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A note from the writers: Here, we use “survivor” rather than “victim,” except where victim is the legal term.
The first commutation hearings in Wisconsin’s history took place last month, allowing people who have been incarcerated for decades – some serving life sentences – and have turned their lives around, to seek early release. Announced by Gov. Tony Evers in April, the process has been controversial from the start for several reasons, including whether commutation forces survivors to relive trauma; whether they receive adequate notification; and whether they have the chance to be heard.
A commutation ends or changes a convicted person’s sentence. Unlike an expungement or pardon, a commutation does not remove the person’s record from public view or restore any rights.
As a crime survivor, a formerly incarcerated person and a criminal justice professor, we don’t experience the criminal legal system from the same vantage point. However, we all agree the current approach to victim inclusion needs to change and can be accomplished in a way that doesn’t deny people a meaningful chance at mercy and early release.
Opposition to commutations has consisted of pointing out problems regarding survivor inclusion, misunderstandings about the process, and, in too many cases, leveraging survivors’ pain as a tool for political ends. While the commutations process did not create this problem, it has spotlighted the issue statewide. To look forward to how to address survivor inclusion, we first need to look back.
A system survivors used to run
Survivors once played a far more central role in American justice. In colonial America, crime was viewed not only as an offense against the state, but as a harm suffered by a real person. As such, survivors played a direct role in seeking redress, often by initiating complaints and leading prosecution. Other societies shared a similar premise: The person harmed helped decide how harm would be repaired.
That changed as the state took control of prosecution, redefining crime as a public offense. In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that a private citizen has no legal interest in another’s prosecution, and two years later, a new rule allowed courts to remove survivors from the trials of those accused of harming them.
A survivors’ rights movement rose in the late 1970s. Wisconsin led the way, passing the nation’s first Victims’ Bill of Rights in 1980. But it soon became entangled in tough-on-crime rhetoric, and participation followed demands for harsher sentences. This resulted in rights on paper, but no infrastructure to deliver them.
What exists
Wisconsin provides survivors compensation; medical and advocacy support; shelter; and addresses confidentiality. Regarding notification, under Wisconsin law, survivors have the right to notice of court proceedings and, sometimes, of release. But the standard is a reasonable attempt. This only requires that a letter go out in good faith, not that it be received, help or clarify things for survivors. And none of this is criticism toward victims services professionals who operate around very complicated case dynamics and within limits, laws and even disconnected systems.
Notification is also not automatically protective. For some, more information helps. For others, being kept informed tethers or pulls them back to something they wish to keep at a distance. A woman who now runs an organization supporting currently and formerly incarcerated people was raped when she was 13 years old. For years, she closely followed the person who assaulted her, tracking his case and later his time inside. To her, this felt like a way of staying safe until she decided the tracking had become its own form of imprisonment. When she finally stopped, she described the peace of not knowing as one of the healthiest choices she made in her recovery.
A decade later, she learned that he had been released and had genuinely turned his life around. She remarked that hearing this healed her more than any previous part of the process.
National surveys find that survivors favor rehabilitation over punishment, with roughly three in four supporting earned sentence reductions for people who genuinely engage in treatment and programming. What the executive order for commutations and the public hearings have drawn attention to is the remarkable transformations that people in prison have undergone in the years and decades that they’ve been incarcerated. These individuals have become the kinds of people many survivors would want returning to communities, if given that chance.
What could be better
Three additions could move Wisconsin toward a justice system more worthy of that name for survivors.
The first is a virtual platform for the public to view and follow, as they wish and at their pace, the progress of incarcerated people throughout their incarceration: education, programming, conduct reports, volunteering, work, etc.
The second is a graduated entry point for survivors to learn about and engage in restorative processes, such as questions for survivors who have gone through such processes and information about what it entails as early into the adjudication process as possible.
The third is a communication vault: a shared, opt-in space where survivors and incarcerated folks can leave monitored communications for the other to read, with no notification pushed to either side, which keeps it a possibility rather than an intrusion.
Repair alone cannot resolve every harm; punishment alone can never restore what was lost.
The point is to have a system capable of both giving survivors a real say in whether they participate and giving those who have caused harm the chance to show their benefit to society from their transformations. This is not only entirely doable but also the version of justice most of us already believe in. We have simply yet to build it.
For more information
Survivors wishing to sign up for post-conviction notification or learn about current restorative justice opportunities, including Victim-Offender Dialogue or the Apology Letter Bank, can contact the Wisconsin Department of Corrections Office of Victim Services and Programs at 800-947-5777.
Survivors in any Wisconsin county can access these services, and be connected to others they may need, through the Department of Justice’s Office of Crime Victim Services or at 800-446-6564.
Colette Shumpert is a founder of We Loved and Lost, a Milwaukee organization that helps individuals and families heal after the tragic loss of a loved one, speaker and author. Shannon Ross is the founder of The Community, a nonprofit organization that creates newsletters, videos and podcasts for and about people who have been incarcerated. Dr. Rebecca Konkel is an associate professor; Social Welfare PhD Program Coordinator, Department of Criminal Justice & Criminology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
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