For 25 years, if you had a family member serving a long sentence in a Wisconsin prison and you believed — genuinely believed, with evidence to back it up — that they had changed, there was almost nothing you could do about it. No governor since Tommy Thompson had issued a commutation. The clemency process existed on paper. In practice, it was a door nobody opened.
That changed this year. In April, Gov. Tony Evers signed two executive orders restoring Wisconsin’s commutation process and creating the Governor’s Commutation Advisory Board — a body of up to 14 members tasked with reviewing applications, holding hearings, and making nonbinding recommendations to the governor on who deserves a second look at their sentence. In June, Evers announced eight additional appointments to round out the board, which held its first meeting that month.
I want to walk through what this actually does, because “commutation” gets thrown around loosely, and the distinction matters for anyone in Milwaukee with a stake in this — which, given our incarceration numbers, is a lot of families.
What a commutation is, and isn’t
A commutation reduces a sentence. It is not a pardon, which wipes a conviction from someone’s record entirely, and it doesn’t declare innocence. Someone granted a commutation still has the conviction on their record — they simply serve less time than originally sentenced, typically because the parole board and now this advisory process determine the punishment no longer fits the person or the public safety calculus.
Evers appointed his chief legal counsel, Mel Barnes, to chair the board, with corrections veteran Cindy O’Donnell as vice chair — a pairing that signals the administration wants both political accountability and institutional corrections experience in the room, not just advocates. The board’s evaluation criteria, per the executive order, weighs three things: the impact on victims and survivors, whether release is consistent with public safety, and the applicant’s documented personal growth since conviction — rehabilitative programming, education, treatment, and work history behind bars.
Notably, one of the orders creates a distinct process specifically for people sentenced as minors to life in prison — a population that includes Wisconsin residents who’ve now spent decades incarcerated for crimes committed as children, well after the constitutional and scientific consensus on adolescent brain development shifted the national conversation on juvenile life sentences.
Why this belongs in a Community Advocacy story, not just a politics one
I could have filed this under Politics and called it a day — governor signs executive order, here’s the mechanism, moving on. But that misses what actually matters on the ground in Milwaukee: victims’ families who deserve real notice and real input, not a rubber-stamp process; incarcerated people and their families who now have a functioning door to walk through for the first time in a generation, after years of false starts and false hope; and a reentry infrastructure in Milwaukee County that has to be ready to receive people if this board actually recommends releases at scale.
That last piece is the part I’d push hardest on. A commutation process without a robust reentry system behind it is a policy that looks good in a press release and creates real hardship in practice. Housing, employment that doesn’t ask about the box, mental health and substance treatment continuity, ID and documentation help — Milwaukee’s reentry nonprofits have been doing this work for years on shoestring budgets. If this board starts recommending commutations at any real volume, the state needs to fund the landing, not just open the gate.
The tension nobody’s fully resolved
Victims’ advocates have raised legitimate concerns about the pace and transparency of this process, and I don’t think it’s fair to wave those off. Registered victims do receive notice and the opportunity to weigh in under the new process, which is the right baseline. But “notice” and “meaningful input” aren’t automatically the same thing, especially for victims who may not have the resources to track a bureaucratic hearing process or who feel retraumatized by having to relitigate their case years or decades later. The board’s first several decisions will tell us a lot about whether that balance is being struck honestly.
There’s also a fair question about scale and speed. Advocates for people currently incarcerated have noted the process has already triggered a real sense of urgency inside Wisconsin prisons — people who’ve spent years believing there was no mechanism for release are now filing applications by the hundreds. That’s a good problem for a state to have, but it’s still a problem if the board doesn’t have the capacity to review that volume without years-long backlogs forming, which would recreate the same broken-promise dynamic this reform was supposed to fix.
What to watch next
If you’re a Milwaukee family with someone eligible to apply, the application goes through the board, with victim notification built in and the criteria I outlined above driving the recommendation. If you’re an advocate or a nonprofit doing reentry work, this is the moment to make sure Madison hears that funding needs to scale alongside the board’s caseload, not lag a year behind it.
Twenty-five years is a long time for a door to stay shut. Wisconsin finally opened it. Whether it stays open, and whether the people walking through it land somewhere that actually works, is the next chapter — and I’ll be following it.