A recent Wisconsin Policy Forum report highlights problems in Wisconsin’s criminal justice system ranging from the state’s continued place as a national leader in the disproportionate incarceration of people of color to expected increases in costs associated with the state’s prison population.
The April report, entitled Cross Examination: A comprehensive view of Wisconsin’s criminal justice system, shows persistent troubling trends and hopes to be a “baseline assessment of Wisconsin’s criminal justice landscape.”
Much in the report will not surprise readers current with Wisconsin’s criminal justice system, but the report’s statistics show the context and alarming depth of some issues. For instance, Black residents composed 5.9% of Wisconsin’s population in 2024 but accounted for nearly a quarter of all criminal complaint case filings. Black residents are concentrated in Milwaukee, with 52.9% of the state’s Black population even residing in a single Milwaukee zip code. And 18.6% of Wisconsinites had a substance use disorder in 2022-2023, ranking the state 15th nationally.
WJI evaluated the report with one question in mind: if case filings are down, arrests are down, and the volume of people on community supervision is down, how does Wisconsin continue to incarcerate more people year over year?
While the report does not answer this question directly, it shows changes in the state’s prion population that may be key. Overall crime has decreased, but the number of people incarcerated on long sentences for violent crime has increased, incarcerations for intoxicated driving have grown significantly, and charging of at least one felony offense has increased in frequency.
The report says “these trends have contributed to Wisconsin’s prison and community supervision rates remaining high even as overall crime rates fell between 2019 and 2023.”
Who Wisconsin is incarcerating has evolved over time. Report data showed a “greater than expected” increase in incidents of arrest for older adults and a decline for youth.
The numbers suggest the increase in arrests for older adults is driven predominately by charges for those arrested for driving under the influence. Adults aged 50 and above accounted for 20.4% of intoxicated driving arrests, an outsized share of their otherwise much lower offense rate.
Only 4.7% of total arrests are for individuals aged 60 and older, but total arrests for that age group increased by 24.8% from 2019, with a 56.4% increase for drug or substance abuse related offenses.
The report suggests that while Black Wisconsinites experience a large proportion of arrests, “it is possible that the deployment of law enforcement personnel to particular municipalities or neighborhoods of certain racial or ethic groups makes it so that crime committed by the individuals who live there is more easily detected.”
Given Milwaukee’s relatively low clearance rates (27.9% for the Milwaukee Police Department versus 53.7% for all other agencies in Wisconsin), and that most of the state’s Black residents live there, raising clearance rates in the city might also affect the demographics of those arrested in the state. The report notes that MPD’s management of a larger population and its greater share of more violent crimes make a direct comparison of its clearance rate unproductive.
Statewide, white individuals represented 81.4% of all arrests for driving under the influence, 63.9% of all theft offenses, and 66.2% of all drug/narcotic offenses.
In Milwaukee, drug crimes (2.8%), fraud (1.8%), theft (1.7%), and driving under the influence (1.7%) accounted for a smaller proportion of arrests than statewide.
Case filings, like arrests and crime more broadly, are down statewide.
Declines in filings are also more pronounced in some demographics than others. In 2005, 102,679 cases were filed against white individuals. That decreased 40.9% to 60,695 in 2024. Meanwhile, case filings against Black individuals fell, but by a smaller margin: from 35,616 cases in 2005 to 25,682 in 2024 (a 27.9% drop).
U.S. census data shows that Black individuals have made up roughly 5.6% of the state’s total population during this same time frame.
The report attributes much of the decline in case filings to a drop in misdemeanor charges but highlights an increase in felony filings.
The cases in which the most serious offense was bail jumping or escape saw significant growth from 2014 to 2024.
Prison admissions due to revocations (without a new sentence) still compose more than a quarter of all prison admissions but remain below levels seen prior to the pandemic, when Wisconsin’s prison population peaked. The report says this decline may be influenced by the Department of Corrections’ “Evidence-Based Response to Violations program,” though many remain skeptical of its efficacy.
Admissions for revocations involving new charges, however, peaked in 2023.
Prison admissions for intoxicated driving offenses increased dramatically, from 386 in 2000 to 1,314 in 2023.
The community supervision population shrank moderately after 2019, but significant differences for demographic groups exist as shown in the chart below.
