Image by Wisconsin State Journal Photographers.
KACIE KRESS & LUCAS ROBINSON
The Dane County Board and the Sheriff’s Office want to double the $3 a day paid to inmates who work in the county’s jail facilities after queries from the Wisconsin State Journal about the level of compensation.
The pay raise for the county’s incarcerated workers would put their pay at one of the highest rates in the United States, said Sup. Dana Pellebon, who introduced the measure at Thursday night’s board meeting.
“It’s still not enough and we recognize that,” said Pellebon, who represents Fitchburg in the 33rd District.
On average, two dozen inmates volunteer to work between the county’s jails at the City-County Building and Public Safety Building, with duties ranging from doing laundry to handing out meals and doing some of the facility’s nastier janitorial work.
Inmates can currently accept pay or mark a day’s labor as a day served on their sentence or toward a sentence. The county spent about $24,280 last year on paying inmates for work, Dane County Sheriff’s Office Lt. Gary Vandivier said.
That amount is less than half the pay of the lowest-paid full-time county employee, a weapons screening attendant who makes $51,646 a year, said Chuck Hicklin, the county’s finance director.
Pellebon, who is running for Dane County executive, has been an advocate for justice reforms on the board in recent years and is on the body’s Public Protection and Judiciary Committee. After the State Journal contacted her Wednesday for comment on the current pay for inmates, Pellebon said she reached out to Sheriff Kalvin Barrett and the two agreed on doubling the pay.
“If we can affect their daily rate right now let’s do that,” Pellebon said. “We really do want to work on spaces of reduction of harm.”
Inmate pay across the country’s jails and prisons varies widely. In Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia and Texas, many inmates don’t get paid at all, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, a think tank. The average maximum daily pay for prisoners has actually declined over the years, from $4.73 in 2001 to $3.45 in 2017, according to the group.
What prisoners do
When Dennis Franklin worked in the Dane County Jail while incarcerated there in 2012, his work ranged from mopping the floor to cleaning smeared feces out of the facility’s segregation areas, which are effectively solitary confinement cells.
“When there is something like that that’s hazardous, you can bet the league that the resident workers are going to be the ones that clean that up,” Franklin said in an interview. Franklin is now an organizer with EXPO, a group that advocates for the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated.
Inmate workers clean segregation cells every time a person is moved out, Vandivier said.
Franklin also cleaned what he described as mold out of the showers in the Public Safety Building.
“We didn’t have any masks, any respirators,” he said. “You just tuck your pants down in your socks and you go in there.”
Jail officials contend that there has been no mold in the facility in recent memory. In April 2023, a company inspected the jail’s dishwashing stations and showers and confirmed there was no mold, said Elise Schaffer, a spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Office.
In 2023, the county’s two facilities had 10 work orders submitted for cleaning “mold,” according to records obtained by the State Journal through a records request. Inmates cleaned up the growth in five of those instances, according to records.
“Mold/Algae needs higher level of care than inmate workers,” read one work order in March. “They have cleaned it to the best of their abilities.”
After the State Journal reached out for comment, Vandivier said jail staff have been instructed to stop writing mold in work orders since they’re not professionally trained to identify mold.
The use of inmate labor across Wisconsin’s county jails varies. La Crosse County does not have inmates working in the jail, Sheriff John Siegel said in an email. In Marathon County, inmate labor is considered community service that can be used to reduce a sentence, said Sheriff Chad Billeb, who is vice president of the Wisconsin Sheriff’s Association.
“In Marathon County our inmates would not clean material such as mildew,” Billeb said. “If we were aware of any mold or mildew in our facility, it would be cleaned by our facilities department or through a contractor.”
Beyond the presence of growth in the jail’s showers, not using inmate labor would require the county to hire more staff or contract some the work, Pellebon said.
“It’s a quicker turnaround than having a contract company — that is the practicality of it,” Pellebon said. “The reality is if we hire staff to do this work that has to be staff that is available 24 hours a day because that’s when the work has to be done.”
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