Parole Commission Meeting Notes, March 2021

Parole Commissioner Doug Drankiewicz on the zoom call.

Parole Commission Chair John Tate II started this month's zoom meeting with great concern that members of the public may be able to unmute themselves and interrupt the meeting. Apparently something was different with the settings from previous meetings. 

After working that out, Tate asked that everyone on the call identify themselves, particularly members of the public who didn't have names up on the zoom because they were just calling in, or had chosen not to insert their names. I don't know why this was important. If I remember correctly back when the monthly meetings happened in person, Tate only did this roll call thing the one time we turned out so many people they had to move the meeting to a larger room.

Anyway, there were about ten people on the call who were not PC staff, which is more than last month, and I suspect this influenced the way things went at the meeting.

There wasn't a formal agenda, but topics discussed included: check-ins with staff and business from the previous meeting, Tate's reappointment, the rate of release grants, non-deportables, and sentence eligibility waivers. 

Check-in and follow-up

At the last meeting there was a lot of discussion about DOC records offices and trouble with getting the right files to commissioners.  Records Associate Sarah Tome said she sent Tate's instructions to the DOC records person, and they are now sending just what the commissioners request rather than whole file, which is helping get the records to them more timely. 

Records associate Oliver Buchino said everything was going smoothly. He was catching up on correspondence from incarcerated people, and handling a few smaller records requests.

Tate also asked the commissioners about the number of assignments, which everyone agreed seemed balanced. Tate said Shannon Pierce (the newest commissioner) seemed to be fully trained. Jennifer Kramer has a slightly higher number this month, but she’s okay with it. There are some facilities with many parole-eligible people and sometimes many come up for hearings at once, causing one commissioner or another to have an unusually heavy load. No one complained about this and Tate said the heavy facilities are split between the commissioners well. Also, any commissioner with a heavy load one month can ask others for help. 

Oh, and Doug Drankiewicz continued to sit inaudibly far from his microphone. Everything he said was half-garbled and difficult to hear, which is probably how his hearings are too.

Reappointment

Tate's term expired, but he announced that he has been reappointed by Governor Evers. He is still not confirmed by the state senate, but hasn’t been confirmed for the last year and a half, so nothing is changing.

Rate of Release Grants

Tate somewhat hesitantly revealed some data about the parole commission's work. In 2020, they issued over 200 parole grants. “Dramatically different than previous years," Tate said, "probably the highest in a really long time.” Not everyone issued a grant got released, some had concurrent Truth in Sentencing (TIS) sentences, or other issues keeping them incarcerated, but most were released. 

Tate knows of only one person who was released and then re-incarcerated, and that was for an unrelated offense. “Percentage-wise that’s a very good thing, and to be expected.” 

He also described how some of those released people have since died, saying that their families were very grateful to have had time with them. All of this seemed to be about encouraging commissioners to continue recommending release, and to self-congratulate before the dozen or so members of the public who were on the call.

Personally, I don’t see releasing 200 of 2800 people who present such an incredibly low re-incarceration risk as a huge achievement. My concern remains with the 2600 or so people Tate has left incarcerated without good reason.

Non-deportables

Then the commission discussed undocumented people held in WI prisons under the old law. They have ICE detainers on their records. It appears the DOC just holds these people at high security levels indefinitely. Many wish they could be deported and face the more reasonable justice systems in their home countries, but it seems the WI DOC wants to keep making money off holding them. People who are old law and undocumented have been held this way for over 20 years.

Apparently, Kramer recently had a hearing with an undocumented person, and inquired about it, only to discover that they cannot be deported, because the US does not have communication and deportation mechanisms established with their home country. That means that, if they are released, they will remain in the US as non-citizens. The Bureau of [slur removed] Classification and Management (BOCM) isn’t doing anything to prepare such people for release. Tate addressed the situation, instructing BOCM to send them to lower levels and give them access to programming, just like anyone else.

Sentence Eligibility Waivers

Tate then talked about ED31, which allows him to waive sentencing requirements. Many people sentenced under the old law are required to serve 25% of their sentences before they become parole-eligible. There is a group of people from the 90's serving incredibly long sentences, over 100 years, who haven’t done even 25% of their time. Tate has begun evaluating them and if their sentence was disproportionately long compared to others convicted of the same crime, he is  waiving the 25% sentence requirement and starting the parole preparation process for them. 

Tate mentioned one 75 year old man who was in that situation, and is going to be released soon. He also said he cannot do this waiver for people who were sentenced to life and had judges set specific eligibility dates for them.

There followed a long discussion about how these waivers would be documented and kept record of. It seems like Tate had to talk this over extensively with legal council, with Doug Drankewicz, and former commissioners like Steve Landremann. Some of these advisors were very concerned about facilitating the process by which a future commission chair could undo Tate's decision with these waivers. Reading between the lines, it was plain to see how eager Doug Drankiewicz and Steve Landremann were for Tate's tenure to end. They must really long to restore the tradition of holding people captive as long as possible.

At one point, as the concerns about making it easy to undo Tate's work kept coming up, he finally shut the conversation down. “The hope is that a new chair wouldn’t [cancel the waivers]," he said "it would be difficult for me to see and believe that another chair would come along and say, ‘okay, this person has been evaluated and is on a course [to release] but nevermind, forget that course’ particularly if the commissioners were assessing that they were making positive progress, moving towards release. I would be hard-pressed to understand why someone else would come along and say never mind.”

What we all know is that previous commission chairs, like Daniel Gabler, and his commissioners (Drankiewicz, Landremann, and Danielle LaCost) did not make decisions based on pathways to release. They didn't even bother keeping up the appearance that the parole commission existed for anything other than paying itself to deny people’s release. It is likely that Tate will be replaced by a Republican appointee who will re-institute that practice. I'd have to guess whether Tate is naive about this fact, or if he was being diplomatic.