Yes, there are other players in the system, and the sheriff is definitely one of those players.

I reported yesterday morning in this blog that it looks like Bobot is done. http://watchdogmilwaukee.com/blog/john-david-morgan/2006/bobot-drops-recount-plans/

Still looking for more confirmation on this. Journal Sentinel has not reported anything as yet.

The jails aren’t overcrowded? Give me some of what you’re smoking dude! So are no inmates at all sleeping on the floor of cells in the pods with mattresses?

Determining where, ultimately, a person is jailed is up to the COURTS, not Sheriff Clarke. He holds them until they cases are brought to trial, make bail, etc.

Maybe if we had less people breaking the law then we wouldn’t be having this discussion?

The other thing that you have to realize is that the VOTING public really does not care about the conditions in the jail and how long people have to wait…they’re more concerned about their own safety and well-being in their neighborhoods. That’s just the way it is, I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but that’s a fact.

Arrests are down, overall crime down but violent crime up — and there are fewer cops on the street in the city now, so they can’t be bringing more people to the jail.

We have plenty of jail space - and 300 probation and parole beds at 10th and State Secure Detention that Baldwin and Cox didn’t have. If you move the different types of offenders to the right facilities - jail - HOC - Secure Det. - Huber - Monitoring - efficiently you clear the jail pods for pre-trail detainees, releasing the bottle-neck in booking and intake. Clarke has a major role in managing all this. Why is that so difficult to understand?

You have pointed to a larger problem: Jail overcrowding used to be something that was worked on in this community. Baldwin and Cox, the state and the county, had fixed many of the problems. Baldwin was acccountable.

You’re very right, things have changed. Under Clarke and Walker, responsibility is routinely shirked. Of course it can’t be THEIR fault.

Why you think we shouldn’t try to hold them accountable is beyond me.

Good luck with Belling.

Each one of those points that you brought up has nothing to do with Sheriff Clarke or his job. Clarke is not a legislator of laws, he does not decide what is legal and not legal. His job is to enforce the laws that are passed by the legislators in Madison. If you have a problem with petty offenses, driving suspensions, etc, then you need to contact your legislators…Clarke and his deputies have nothing to do with it. If you want to speed the process in the jails so people don’t have to potentially sit there up to 48 hours, then ask your legislator to build more jails to accommodate the overflow or ask your legislator to de-criminalize some of the offenses that you listed above.

If Sheriff’s deupties and Milwaukee Police officers are constantly out there making arrests and throwing them in jail, what can Clarke do with an already-overcrowded jail? It is not his fault that people are being arrested for crimes they commit. Or maybe you think we should enforce the laws that are currently on the books and turn our backs on more of the criminal activity in our city/county?

(I’d fix it above, but it seems every time I edit any of our comments, slashes /// appear with apostrophes and quotes. A wordpress glitch?)

1) People whose drivers’ licenses have been suspended or revoked. This has been a leading offense of folks being jailed in Milwaukee County for a long time. To have them sit there stewing for days in that booking area with murderers, thugs, rapists and a steady flow of street drug dealers is deplorable.

2) The mentally ill. Criminalizing the mentally ill is another longtime MilCounty problem. Police have some crisis intervention training but no certified special units like they do in Memphis or Portland. Sheriff’s have some training as well, but all too often the mentally ill are tossed in the jail and forgotten, relying on deputies to make high risk medical decisions. They need to be at the Mental Health Complex.

3) Probation/parole revocations. These folks could be in for any number of reasons, any number of original charges — most of what flows through the misdemeanor courts is petty stuff.

4) Many people who are not formally charged, or who later have their cases dropped or dismissed. You’d be surprised how many people who get tossed in jail for a night or two are not convicted.

We understand that it’s difficult to seriously talk about the jail during a political campaign, but referring to everyone in the booking area as a “criminal” is a terrible misrepresentation.

I once wrote a story about a city health nurse, Linda Armstrong, who sat in that jail for 44 hours because she showed up a few minutes late for a family court hearing, had her case decided in her favor, only to have the court clerk forget to cross out the warrant issue that had been marked on Linda’s file. When a Glendale cop pulled her over for a faulty tail light on her car, the warrant was still outstanding and the cop ran her downtown.

