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Green Bay Still Waiting on Prison Closure
Local leaders in Allouez are not sitting and waiting for the state to close the Green Bay Correctional Center.
The Village of Allouez hosted a meeting last week to hear from lawmakers and locals about the plan to finally close the GBCI.
“Good things come to those who hustle while they wait, and the three of us are going to continue to hustle. I know all of you are going to continue to hustle,” Rep. David Steffen, R-Howard, said at the meeting.
Lawmakers thought they had an agreement with Gov. Tony Evers in the new state budget to close the prison by 2029, but the governor removed the deadline when he signed the budget back in July.
“My hope is that, with that line item veto, that this (bill) will be comprehensive enough when we are done drafting the bills and talking with all interested parties,” Rep. Benjamin Franklin, R-De Pere, added. “That we have a final product that not only gets voted on by the Assembly, but gets voted on by the Senate and then ultimately gets signed by the governor.”
“We now have a path, we have a plan, we have a legislature that’s in agreement and we have a governor who’s supportive of what we’re trying to do here in Allouez. None of those four things did we fully have just one year ago,” Steffen said.
Prison advocates, though, are calling on the governor to begin to remove people from GBCI and other state prisons before his term ends in 2027.
The Wisconsin Transformational Justice Campaign last week rallied at the Capitol, and pressed the governor to make good on his first term promise to cut the state's prison population in half.
“We’re calling on Governor Evers to start utilizing that power before he leaves office,” Justice Campaign coordinator Mark Rice said. “It’s time for him to follow through.”
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