Protesters outside Wisconsin’s Waupun Correctional Institute after the deaths of three inmates due to reportedly poor health conditions and care. Courtesy Waupun Pioneer Press.
_______
I count myself a proud Wisconsin native of a beautiful, bountiful state with an embattled progressive tradition. I was aware of a serious state problem of excessive incarceration, but I never realized the radical severity of the problem, which is surely fixable!
Recently in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel‘s Ideas Section, columnist Jeffrey Sommers (a political economy and public policy professor at UWM) reported that we have the highest incarceration rate of Black citizens in not only the country.
Per capita, Wisconsin’s jailing of 2,250 Blacks per 100,000 Black adults exceeds the highest general incarceration rate of any of the world’s 223 countries measured. El Salvador’s 1,659 per 100,000 was second highest. Curiously the United States general rate is “only” 541 (per 100 K). This indicates a serious problem of racial profiling in our state, which supposedly was addressed years ago.
Several sources on this confirmed the global rate information, including the World Population Review. 1
The Wisconsin writer pointed out that the alleged reason for these policies is to lower the crime rate, but the figures show they failed to produce comparably lower rates, if you determine it by people jailed.
I have never been more shocked or disgusted at my own state’s doings. We should hold the too-long Republican controlled legislature primarily responsible for this, though I haven’t heard Democrats addressing it much either.
Not so coincidentally, the next page of the same Ideas Section included Philip Klinker’s letter to the editor bemoaning that the only way to reduce the state prison population that’s caused so many problems otherwise is to repeal petty criminal statutes. But “no politician in the state is brave enough to advocate to repeal the laws of petty criminal statutes” – a big part of the problem.
Is that true of our officials? Is it an awareness problem, blase governance? Or worse?
A couple of factors are key. Bail jumping in Wisconsin is a common petty crime that involves such innocuous activities as driving to work when the bail said you couldn’t. If you are accused of a felony, the charge carries a six-year maximum sentence. It doesn’t matter if you are found innocent of the crime, the bail jumping charge still stands. Various factors apply depending on your case.
Then there’s too-common charge of “disorderly conduct” which evidently amounts to anything the police or prosecutor says it is. A review of the state statutes shows that a vast array of activity or behaviors — even victimless — can be interpreted by officers as “disorderly” and result in a Class B misdemeanor. 2
Think about the fractured or destroyed lives incarceration can produce, especially for those imprisoned for an extended period, or unjustly.
A widely-disseminated 2023 news report said four inmates at Waupun’s aging Correctional Institute have died over the last four months. One death was confirmed as a suicide. The other two deaths remain under investigation. “A group of Waupun inmates filed a federal lawsuit in Milwaukee last week alleging conditions at that prison amount to cruel and unusual punishment. The prisoners allege they can’t get access to health care, with guards telling them their illnesses are ’all in your head’ and they should ‘pray’ for a cure.”
Cameron Williams. (Submitted photo) The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
One 24-year-old black man, Cameron Williams, died of a rare stroke after extended solitary confinement and deprivation which shocked his fellow prisoners, who heard his cries for help to officials and “blood-curdling screams.” He was he was serving a three-year sentence for burglary — he’d pushed a woman to take her purse. 3
All of these problems amount to moral arrogance, or at least negligence, far below this state’s history of honor.
Democratic leaders recently have written a bill to remedy crowded and poor prison living conditions. That hardly goes far enough.
Where are our real leaders on this? It may not be easy in our polarized political climate, but all the more crucial as we’re a key swing state in elections. We need voting citizens. The policies may also reflect increasingly extensive and gratuitous voter suppression efforts.
Make your voice heard, however possible. Let’s repeal these laws or Wisconsin will continue to dwell in immoral disgrace comparable to a wretched prison cell.
Cathedral Square Park is jammed with an estimated 10,000 “No Kings” protesters Saturday. Photo by Mike DeSisti Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The clash of resounding, angry coast-to-coast public sentiment against self-satisfied Trumpian tone deafness thundered across real space and time on Saturday, June 14.
Yes, it was the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Military and somebody’s 79th birthday. So the Narcissist-in-Chief got his HUGE military parade – a la Communist China, North Korea and Russia, all groaning, pavement-crushing tanks, roaring overhead jets and marching troops – to pretend it was all in his glorious honor. Many troops reportedly did not want to be there.
“I have never experienced such a joyless, lifeless, and sterile mass event in my life,” commented Esquire‘s longtime political reporter Charles Pierce. Yet Adolf Hitler’s moldy remains probably quivered in envy.
So that was the weird cocoon of Washington, D.C. adorned with its MAGA shell.
