Transcript
Racial Disparities in Wisconsin Incarceration (Hour 3)
Daybreak w/ Brian and Jamie · Mon Apr 27, 2026
You're listening to Civic Media.
You can tune into any of our live shows on any radio station across the state with the Civic Media app.
Find us in your phone's app store and listen anytime, anywhere.
Across the state of Wisconsin, Daybreak with Brian and Jamie is back.
Just what we need in some areas of Wisconsin, more rain.
Keeping up with the good news, why not?
Let's look at some headlines from Iran.
Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Argachi is in Russia ahead of a meeting with President
Vladimir Putin to discuss the conflict with the U.S.
after the diplomats visited with key mediators in Pakistan and Oman over the weekend.
Not over there though you got to call them on the phone because if you didn't hear Jared Kushner is not going over we're tired of the quote was we don't need to be on 15 hours on flights we're very busy.
You started a war two months ago that's why you're busy yeah you started a war so no but now now all
All Negotiations will take place via phone or probably as is the case with our administration on social media Which is not doesn't seem like how a run it goes to social media, but they go to mock with their Lego videos
Which
They are
Mm-hmm.
I don't know who's making them, but they're doing them fast anyway
Donald Trump said yesterday that he defended his decision to cancel his envoy's trips to Pakistan, saying Iranian authorities can call if they want to talk while reiterating that the war could come to an end very soon.
Why is nobody paying their phone bills so you
don't get to talk
It's not really an olive branch that they're extending there, is it?
No, it's certainly not.
And you know, two weeks, that's what we've been told since this started eight weeks ago that we're only two weeks from this ending.
So I don't know what two weeks actually looks like in this administration's mind, but we're well beyond that.
And I was seeing reports, they're not.
They're not.
Hold on.
Are you sure about that?
I was seeing reports over the weekend that in a lot of the Midwest, including Wisconsin, we're going to see some of our highest prices over the next few days, simply because of refineries, because of the season switch and all of the different things.
So if you do have to fill up, I would suggest, or even if you've got a half a tank and you're thinking you can ride it out this week, but you're worried about the price, maybe
Stop by
your favorite
battleship.
suddenly
is one of your,
So you must love this story.
DoorDash spent about $2 million on lobbying in Wisconsin more than any other group this session.
$2 million by DoorDash.
I don't have shade on DoorDash.
I've never used them.
I'm chastised daily by my daughter for not using DoorDash.
No, I don't use them.
But the goal
was to pass
That's fine.
They wanted the bill was to create portable benefits like health care, paid leave and retirement tied to how much gig workers drive.
But the trade off workers would be officially classified as contractors, meaning no minimum wage protections, unemployment insurance or workman's or workers cop.
The governor voted to veto the bill.
He cited lack of bipartisan support and concerns about worker protections.
DoorDash logged nearly half of the 543 lobbying hours spent on the bill showing how aggressively one company pushed it.
The company argued gig work is meant to be flexible part-time income, not traditional full-time employment.
Lobbying overall is massive here in Wisconsin over almost 51,000 hours spent across 545 bills.
248 bills received zero lobbying attention, which is why we never hear of them.
and they you never darken your door.
Next biggest spenders including Wisconsin manufacturers in commerce and renewable energy group Wisconsin infrastructure investment now.
So one of the most lobbied issues wasn't widely known a transmission line.
transmission line tied to about $1.8 billion in energy projects showing how high stakes and behind the scenes of some lobbying efforts are.
You want to know why Wisconsin politics never stops and why we have so many conversations nationwide about Wisconsin politics?
51,000 hours of lobbying.
That's all you need to know.
That's how much you need to know about what's happening in Wisconsin and the amount of money that flows in to our politics.
is politics for Wisconsin.
It's really all you need to know.
The two million bucks from DoorDash and 51,000 hours of lobbying.
That's it.
It's all you need to know.
It's crazy.
It is crazy.
