Judge ends court oversight of Lincoln Hills youth prison
After eight years, the court-mandated oversight of a Wisconsin youth prison has come to an end.
The Lincoln Hills School for boys and the nearby all-girls Cooper Lake School have been monitored by a court-appointed official since 2018. On Wednesday afternoon, U.S. District Judge James Peterson granted a request from Wisconsin’s Department of Corrections to terminate that consent decree.
The agreement came to be after the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin and the Juvenile Law Center sued in 2017 over conditions within Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake. That lawsuit described violations of constitutional rights, including physical abuse, “excessive” use of pepper spray and lengthy stays in solitary confinement.
“When the lawsuit started, the conditions at Lincoln Hills were really some of the worst at any juvenile facility in the in the country,” said Tim Muth, an attorney with ACLU Wisconsin, in an interview Wednesday.
Wisconsin’s Department of Corrections agreed to make reforms at Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake as part of a 2018 settlement reached under the administration of then-Gov. Scott Walker.
Over the last eight years, a court-appointed monitor has been visiting the youth prisons in Irma to assess the DOC’s progress toward meeting those settlement terms. On Wednesday, the monitor submitted a final report, determining that the prison system had met “substantial compliance” with all the settlement’s provisions. That milestone was the result of “years of deliberate and meaningful reform,” the monitor wrote.