What was really happening in America Saturday?
Five million people were amassing across the nation, in “No Kings” protests fully rejecting the way Trump’s agenda is striving to endow him with monarchial, increasingly authoritarian, powers. People are protesting masked ICE agents workplace raids to deport immigrants without due process, and National Guard and Marine actions in Los Angeles, the arresting of a U.S. Senator at a press conference, the ongoing travesty of American governmental support of Israel’s self-defense-turned-genocide of Palestine’s Gaza, among a myriad of other problems with our deeply injured democracy right now.
Désirée Pointer-Mace, of Milwaukee, sings during the No Kings protest at Cathedral Square Park in Milwaukee. Carol Coronado / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
As the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported, Wisconsinites in more than 50 towns and cities took to the streets on Saturday, June 14, as part of what organizers say was the largest nationwide protest yet against President Donald Trump’s second-term agenda, the stuff of tyranny running amok.
In downtown Milwaukee, organizers estimated the crowd reached almost 10,000 people, according to Alan Chavoya, a protester with the Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. Protestors chanted and sang in Cathedral Square Park, before marching a mile loop around part of downtown. The rally was energetic, but peaceful.
I was there and can affirm that description.
The protest’s first phase was a series of speakers who had plenty to say, some fiery, some incisive and learned, and speakers ran much longer than the planned one hour time slot. But these times are bristling with burning issues to discuss and protest from the Trump agenda, defying the law, a compliant Congress and the Courts, with immigrant issues at the top of the list.
The crowd remained attentive and patient. There were a number of quote-worthy speeches and notably one speaker who offered the shocking news that Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were shot and killed, a short time beforehand. Also, Minnesota state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were shot multiple times in the early morning hours Saturday. The anouncement prompted the crowd to a moment of silence to honor that tragedy. (Vance Boelter was arrested Sunday night in rural Sibley County, about 50 miles from Minneapolis, as the prime suspect in what has been described as a politically motivate assassination.)
Laurie Peifer, of Milwaukee, dressed in a “Handmaid’s Tale” costume as part of No Kings protest at Cathedral Square Park in Milwaukee, June 14, 2025. he was protesting to support women’s health care. Carol Coronado / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
However, I took no notes Saturday so I’ll let one speech suffice by example. Renowned progressive journalist and author John Nichols delivered a double-whammy of a special sort. He first declared that he actually had a distant ancestor who took part in the American Revolution. But then he quickly clarified the role of dissent in our history of patriotism by noting that only white men could vote when the nation was formed. Suffrage for women and voting rights for people of color came much, much later, a long, achingly profound history we must never forget.
As another speaker said, quoting the great Black abolitionist Federick Douglass, “If there is no struggle, the is no progress.”
Then at one point, Nichols paused and said, “I just had a call from a friend of mine.” It seemed a curious disruption of the momentum of his speech. But in a few moments we understood what this meant. After a click or two, a voice came over the loudspeaker — the unmistakably Brooklyn-tinged accent of Senator Bernie Sanders. No figure but the voice was doubtless. It was a bit of old-fashioned sleight-of-hand stagecraft, updated for the cell-phone era.
Sanders gave us about five minutes of his vintage stem-winding rhetoric about billionaires screwing the countless of the 99 per cent. He also pointed out how the recent Wisconsin election of liberal Supreme Court justice Susan Crawford provided powerful repudiation of Trump and his then-right-hand billionaire Elon Musk who had contributed millions to defeating Crawford (before bowing out of his despicable position). It was just the sort of thing this crowd deserved to hear, I daresay. Nichols actually co-authored a book with Sanders published last year, It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism, striving to reground the left’s arguments in the new populism.
After years of political prominence Sanders may be right now — along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — the two most electrifying figures on the left side of democratic politics, by virtue of their recent “Fighting Oligarchy” nationwide tour, which has continually commanded large crowds. The pair is all the more striking for representing political figures widely separated generationally, yet brought together in resounding harmony of defiance.
Nichols, a Wisconsin native and Madison resident, closed his speech by telling us we cannot go backward into the nostalgic fictional past of the white supremacist MAGA movement. “We are Wisconsinites and Wisconsinites go forward!” he shouted, invoking the state’s motto, ever pointed to righteousness.
This was one protester among many who added wit and levity to the proceedings with his Elvis assemblage. Photo by Nancy Lynch Aldrich
Finally the protest morphed into a march gathering along Wells Street behind the speaker stage and snaking slowly east to the lakefront. Then the crowd turned south, past the War Memorial and curved west at the DiSuvero sculpture, The Calling,” in front
“No Kings” protesters march west from the Milwaukee lakefront and the iconic DiSuvero sculpture “The Calling,” and the Milwaukee Art Museum’s brise soleil. Photo by Kevin Lynch
of the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Calatrava addition with its flaring brise soiel sunscreen. No doubt this mass of humanity had a calling this day. It was certainly the first time I’ve ever marched up Wisconsin Ave, Milwaukee’s downtown main street.