And this is why I think that money in politics needs to stop because that's ridiculous.
And especially if there were 248 bills that received zero attention,
What were those bills?
Now I have questions.
Were they things that would have actually helped the constituents?
Don't
This
If you ever want to know why Wisconsin politics is all screwed up, those are the two numbers that you have to keep in mind.
In other news headlines of stuff you need to know, the owner of the Minakwa Brewing Company, Kirk Bangstead, is facing some backlash for a social media post that he made
through his company, suggesting that violence against Donald Trump following that shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner was justified.
The post referenced marksmanship and promoted a free beer day tied to Trump's death.
Now, Bankstead has previously posted similar messages and sells merchandise referencing the president's death.
The Democratic Party of Wisconsin condemned the post saying the rhetoric is completely unacceptable and should be retracted immediately.
Democratic leaders, including Mandela Barnes, who is a gubernatorial candidate, spoke out saying, quote, it's completely unacceptable, and I'm thankful for the actions of law enforcement who acted swiftly and bravely to keep everyone safe.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Missy Hughes, also put out a statement saying, quote, political violence has no place in our society.
She went on to say it must never be tolerated or embraced.
Now, Banksted has defended those comments in follow-up posts and even criticized Democrats who
denounced his remarks.
He is a political donor, he operates a PAC involved in Wisconsin political issues, increasing some scrutiny over those statements, and the incident obviously comes as Wisconsin heads into a very competitive next few months in this 2020 election cycle.
I wonder if this Secret Service will be paying him a visit because I didn't, and I know broadcasters have a different
sure line that we have to stay under we're no calls to action no no inciting violence that kind of thing which makes sense but I thought if you made a threat against the president and I guess he would he would say he didn't make a direct threat he was just hoping that someone would be able to do something and offering a reward on a day that this may have happened but he will also argue that he didn't say
His free beer day is not is for the death a man can people die every day But I don't I don't buy it.
I think he's out of line.
I think it's reckless This is this is it's very reckless.
It's very just callous
again.
I
like
And I always go back to the whole thing, if you are a Democrat and you would be offended if somebody said this about Joe Biden, Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, name your Democrat, right?
If you would be offended by that, why is it okay for us to say the same thing?
Right?
A Democrat to say the same thing I should say.
Why is that okay?
It's not okay because it's reckless.
It erodes the trust that we have going forward.
There's no civility in that.
And if you're going to condone political violence, I'm sorry.
There's no
You can fight very hard.
without resorting to promoting violence.
And by fight, I mean debate and campaign and get out there and argue policy and argue treatment of people.
Those are all things that you don't give up on.
You keep hammering at those issues, hammering, hammering, hammering.
But nothing, nothing good comes of making threats like that, getting into gullible people's heads to
that this is the answer.
Because let's be honest.
There's no, there's no chance that it's gonna be better.
God forbid, God forbid one of these, one of these was real.
And I know that's just me saying they're not real.
There's no, but I have a, you know, the opinion.
But do you think it's gonna be better for this country if that were an outcome?
It's not.
Menards is in trouble.
We'll talk about it
on Daybreak.
Would you
in our
the gift shop.
I don't care if it's some cart.
I want Minnie ears.
And I did get my Minnie ears.
It's
I
I saw a bubble wand.
And for a brief second, I wanted to recreate the moment.
But we were in Epcot, not at the Magic Kingdom.
sure that it would be as impactful.
But I did find the pink bubble wand as well.
And I had a brief moment where I wanted to really just reenact the photo and be where Lindsey Graham wise.
That's crazy.
were
those
dollars.
thought you got those when you walked
yes.
It is a better deal.
Maybe that's why he
You know, us is getting paid, a truck driver at a Menard's Distribution Center.
because an Eau Claire County jury awarded him $5.5 million, placing 100% of the fault on Menards and its forklift operator.
