner of a 90-unit complex has recently non-renewed two thirds of his tenants, leaving them to scramble to try to find housing in an impossible market for lower-income renters. In addition, recent changes
Read moreOn August 24, 2016, I was interviewed by Wisconsin Public Radio regarding the explanations for Wisconsin’s high racial disparities rates. You can listen to the interview online or download it on the WPR web site
Read moreI had the great honor to appear with Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm and UW-Madison Law Professor Michelle Lavigne at the Wisconsin Ideas lecture series to talk about criminal justice in Wisconsin. Michelle goes first, I do my graphs second, and the star of the show, John Chisholm speaks last.
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Dane County has the highest Black/White rate of prison admissions among Wisconsin counties with large Black populations, but it does NOT have the highest Black prison admission rate. That dubious honor goes to Kenosha County. Milwaukee County has high racial disparities in prison admissions and has over 70% of the
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