The eastbound lane was open to car traffic and many drivers honked their horns in solidarity, a few displaying “No Kings” protest signs through sun roofs.
If anything signified the transformation of Milwaukee into meaningful expression and acton it was this scene, rising from the city’s most iconic setting.
And yet, this was one of so many across the nation.
We the people have spoken. Who will hear us?
_____________________
Your blogger, Kevernacular, at the Milwaukee “No Kings” protest with his well-traveled Trump sign, modified with a “king” crown motif. Photo by Nancy Lynch
Note the lock-step brain-lock message on Elon Musk’s cap. This is how authoritarianism works. It typically leads to overt fascism and the death of a democratic government. Photo courtesy Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
The smell of musk is an acquired taste, and I don’t mind it alt all. Yet the stench of Elon Musk grows stronger and more wretchedly foul each day, especially as the Wisconsin Supreme Court election nears, on April 1.
Billionaire Musk will hold a rally in Green Bay Sunday evening at 6:30 p.m. at a yet-undisclosed lovcation, less than 48 hours before polls open to give a campaign “talk” for Republican candidate and Trump suck-up Brad Schimel. He’ll also hand out a million dollars to the second preson who commits to having voted agaist “activist judges” by signing a petition of his. He’s already doled to a cool milion to one person. His definition of “activist judges”?
Trump has indicated that would be any who have rued for the illegality and uncontitutionality of any Trump executive action ot destructive acts by his toadie fellows, such as Musk and his DOGE gang.
“Entrance is limited to those who have voted in the Supreme Court election,” Musk wrote, though he did not specify how that would be verified.
Musk also wrote that he would present the second of two $1 million checks “in appreciation for you taking the time to vote.”
Stop to think how corrupt and lame that reasoning is. He’ll have thousands willing to sign and vote for Schimel but only two get the big dough, I suppose as a symbolic gesture of his financial power to do all he can to buy this election for the Trump toadie in waiting.
Sure, the two million bucks isn’t lame in itself, it’s pure financial power. But it is morally depraved, in this action. Unless you think it’s cool for one person to date to donate $20 million to influence for the outcome of a state judicial race. Musk is the richest man in the world in a society where a small handful of billionaires have more wealth than the financial bottom half of American citizens, as Sen. Bernie Sanders pointed out recently .
Circuit Judge Brad Schimel. Courtesy AP
The race is being closely watched nationally as an early indicator of mid-term election trends. Locally it will determine the ideological balance of the court, which now has a one-seat advantage for liberals.
Musk, a close ally of President Donald Trump, personally and via two groups has poured about $20 million into the race to back conservative candidate Brad Schimel. Finance law allows unlimited donations of they are given to a group other than the canidate, typically the candidate’s political party (Republican) which then passes it “legally” on to the candidate. How corrupt is that? Thanks also to the Supreme Court ruling on “Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission” of 2010.
We should prepare to act swiftly. As soon as word breaks of where Musk appears in Green Bay, we must go there to protest him.
On a more positive note we can do all we can to support and elect Judge Susan Crawford, Schmiel’s opponent. She has an admirable track record of humane, common sense rullings in seveal judicial positions she’s held.
Impressive, to me, is this editorial endorsing her. Why? Because it’s not from some flaming lefty, it’s written by three Wisconsin bsiness leaders who explain how Crawford will be much better than Schimel for the state’s economy. Please check out this editorial, also published in the Journal-Sentinel (Ideas section):
Our September 2016 departure from the Denis Sullivan’s dock, outside Discovery World on the Lake Michigan shore of Milwaukee. All photos by Kevin Lynch
We can absorb history in many ways, but it’s usually in a second-hand or secondary source way, like reading a book, or watching a documentary. Historically-attuned scholars and artists can surely illuminate the past with immeasurable brilliance and depth. The work of documentary-filmmaker supreme Ken Burns comes to mind, as do historians like Eric Foner, John Meacham, Shelby Foote, David S. Reynolds, Joseph Ellis, Sean Wilentz, David McCullough and others.
