Fewer Troubled Teens Are Sent To Troubled Lincoln Hills

The numbers of delinquent teens sent to Wisconsin’s juvenile facilities are still 30-percent less than when agents first raided them for alleged inmate abuses. Gannett’s U-S-A Today Network says 180 juveniles are at the Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake boys’ and girls’ institutions in Lincoln County. That’s much fewer than the 264 inmates the day before the December 2015 raid that was part of two federal investigations now in their third years, as a federal judge recently ordered the state and the A-C-L-U to come up with a plan by the end of this week to change policies on using pepper spray and putting teens in solitary confinement for long periods. Milwaukee, Brown, and Racine counties sent a combined 57 fewer inmates to Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake last year than in 2015. Because of that, lawmakers propose increases in what counties pay the state to house the youngsters from 300-dollars a day to 400.