Author: Wisconsin Watch

Even before COVID-19 began to snake through Wisconsin’s jails and prisons, Chad Billeb saw a storm coming. As chief deputy for the Marathon County Sheriff’s Department, Billeb was already studying ways to reduce the number of inmates in the jail, a challenge that county leaders have been examining for years. As early as 2017, overcrowding was such a central issue that staff and outside experts concluded that the county would need a new $75 million jail. The pandemic’s arrival brought new urgency to the overcrowding problem. A similar story played out in jails and prisons across Wisconsin and the...

Shenora Staten-Jordan felt lost when her father, Gary Lee Staten, died of COVID-19 in May. She had not expected to lose him so soon at age 61, or for a contagious disease to hinder her goodbye. All of that only strengthened her Milwaukee family’s wishes to give Staten — a beloved father and grandfather who spent 30-plus years serving Milwaukee Public Schools — the type of homegoing service he deserved, she said. “We look at the news every day and we are seeing numbers of COVID-19 cases, and people that have lost their lives to COVID-19,” Staten-Jordan said. “And...

Ideally, the 65-year-old would return to her old job of digitizing government documents for Data Dimensions in Janesville, Wisconsin. But she can’t. The company laid her off in March 2020, temporarily at first, when COVID-19 struck. The layoff became permanent last summer after the company lost a government contract and cut more than 100 employees. As the state requires, Miller since May has conducted at least four weekly “work search actions” to keep receiving the state’s maximum for unemployment benefits: $370 per week plus whatever the federal government kicks in, which has varied throughout the pandemic. She would search...