Yet for years, Milwaukee has been blessed with something even more vivid and experientially historical than those gifted people’s best efforts, even when they are talking as guest pundits on TV. I’m talking about a mainline to history as real as stepping aboard a tall sailing ship transporting you to the glory days of such vessels in the mid-1800s, the era of Moby-Dick,Two Years Before the Mast, and Typhoon. 1
In September of 2016, I was fortunate enough to take that step, off the Milwaukee harbor onto the city’s majestic flagship schooner S/V Denis Sullivan, for a Lake Michigan tour, which helped inspire this blog. It was motivated to do research for my novel about Herman Melville. I had visited an actual docked whaleship from the era, The Charles W. Morgan, in Mystic, Connecticut.
But I’d never actually sailed on a tall mast ship from that era, even if this one was a hybrid replica, built by volunteer Milwaukeeans – the world’s only re-creation of a 19th-century three-masted Great Lakes schooner. She was the flagship of both the state of Wisconsin and of the United Nations Environment Programme . .
And here you begin to get an inkling of our state’s loss, when the ship – stripped of it’s tall masts — departed on October 8 for Boston, and it’s ultimate destination, St. Croix,now sold to a company in the Virgin Islands –as reported superbly by Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Reporter Chelsey Lewis, in the in-depth article linked to below.
Noted Milwaukee folksinger David HB Drake, a vocal opponent of the sale, had a suggestion, as he posted on his Facebook page: “OMG– The Denis Sullivan has been sold to Boston.
This for me is like the Braves being sold to Atlanta…unthinkable!
There was no warning or opportunity given to the very people who built her and volunteered these 30 years to keep her afloat in Milwaukee. Had there been, perhaps a citizens groups could have bought her and kept her here or at least formed a partnership with the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc to keep her in Wisconsin.”
However, that museum is currently in the midst of its own campaign to raise $1.5 million to put the USS Cobia, its World War II submarine, in dry dock, Lewis reports. The Manitowoc museum considered possibly serving as a home port for the ship, but not the home port.
Other organizations, like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration “were considering partnering with Discovery World to use the ship for programming around the newly designated Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary, but they, too, could not take primary ownership of the boat.”
Lewis reported on a former crewmember, Michael Gaithier, who expressed bitterness:
The boat was treated like an unwanted stepchild … it was neglected and not taken care of in the way that most tall ships with most healthy organizations behind them in this country have been taken care of
Back in September 2016, sail boats breeze by the port side rigging of the Denis Sullivan with the Milwaukee skyline in the background.
For my part, as an appreciative memory, I’ll convey some of our experience on the schooner. In September of 2016, there we were, riding the waves with the huge sails billowing to and fro, as the wind took us.
Ann Peterson in the deck of the schooner Denis Sullivan in September of 2016.
The historical schooner cruise was a birthday gift to me from my companion, Ann Peterson. And it was the palpable, wind-in-your-face, and even intoxicatingly moving experience I’d hoped for, even it proved too much for the steadiness of Ann, who started out gamely, as the picture above shows. Yet as the good ship dipped and swayed in the slightly feisty waters just beyond the Milwaukee harbor breakwaters, she grew a little green in the gills, and her chipper smile faded.
That’s part of the physical reality of being on open waters on such a vessel, but there’s so much more. You begin to get a sense of how a person can release oneself from the confining and aggravating patterns of workaday and quotidian problems and pitfalls, and from the looming shadows of psychological malaise that life’s tensions and burdens can impose.
This sort of voyage lacks the tony creature-comforts and luxuries of an expensive cruise. Rather it does transport you back to a much heartier distant time, when brave people traveled and worked much closer to the elements of water, sun and wind. In reflection, one may draw from this elemental immediacy some sense of the holistic importance of water, covering the vast majority of the globe, and the ecosystems it sustains on water and land.
These are things that a writer like Melville, despite (and because of) being a whaler in his early adulthood, proved quite aware of, for a man of his time. His masterpiece novel reveals that he had profound regard and respect for the whale and its place in “the watery part of the world,” as narrator Ishmael pointedly calls it, in his very first reference to the oceans, in “Loomings,” Chapter 1 of Moby-Dick. Or consider his gloriously attuned description of a great herd of nursing female whales in Chapter 87, “The Grand Armada.” Such are some the educational aspects this vessel can pursue, though I’ve never taken an educational cruise on it, per se.
How resonant is the ship’s presence culturally? Well, for one example, renowned folk singer Pete Seeger recorded a song called “The Schooner Denis Sullivan” in 2001. 2
Here, Seeger sings his story-telling song a cappella:
Our 2016 cruise also allowed us to soak up the skyline of our modestly handsome city’s downtown, in ever-shifting contours, especially as the urban silhouette cuts itself against the increasing brilliance, then the warming glow of the setting sun in the West. (see photo sequence below). Looking upward, the towering, majestic sails overhead elicited a sort of poetry of rhythmic motion – sweeping, rippling, billowing and whispering.