Yeah, so this is considered one of the largest known forklift injury awards against Menards in Wisconsin.
suffering a severe head
Now this case centered on unsafe forklift practices involving a temporary worker who had not been properly trained.
certified or supervised before operating this equipment.
During the trial there was testimony and it revealed that the forklift operator violated
all of the known safety rules and multiple employees acknowledged all of
those
the
When I was in college, I worked on a loading dock and unloading and unloading trucks.
And part of the deal was you had to you were going as fast as you could.
And so I had no experience driving a forklift.
But that was what you had to do sometimes.
And it is it's not people think, oh, it's pretty simple, right?
I crashed into something and shattered.
So there was some glass thing in this box, I
destroyed it.
And, you know, because the guys who were trained on it, who had been long time old timers on the dock, they didn't have time to help some new kid who was just there for the summer.
And it is
You gotta know what you're doing if you're gonna be wheeling around in one of those things.
And it's funny that that you I'm wondering if attorneys when they start making these arguments, they're looking at jury and go, I know this isn't going to fly with them.
These are working people in Eau Claire, right?
They're they're not going to believe that it was
the temp agency or the guy the victim's fault.
I know that I got to make that argument because I'm contractually obligated to defend my client to my the best of my abilities.
But we're going down.
But at a state in Wisconsin that relies so heavily on blue collar industrial type work, you gotta imagine that those arguments aren't gonna play well, especially from some dude in a suit who's basically representing a corporation that some of these people probably know family who works at or whatever it might be, especially in Eau Claire County.
on their job sites too.
When we come back, racial disparity in Wisconsin are some of the highest in the nation.
We'll talk to folks from the Wisconsin Policy Forum who have released a new study about that.
I'm Brian Noonan.
This is Daybreak.
This is the Civic Media Network.
Local voices and statewide impact.
It's Daybreak with Brian and Jamie.
I'm Brian Noonan.
According to a recently released report from Wisconsin Policy Forum, a public policy think tank, the racial disparities in Wisconsin's prisons are some of the worst in the U.S.
Black Wisconsinites were 12 times more likely than white Wisconsinites to be locked up in state prisons in 2022.
Now that disparity was the second highest of any state in the nation behind only Vermont.
So joining us to share more about the results of the study are Joe Pietrangelo.
Wisconsin Policy Forms Research Director and Andy Tisdall.
He's a co-author of the report.
Gentlemen, thank you for being with us this morning.
Welcome.
Joe, let's start with you.
What were some of the key questions that you hoped would be answered by the study?
Well, so the study really looked at the criminal justice system in the state from
beginning to end.
So from arrest, we looked at arrest data and victim data, we looked at court data, corrections, and even we looked at the spending and staffing of the state criminal justice system.
We're really hoping to understand just get a broad understanding of the whole system, what some of the biggest challenges are, what some of the
the striking trends are within the system, including looking at demographics of the population throughout the system and how Wisconsin compares with other states.
One of the things that I found most fascinating as I was going through the report was that it highlights Wisconsin as a highly segregated state.
And so I want to dive into a little bit about that as well.
But how does that essentially, that sort of segregation that we're seeing, how does that shape outcomes in our justice
system?
Go ahead.
ahead.
No, my connection is really not good.
I think I might.
Oh, dear.
Well, we know that poverty is a risk factor for criminal justice involvement.
A national study conducted by the Brookings Institute, they found that people born into the bottom 10% of the income distribution had a much higher rate of incarceration than people born to the top.
And we also know that in Wisconsin, there are disparities in things like the unemployment rate by race.
So you have these areas where where poverty is very high and these areas are also often segregated.
And so that can help influence the criminal justice outcomes of individuals.
well the rate for black wisconsinites compared to the rest of the country as you said uh we have i think it's us in vermont that that have the highest disparity between those two uh as far as overall incarceration rates
ours is a little lower compared to some of the southern states where their disparities are a bit lower because there's the higher incarceration rates for whites as well.
