11/2/2023 0 Comments Pa doc video visitsJust after 7 a.m. on May 13, guards found Whatley dead on the floor of his cell. During Brown County's investigation, guards said protocol requires that a supervisor be notified when an inmate is unresponsive, which did not happen when Whatley stopped responding to guards. Staff visited the cell seven times over more than seven hours to hand out food or mail, but got no response. Guards considered Whatley's unwillingness to walk a refusal of medical treatment. A corrections officer told Whatley "he doesn't need a wheelchair and that he has been walking every day," according to a Brown County Sheriff's documents. The 37-year-old Green Bay inmate was sick, and asked guards to get him a wheelchair so he could go to the prison's health unit.īut Whatley didn't have a documented wheelchair need so he wasn't going to get one, two guards told him on May 11, 2021. "Are we going to make the decision to close GBCI when a catastrophic event occurs? Or are we going to do it in a time frame that is under our control?" Guards investigated "There's going to have to be a decision," Steffen said. State Rep. David Steffen, R-Green Bay, said Wisconsin's time and money needs to be put toward closing the prison and moving inmates into a modern facility with proper housing, medical treatment and programming space. Wisconsin Department of Corrections Secretary Kevin Carr declined two requests by the Wisconsin State Journal this summer to discuss conditions at Green Bay, and the department did not respond to a series of written questions. The prison's small and dated housing and health care services received the lowest ranking possible under the report's scoring system. The 2020 DOC report found that no other maximum security facility for men in Wisconsin had more infrastructure and systems either failing or close to failing than Green Bay. "With Green Bay, you're basically dumping money into it every year to keep it runnable." "The newer prisons are built with better sight lines, better security, better everything," said Ed Wall, who served as Wisconsin's Secretary of Corrections from 2012 to 2016. A bicycle factory converted into a boys reformatory in the 1890s then a maximum security prison in the 1970s, the Green Bay prison's antiquated layout makes it difficult to move inmates throughout the facility and for guards to monitor the prison's two main, four-tier housing units. When the Department of Corrections had consultants look into the prison's aging infrastructure in 2020, they determined it should be prioritized for replacement over the Waupun Correctional Institution, an older facility that has gotten better funding for improvements. What are we doing? We're making people worse." "These men are being forced to live in foul conditions that are not compatible with communal living, period," said Jerome Dillard, the executive director of EXPO, a nonprofit that organizes former jail and prison inmates. Conditions have left the more than 350 staff members at the prison unable to deliver the standards and safety expected of a modern prison, according to interviews with about two dozen current and former inmates and guards, their family members, current and former government officials and activists.
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