The Milwaukee skyline from port side of the Denis Sullivan.
Back on the deck, one of the crew members pulled out a fiddle, as did one of the guests and the pair parlayed out a lively Irish-style reel. (Blog story with link to Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article continued, below photo sequence)
A crew member of the Denis Sullivan pulls out his fiddle to engage in a couple of Irish-style reels with a fiddle-playing passenger (not pictured).
Denis Sullivan Captain Carlos Canario at the schooner’s helm (gripping the steering wheel behind him) along Lake Michigan during our tour on the ship in 2016. Canario was the Relief Captain for Senior Captain Tiffany Krihwan, who has now departed and is now based in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the historically famous whaling town. t
In the tradition of Impressionist painters, see three views (above and below) of Milwaukee’s harbor and Hoan Bridge from the schooner Denis Sullivan, as the sun sets in the West.
An example of the sort of strange phenomenon one can experience out in the incalculable and evocative atmospheres of a Great Lake was this photo I took, from the Denis Sullivan. The ghostly spherical presence or optical effect hovers above the top of Summerfest’s Marcus Amphitheatre. I fancifully dub it “Sphere of sea god.”
***
Milwaukee Journal-SentinelReporter Chelsey Lewis admirably functions as a nautical and cultural historian in her comprehensive report on Milwaukee’s recent loss of the Denis Sullivan in the newspaper’s SundayLife section. She provides an in-depth sounding, a voyage into the good ship’s past, present and future:
The seeming tragedy is the story Ms. Lewis tells of the decision to sell, reportedly precipitated by the pandemic and the apparent failure to hire a new captain and first mate, after longtime ship Captain Tiffany Krihwan and her first mate were forced to leave by economic circumstances. Those included the shutting down of the ship for well over a year, along with Discovery World, to which it belonged. The reasons for the Denis Sullivan to be sold to another operation, World Ocean School, in, St. Croix, the Virgin Islands, remain questionable, especially given that there was a potential buyer in Chicago who would’ve kept the ship based in Milwaukee. The Chicago outfit, Tall Ship Windy, was prepared to make an offer close to the market value, about $1 million, Lewis reports.
By contrast, it is also troubling that Discovery World’s representatives refused to divulge the actual price of the ship’s sale. However, the successful sale should also underscore how distinguished and rare the Milwaukee-built schooner is for historical value, among other things, and the cultural loss Milwaukee is incurring. The sale rationale came down to a decision as to what is “best for the boat,” including maintaining one of its primary purposes as an educational entity. Why such a function could not continue to be maintained in Milwaukee remains unclear, aside from financial woes the operation is still apparently recovering from, post-pandemic.
The schooner’s powerful presence had also helped attract cultural events to its Discovery World dock, such as the evening concert by the popular Milwaukee jazz group VIVO, which was going on when we returned to dock in 2016.
Saxophonist-flutist Warren Wiegratz performs with VIVO, in a dockside concert going on as the Denis Sullivan, in background, moored after our September 2016 voyage on the 19th-century style schooner.
But read the Journal-Sentinel article to judge for yourself on the whole story of the city’s loss of the ship.
Lewis’s story does finally latch on strong rays of hope. The World Ocean School purchased the Milwaukee ship to replace it’s own flagship, which is now docked up for a few years for refurbishing. There’s a possibility they could be open to selling the Denis Sullivan back to Milwaukee when their own ship is ready to sail again. It is after all, a Great Lakes-style schooner. Still, one must consider such circumstances could change as drastically as the ever-roaming tides of the oceans and those Great Lakes, in all their magnificent and mystifying vagaries.
This two-sequence photo of Madison photographer Katrin Talbot (taken a few years before my trip on the ship) in collaborative research work for this writer’s Melville’s novel, shows some of the scale of the schooner Denis Sullivan. Retrospectively, Katrin seems to bid the ship farewell.
____________
1 In the afore-mentioned titles, authors Herman Melville (Moby-Dick), Richard Henry Dana Jr. (Two Years Before the Mast), and Joseph Conrad (Typhoon) gave us first-hand accounts, or concocted creative ships of transport themselves, in often-poetic prose. These were all based on their actual nautical experiences.
The mid-1800s were haunted by captains courageous and crazed, mighty sea creatures,countless sailors and whalers (drowned and survived), “widow’s walk” wives, and others who directly engaged in, or experienced, the drama and danger of 19th-century sea commerce, romance, and warfare (see Melville’s White-Jacket and Billy Budd, both set on warships).