But our ratio is quite high as we found.
He's the research director at Wisconsin Policy Forum and Andy Tisdale, who is a researcher also at Wisconsin Policy Forum, WisconsinPolicyForum.org.
So when we're talking about the economic factors like poverty, unemployment, and income inequality, how much of that is tying back to, according to your research, what we're finding for the incarceration rates, especially amongst the black pop
of the state.
So our study didn't really try to get into the causation or even the correlation with different factors.
What we're really showing is the differences between populations, between geographies.
In terms of some of the factors Andy already mentioned, we do discuss how there are
big income disparities by race in Wisconsin and about two-thirds of the state's black population lives just in the city of Milwaukee.
And there are major income disparities in the city, but we don't try to figure out all of the factors and how much they contribute to each trend we're seeing.
We raised that as a possible factor, but again, we didn't try to measure it.
And it's really difficult to determine how much of criminal justice activity is
captured by the system throughout and how much is not.
But it can be a factor that if there is heavier policing in certain areas, there could be more arrests happening in those areas and then that continues through the system.
Again, that's sort of beyond the scope of this study.
You know, this was a really end up study that really tried to
you know, break down all the data across the system, but we didn't really, you know, get to the level that you're talking about.
Now, this study took us about a year to do, and we are planning to do follow-up research in a number of areas.
So this is just kind of a baseline for us as we go forward.
One of the major trends that we observed was a rise in incarceration rates for older adults, both people age 60 and over and also saw a rise in the age 50 and over.
Yes, and that's, we found that that's both people aging in place, people who have long sentences were just getting older inside prison, but also there were increased admissions for older adults.
The incarceration rate for adults 60 and over doubled.
between 2010 and the present day, and the arrest rate also increased.
We saw growth in people whose most serious offense was violent crime, whose most serious offense was operating well intoxicated, and other public order offenses as well.
So that's what we observed for the growth of that population.
Yes.
We saw that the incarceration rate for American Indian and Alaska Native individuals had gone up significantly.
I wish I could recite the number offhand.
I don't have it.
Nope, I do.
Admissions for American Indian individuals grew from 6.8 per 1,000 to 11.6.
So not quite doubled over the last quarter century.
And so that was the most, the population with the highest admissions rate in the most recent several years was the American Indian population.
So it's now exceeded the admissions rate for the black population in the state.
So we have actually seen a decrease in admissions.
of black Wisconsinites.
So despite having some of the biggest racial disparities in the country in terms of the black versus white incarceration rates, we have seen a bit of an improvement over time in black incarceration rates and admissions to prison for both black and Hispanic population.
Again, that's a little bit beyond the scope
this particular study.
We are doing some follow-up research, like I mentioned, on specific issues.
We're planning to publish a report in later this spring or early summer on the drunk driving issue where we're looking really closely at how that issue is affecting different populations in the state, how Wisconsin's laws compare to other states.
So in that way, we'll bring in insight from across the country, potentially on what we might do differently.
And we can continue to do that with other follow-up research.
Part of the conclusions that you reached at the end of this study was that the racial disparities are just one of the clear trends in the justice system here in Wisconsin.
What are some of those other trends that kind of go along with this or maybe are happening, but they're not directly related to the racial disparities?
So the aging
trend that Andy discussed was one of the biggest findings as well.
Just more older adults entering the system and being in the system.
We also have observed that health care costs for the correction system have gone up quite a bit.
They've tripled since 2005.
It was the biggest portion of the budget increase for the corrections department.
And so when combined with this rising aging population and higher healthcare costs to care for those older adults, that's a concern.
You know, we're spending more than a lot of other states are on corrections.
Healthcare is part of the driving force behind that.
And we're also incarcerating, we're over incarcerating in terms of
the size of the prison population is much higher than what the prisons were built for.
As you were going through your year-long study and you were researching, was there anything that you came across that surprised, and either of you can answer this or both of you, was there anything that was very surprising or striking to you that you did not expect to find as you were going through your research?
