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Evers Vetos Closing of Green Bay Prison
Wisconsin’s governor has taken the rush out of the effort to close the state’s oldest prison.
Gov. Tony Evers early Thursday vetoed the piece out of the state budget that would have required closing the Green Bay Correctional Institution by 2029.
“Sating we’ll [close] Green Bay by ‘29 doesn’t mean a damn thing,” the governor told reporters. “We have to start working on this.”
The budget included a provision that would mandate Green Bay’s closing in just four years, but there weren’t any plans to build a new prison, or to house the 1,000-plus inmates who are currently in Green Bay.
The governor says “there is a plan,” but his original proposal to close Green Bay was part of a much-disliked overhaul of the state’s entire prison system. Evers has said he wants to focus more on rehabilitation and skills training, for example he wants to turn the prison in Waupun into a “vocational village.”
The governor has also said in the past that he would like to cut the number of inmates in Wisconsin’s prisons.
The veto also reflects the on-going difficulty of closing prisons in Wisconsin.
“Just using Lincoln Hills as an example,” Evers explained. “That will need to be redone, and put into a different medium.”
Former Gov. Scott Walker signed a plan to close Lincoln Hills back in 2018, and a new youth prison is set to open in Milwaukee next year, yet Lincoln Hills remains open. And there is no plan on the table to close it either.
Evers, at his early morning budget signing, said he hopes lawmakers take-up his prison plan next session.
“It's more of a message that the legislature needs to work together with us to get a plan,” the governor told reporters.
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