If you live outside Wisconsin, or even if you live in it but don’t follow Madison closely, you may have missed one of the more consequential state-level stories of the year: Governor Tony Evers has restarted the state’s commutation process for the first time in more than two decades. Two executive orders. A new advisory board to review sentences. And after twenty-plus years where a Wisconsin governor commuting a sentence was essentially unheard of, it’s happening again.
This is not a small procedural story, and it’s not a story that should stay confined to state government reporters. Wisconsin’s prison system is one of the most overcrowded in the country, and that overcrowding lands hardest on Black Milwaukeeans, who are incarcerated in this state at the highest rate of any state in the country by one key measure — roughly one in every 36 Black Wisconsin adults is in a state prison, versus about one in 81 Black adults nationally — and at the second-highest Black-white incarceration disparity ratio of any state, behind only Vermont. When people talk about Wisconsin’s racial disparities in policing and sentencing being among the worst in the country — and they are — the prison population is where that disparity becomes permanent, generational, and largely invisible to anyone who doesn’t have a family member inside.
Evers paired the commutation restart with a broader reform push announced last year: a plan to close the aging Green Bay Correctional Institution, which he says he hopes to accomplish by 2029, alongside efforts to rehabilitate and transform Waupun Correctional Institution, a facility that’s drawn federal scrutiny and lawsuits over conditions. Worth being precise here — Evers actually vetoed a legislature-imposed 2029 closure deadline in last year’s budget, citing lawmakers’ failure to specify how the closure would actually happen, even while reaffirming “I support closing Green Bay Correctional Institution.” Lawmakers on both sides say they want the prison closed; none of them have agreed on a funded timeline to do it. That gap between stated intent and funded plan is the story. Whether any of this survives contact with the Republican-controlled Legislature is a different question entirely — and it’s the one that actually matters for how much of this reform is real versus symbolic. Lawmakers in Madison have blocked or slow-walked much of Evers’ broader criminal justice agenda for years. A commutation board the governor controls unilaterally is one of the few levers he doesn’t need their permission to pull, which tells you something about how narrow the path to reform actually is in this state right now.
This fall’s governor’s race raises the stakes further. Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, running for governor, has already been pressed on whether he’d continue Evers’ prison reform plans if elected — a question that shouldn’t be treated as a niche policy footnote when Milwaukee County alone accounts for a disproportionate share of the people these reforms would actually affect. Whoever wins in November inherits the decision on whether Green Bay Correctional actually closes, whether Waupun actually changes, and whether commutations remain a real second-chance mechanism or quietly go dormant again the way they did for twenty years under previous administrations of both parties.
I want to be straight with you about where I land on this, because UNJ doesn’t do reflexive “tough on crime” or reflexive “free everybody” — both instincts fail the people actually living this. Commutations aren’t amnesty. They’re a case-by-case review of people who, by every account of the record, have served significant time, shown documented rehabilitation, and pose demonstrably low risk — reviewed by an actual board, not a blanket policy. That’s not softness. That’s the system doing the individualized justice it claims to believe in but almost never practices, because it’s politically safer to let a sentence run out than to ever admit a sentence might have been excessive in the first place.
What Milwaukee families should do right now: pay attention to who sits on that new commutation advisory board, because that’s where the actual decisions happen, largely outside press coverage. Push your state legislators — regardless of party — on where they stand on the Green Bay closure timeline, because a 2029 closure date with no funded relocation plan is a promise, not a policy. And if you’re a family member of someone incarcerated in this state who might qualify for review, don’t wait for a news story to tell you the process exists. The Center for Veterans Issues, the Milwaukee County Veterans Services office, and reentry-focused groups like MICAH are the people who can walk you through whether commutation is a realistic path — not a Google search and a prayer.
Real reform in this state has died quietly before. The only thing that’s kept it alive this time is that people outside Madison are actually watching. Keep watching.