Weekly Fiscal Facts are provided by the Wisconsin Policy Forum, the state’s leading resource for nonpartisan state and local government research and civic education. The Wisconsin Public Policy Forum logo can be downloaded here.
After brief decline, Wisconsin’s prison population is rising again
After a few years of decline, Wisconsin’s prison population has started to climb again. New figures from the Department of Corrections show the number of adults in state prisons reached a record 23,687 in 2017, up 2.3 percent from the previous year. The department’s budget request for the next two years predicts those numbers will grow by another 5.7 percent, to more than 25,000 by 2021.
In part to accommodate this increasing population, the department is asking for an additional $149.4 million in state general funding in the 2019-21 budget, which would raise DOC’s total annual spending to $1.37 billion by 2021.
This information is a service of the Wisconsin Policy Forum, the state’s leading resource for nonpartisan state and local government research and civic education.
