The Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office is one step closer to acquiring a new body scanner and another narcotics detection dog.
The moves are part of an effort to reduce illegal drug use inside the Milwaukee County Jail, where multiple overdoses have occurred in recent years.
“In talking with jail leadership and doing research on this, it was pretty evident that one of the biggest safety risks at our jail is the influence of drugs being smuggled in,” Milwaukee County Supervisor Sky Capriolo said.
Capriolo introduced the resolution to spend about $250,000 on the new drug-screening tools, which was approved by the Milwaukee County Board’s Committee on Finance on July 17.
She told committee members during that hearing that the tools are needed as a response to overdoses, deaths and persistent contraband problems inside the jail.
Overdoses in the jail
Citing data from the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office, which oversees the jail, Capriolo said Narcan has been administered 50 times in the jail from 2020 through June of this year. Narcan, also known as naloxone, is a medication used to reverse the effects of an opioid overdose.
Narcan was administered five times this year, and two people have died of drug overdoses, according to Capriolo. The overdoses account for the two in-custody deaths reported by the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office this year.
“What we hear from families and from criminal justice reform advocates is that safety in our jail should be the utmost priority,” Capriolo said.
“We look at how many deaths we’ve had in the jail over the last five years, and drug deaths are there, suicide deaths are there. So if we can tackle one of those areas in a concrete way, we definitely need to do our best to do that.”
In 2022, there were 94 nonfatal overdoses in the city’s correctional facilities, according to the Milwaukee County Overdose Dashboard. The total number of nonfatal overdoses has declined each year since, from 58 in 2023 to 18 in 2024.
Four nonfatal overdoses have been reported from Jan. 1 to March 31.
Debate over effectiveness
Rose Scott, president and co-founder of Prison Action Milwaukee, a local nonprofit advocating for jail reform, is strongly opposed to the use of funds for the new body- scanning tool and drug detection dog.
She said the approach is fundamentally misguided.
“When will they pass a resolution to provide monies and directives to reduce the prison population?” Scott asked.
Supervisor Justin Bielinski, a member of the finance committee and chair of the Judiciary, Law Enforcement and General Services Committee, questioned the reliability and necessity of drug-sniffing dogs.
“There’s a lot of issues with those,” Bielinski told NNS. “There’s just a low accuracy rate.”
Bielinski said some studies he’s seen have found reports of both false positives and false negatives in the screens.
“They (dogs) are more responsive to the biases of the trainer of the dog than to the actual narcotics present,” Bielinski told committee members, citing a Chicago Tribune analysis that found drug dogs correctly identified drugs just 27% of the time in searches involving Latinos.
Bielinski introduced an amendment to remove the drug detection dog from the resolution.
Supervisor Steve Taylor, also a member of the finance committee, told Bielinski that the Chicago Tribune was “fake news” and said the sheriff’s department should get what it requested.
Brian Barkow, chief deputy of the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office, said during a committee meeting that he appreciates Bielinski’s concerns. But, he said, the dog and scanner serve different purposes and work best together.
“The scanner would be utilized … to search a person,” he said.“The dogs are not used to search people. They’re used to search places.”
This flexibility also helps ensure jail staff are not bringing in drugs, Barkow added.
The resolution passed without Bielinki’s amendment.
What’s next?
“We have to protect correctional officers, inmates and the public,” Taylor told NNS. “I’m proud that the finance committee backed the measure and would urge my colleagues on the board to support this resolution that enhances both safety and accountability.”
The full board is expected to vote on the resolution at its next meeting at noon on Thursday, July 24. The meeting is open to the public and can be attended online or in person in Room 200 of the Milwaukee County Courthouse, 901 N. 9th St.
Capriolo said she expects the resolution to pass and for progress to begin soon after.
“I hope that within the first three months, we would be able to see a drop in contraband being smuggled through,” she said. “And I will definitely be asking for updates.”
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