Regardless of what the perception of the general public is, managing the booking area and the jail humanely is the legal responsibility of the Milwaukee County Sheriff. Clarke had nothing but contempt for the Christensen court order, an undefensible indictment of his management skills.

In fact, Clarke’s so arrogant he strolled through the booking area and other parts of the jail with a loaded gun, putting the lives of everyone who had the misfortune of being in the same room with him. Later on, he served drinks at a fundraiser carrying a loaded gun (Republican sheriff’s candidate Holt has filed an ethics complaint against Clarke on this).

Contempt for his legal responsibilities at the jail. Contempt the ethics of his post. Contempt for his employees. Contempt for his budget realities. It’s a pattern of Clarke contempt for everyone in Milwaukee County.

Dems and Bobot need to realize that the voting public (Dems and Reps) does not really care about the conditions in the Milwaukee County Jail, they care about the conditions of where they live…not criminals.

The Christensen class action suit was filed in 1996 due to, yes, deplorable conditions in the booking area, where arrested people were packed in for days, treated like cattle and denied medical treatment. There are no beds or showers in the booking area.

People in the booking area have not been charged with crimes, have not gone through intake, have not seen a judge or prosecutor, and are innocent until proven guilty. Many have been arrested driving with suspended drivers’ licenses and other petty offfenses.

The claims made in the suit date back to Richard Artison’s watch as sheriff. When the consent decree was settled in 2001, Lev Baldwin was sheriff. By then a number of changes in the intake area, including the addition of Sunday intake courts and new House of Corrections construction by the state, put the county in a position to meet the requirements of consent decree. Meeting the requirements relied on the sheriff’s department working cooperatively with the courts and the HOC, which is what Baldwin and then HOC superintendent Richard Cox had accomplished.

The County agreed in the decree that no one arrested and brought to the jail would be kept in the booking room (or without a bed) for more than 30 hours. The county also can’t let the population in the booking area exceed 110.

Clarke simply pretended as though the consent decree did not exist. In September 2004, the ACLU filed 13,000 new violations of the court order, and more would be added in the months that followed. That’s no hiccup.

Rather than take responsibilty and start following the law by managing the jail humanely, Clarke pointed fingers at Baldwin and Pete Misko, the guys who brought the county into compliance before he came along. That’s Clarke’s style: refuse to take responsibility and blame someone else — when he has no one to blame but himself.

As for the Christensen decree…was that the result of
Sheriff Clarke? Nope. The issues that led up to the lawsuit and subsequent decree occurred YEARS before Clarke was elected. Jail conditions have improved tons since then. Was there a hiccup? Yes. Things happen. Personally, I don’t really care what kind of “deplorable” conditions the inmates are “subjected” to and neither does the majority of the voting public. I have no problem with criminals sleeping on cement floors using toilet paper for a pillow. Good for them, that’s what they get for being a criminal, convicted yet or not. Payback for all the times they got away with something else and weren’t caught.

The recount is warranted. And it’ll happen.

Mark Belling (mkelover) - Is that you writing us from your clearchannel IP?

If Bobot wants a re-count, he has to pay for it out of his own pocket, and it’s not cheap to do.

If Bobot wants to run as a write it, he’d better include spelling lessons in every single ad because if someone writes him in and misses/adds a letter, etc, it’s not counted. The name has to be EXACTLY right…and given the intelligence of some of the posters here, I highly doubt many of them could vote for Bobot correctly.

The recount isn\’t likely to change the results, but we\’ll know more because of it, and Bobot needs all the attention and all the help he can get — and some campaign contributors — if he\’s going to pull off a write-in candidacy. Bobot\’s campaign is broke, according to JS and Bobot. He didn\’t do any TV in the primary. Can we really say he ran the best campaign?

NOTE: The 67,781 is the county-wide ballots cast. The city of Milwaukee elections commission is now reporting 46,500 ballots cast last Tuesday, but only 35,000 votes cast for Bobot or Clarke. That\’s 11,500 ballots — nearly one out of four — that apparently didn\’t count for Bobot or Clarke. That seems extremely high. What happened Tuesday?