During a recent campaign event, gubernatorial candidate Mandela Barnes advocated for putting criminals in “a four-year program or tech school” instead of prison because it would cost less.
Gov. candiate Mandela Barnes, the state’s former lieutenant governor, recently told an audience at a campaign event in Milwaukee that criminals should be sent to college or tech schools instead of prison because it is far less expensive.
“The money we spend to incarcerate an individual, like, you can pay significantly less money and put a person in a four-year program or even a tech school or put a person in a trade school,” he said.
The remarks came during a discussion about recidivism rates and overcrowded prisons. Barnes has long been an advocate of decriminalizing, well, crime, but this is the first time he has ever advocated something as radical as sentencing criminals to college.
“The biggest issues we have, in my opinion, stem from recidivism because we have a lot of bogus [probation] revocations, people who are going back in not for a new crime but for technical violations they may have had,” Barnes said. “They may have failed a drug test; things that could easily be remedied and that is why we end up seeing that high prison population that we have that’s twice as much as Minnesota’s.”
A solution, Barnes later said, would be to reduce the prison population by sending those who commit crimes or probation violations to a four-year college or technical or trade school.
Barnes has long been in favor of dramatically cutting Wisconsin’s prison population, saying in 2018 that it must be cut in half to make the state safer. After he was elected, he and Governor Tony Evers did cut the state’s prison population significantly, using the COVID-19 pandemic as the pretext to do so.
Barnes is a leading candidate to win the Democratic nomination for governor. The most recent polls show him in second place behind fellow Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong, who is also in favor of greatly lowering Wisconsi’s prison population.