Andy, do you want to start?
Sure.
Well, one thing that surprised me was in terms of the total cost of Wisconsin's correctional system, we ranked 12th among the states.
And we were the second, we had the second highest corrections cost of any Midwestern state behind only Nebraska.
In addition, we found a study that said that we had the highest cost for re-incarcerating people who were returning to prison.
I was not expecting either of those facts, and I'd like to dive into them more in a future report.
Well, one thing that just happened is that on the youth justice side, Milwaukee County, a new youth facility was just opened for youth in Milwaukee County.
Milwaukee County, about half of the youth that have been sent to Lincoln Hills in northern Wisconsin and Copper Lake are
youth from Milwaukee County.
And that's been a consistent trend.
And now, you know, there's more of an effort to have youths closer to home, including in Milwaukee County.
So that was one thing that happened with that facility opening.
Another thing is we've, this is a little bit before the year, but there's been an increase in wages for correctional officers, which was
in response to major vacancies in the state prisons.
And so that's another pressure point for the cost of the system.
you.
You're listening to Civic Media.
Find the latest news, information, and archives of all your favorite shows on the Civic Media website, civicmedia.us.
Lake Superior to Lake Michigan.
This is Wisconsin's Morning Conversation,
break with Brian and Jamie.
We hope you are having a great start to your Monday, a little rain around most of the state today.
Hopefully you keep yourself dry.
Keep your umbrella handy kind of thing.
We'll give you all of those hands.
Usually right now it's dry out.
It's just a little cloudy.
It looks like it could rain, but it hasn't yet.
See,
If you weren't here the three of us would go, yeah, it's going to rain.
Good luck with that.
Because I always figure, unless I'm talking to children.
Then I will tell you, oh, you gotta bring your coat today.
It's gonna be rainy.
I don't know, I ran into all
serious therapy.
It is reevaluation
did Frank put
all of
that Announced that it was developing a movie based on the game hungry hungry hippos a hippos So it actually started to happen and now we are getting this a horror movie about a killer hippo And it is called hungry the tagline even says this hippo isn't playing games and while it sounds like some sort of throwaway garbage meant to capitalize
on some sort of existing product, probably.
But this movie looks like it could be good if you like horror movies.
And I did, in fact, watch the two minute trailer to see.
And I'm not a horror movie fan.
So I
to
the game is
hungry hungry yes
in the
A good animal attack movie because it makes you look at your pets differently.
It makes you very skeptical.
When yesterday I was cutting the grass, a cat shout out from bushes and went under my shed.
I'm like, what's going on with you?
Maybe that cat is plotting my demise.
I don't know.
Kitty killer.
That's what, that's what I'm making a short film
I don't want you to be a part of that
This film, in case you're wondering, it's going to center on a group of holiday goers who must fight for their lives against this rampaging hippo on the loose after becoming lost in the Louisiana Swamplands.
Nice.
Now, there is an interesting line in the trailer that totally contradicts...
the movie's title and the marketing.
In fact, I found this super ironic.
A guy says, quote, hippos are vegetarian.
He ain't killing you to eat you.
He's killing you for fun.
So not only is he not hungry, but it appears that he is playing games.
So take it for what it's worth, but it does look like if you like horror movies, a whole lot of fun.
spoiler
They
the
Swim like 80 90 miles per hour or something.
There's no
it up.
I'm looking it up.
Can you
seconds?
We gotta, yeah, we gotta
I'm Jamie Barton.
It's 8.59 right now.
You're listening to the...
The
national news cycle never stops, but it can be hard to find news about your local community.
Civic Media is dedicated to providing quality local and state news coverage across Wisconsin.
With the Civic Media app, you can get notifications about local stories that matter to you and your community.
Find the free Civic Media app in your phone's app store and choose notifications from the menu to tell us what kind of news you want to hear about.