Twelve Names, One Board, and Wisconsin’s Quiet Test of Redemption

There’s a hearing happening in Madison on August 21 that most of the country will never hear about, and that’s exactly why UNJ is covering it.

Wisconsin’s Commutation Advisory Board will convene to review twelve applications for commutation — a form of executive clemency that can shorten or modify a criminal sentence — with five of those applicants having direct ties to Milwaukee. This is the state’s first meaningful round of commutation hearings since Governor Tony Evers signed executive orders this spring reestablishing a process that had gone effectively unused in Wisconsin for more than two decades. If Evers grants even one commutation coming out of these hearings, he’ll be the first Wisconsin governor to do so since Tommy Thompson left office in 2001. That’s not a footnote. That’s a quarter-century gap in a mechanism the state constitution has always given governors, sitting dormant through both Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

I want to walk through why this matters beyond the twelve names on the docket, because the commutation process itself says something about how Wisconsin — and honestly, most states — handles the tension between public safety and the idea that a sentence, once served in part, can still be revisited if the person behind it has genuinely changed.

The board isn’t a rubber stamp. Applicants and the people supporting them have to make their case with evidence: participation in programming while incarcerated, documented rehabilitation, a release plan, community and family support, and increasingly, an assessment of recidivism risk that the board says it will weigh directly in these reviews. That last point matters, because it cuts against the caricature that commutation is simply about mercy detached from public safety. It isn’t. The people on this board are being asked to make a genuinely difficult judgment call: has this person earned a shorter sentence without creating new risk to the community they’re returning to.

Mark Rice, who coordinates transformational justice work for WISDOM — a Wisconsin faith-based advocacy coalition that’s pushed for this kind of reform for years — has been blunt about the stakes. His argument, and one I find hard to dismiss, is that Wisconsin’s sentencing has historically been harsh enough to help drive a serious prison overcrowding problem while closing off legitimate paths to redemption for people who, by every practical measure, aren’t the same person who committed the original offense. That’s not a soft-on-crime argument. It’s a capacity and outcomes argument, and it’s one that faith communities across Milwaukee have been living with directly — visiting incarcerated members, supporting families carrying the weight of a parent or sibling’s absence, and often being the first phone call when someone comes home with nothing but a bus ticket and a court date.

I’m a combat veteran before I’m anything else in this business, and I’ve watched what happens to men who come home from something brutal and are expected to just reintegrate without a real plan. Incarceration isn’t combat, but the reentry problem rhymes. A sentence that ends without a bridge back into community, work, and family isn’t justice completed — it’s just deferred failure. Wisconsin’s Veterans Treatment Courts already recognize a version of this logic for veterans specifically, diverting them toward treatment rather than straight incarceration when their offense is tied to service-connected trauma. The commutation board extends a related idea to a broader population: that a sentence handed down years ago, under different circumstances and sometimes different sentencing norms, doesn’t have to be the final word if the person in front of the board has done the work.

None of this erases victims or their families from the equation, and it shouldn’t. Every one of these twelve applications almost certainly has someone on the other side of it who lost something that a commutation doesn’t restore. That’s the honest tension here, and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t real. But a functioning clemency process — used rarely, reviewed seriously, and tied to actual evidence rather than politics — is one of the few tools a state has to correct sentences that, in hindsight, no longer serve public safety or justice. Whether Wisconsin’s revived process outlives Evers’ time in office is an open question his successor will have to answer. For now, on August 21, twelve people and their families will find out if the state is willing to look at who they’ve become rather than only at what they did.