Sheriff Kalvin Barrett Reflects Back on Five Years of Service: Evolving Enforcement (Part 1 of 2)
Over the past five years, Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett has worked to humanize the work of the Dane County Sheriff’s Office, especially in the area of mental health.
by Jonathan Gramling
It seems like a quick five years since Sheriff Kalvin Barrett was elected Dane County Sheriff, the first African American to hold the post. It’s a job with a lot of responsibility, managing the Dane County Jail and providing law enforcement to rural areas of Dane County that don’t have their own law enforcement department.
“We cover 1,200 sq. miles of land and over 60 towns, villages, cities and unincorporated areas and another 41 sq. miles of water that we are responsible for,” Barrett said. “It’s a lot.”
While law enforcement entities have strict jurisdictional boundaries, crimes do not necessarily conform to those boundaries. And so the various law enforcement entities collaborate together in the interest of public safety.
“We help out and assist every agency,” Barrett emphasized. “And I think that sometimes gets overlooked. When you’re the sheriff’s office and you’re the largest in the county, your budgeted for you’re budgeted for your primary responsibilities, things that you do. But when you really look at the numbers and the data, it shows that we help out every other jurisdiction, whether it’s detectives, whether it’s initial traffic, whether it’s back-up on calls, whether it’s a drone or K-9 or special teams, we do it all with the limited budget that we are given every year. We even provide service in the city of Madison. We’re there to do a lot. And it’s great to be there. It’s important for us to have the support from the budget decision-makers to help us do that job well.”
The sheriff’s office has 471 deputy positions and 119.5 professional staff. At any given point of time, the sheriff’s office will have a number of vacancies as the Baby Boom generation retires that Barrett is trying to fill, vacancies that are tempting to be cut by a county board facing strong budgetary pressures.
“We were able to do a lot of great things through programs and innovative ways to identify, qualify and attract the best candidates who were out there and then hire them,” Barrett said. “I would say that number one, we did a really good job with the hiring and things that we have in place to hire good people who represent our Dane County values. We are still trying to keep up because not only are the deputies retiring, but the supervisors are also retiring. So when the captains, lieutenants and chief deputies and sergeants retire, then we have to promote up and it creates these holes in these mandated places that we have. I think our efforts in the last five years to hire quality individuals who represent our Dane County values was one of my most proud moments. We’ll continue to do that. It could be really easy to drop your standards or just get people and put them in a position just to say, ‘We hire people.’ But that is just short-term thinking.”
For Barrett, quality is almost more important than quantity.
“I am not going to bring a person in just to say, ‘Hey we got someone here and they are working,’” Barrett emphasized. “For me, proper staffing isn’t just about having a body there. Proper staffing is having the right person at the right place at the right time doing the right things. That’s what is most important to me. You can put anyone from anywhere into a spot. But if they are violating people’s rights and using excessive force and not doing things appropriately, then we’re just going to cost the county more in law suits just trying to keep up with this bad apple who is in here causing all of the havoc.”
With the new Dane County Jail Tower slated to open in December, the complex of areas devoted to incarceration in the Public Safety Building will go through a redesign to provide more up-to-date rehabilitation services.
“The entire fourth floor where we are currently housing jail residents will be connected to the fourth floor of the Tower,” Barrett said. “And it will be an entire medical-mental health floor. We don’t have that now. We talked about solitary confinement being where we take people for mental health crises and medical issues as well as disciplinary issues. All we have right now is solitary confinement and cell segregation cells, which is heart-breaking. And as I’ve stated before, it is borderline unconstitutional to have people suffering from mental illness in solitary confinement. And now with this medical floor — it will be both males and females — it will be like an open ICU. There will be a nurses station. There will be a deputy station. And it will be much better to help people rehabilitate while they are incarcerated.”
Once the Tower opens and all of the renovations take place, the jail could already be at capacity in Dane County, which is the fastest growing county in Wisconsin, which in turn could lead to occupancy issues. And while some have pushed the policy belief that changes in law enforcement and the criminal justice system could lead to less need for incarceration, Barrett believes that it is a deeper societal issue.
“It takes a change in the culture and the programs, from father to son and daughter,” Barrett emphasized. “It really takes time, consistency and all of those things that go into it. A lot of times, the emphasis is put on the criminal justice system to reform our communities. But in reality, we have to reform our communities in order to reform the criminal justice system. The criminal justice system is a reaction to all of the symptoms and the problems we have in our communities. We just respond to the things that we see: crimes, issues and deviant behavior. We have to get to the root cause and get upstream to see why the crime is happening first. And in the process of solving that, we end up reducing the role of the criminal justice system. But so many times it is easy to put the emphasis on us. It’s easy to say, ‘It’s your fault law enforcement, law enforcement, law enforcement.’ But in reality, it’s much bigger. It’s a societal issue that we have, not just a criminal justice issue.”
One of the societal issues that Barrett has tried to change within the purview of the sheriff’s office is the use of language in reference to people who are incarcerated.
“If we were to look at history, how the use of certain words or stigmas or labels allows society to treat people less than,” Barrett said. “Look at the African American community. The use of the ‘n-word’ was used to treat us as second-class citizens. Look at our Native Americans. There were terms that were used to treat them less than and keep things from them. I realize that as a historian, as someone who is a criminal justice academic. I really understood the power of a term and the power of a stigma and how we have to change that.”
In essence while people have committed a crime and are paying the price for that, they are still members of the community. People housed in the jail are referred to as residents and not as inmates.
“When I first came in, it was important for me to share that,” Barrett said. “Whether you are wearing the uniform or not, we are all one wrong decision from ending up as a resident in the Dane County Jail. That’s why I made the decision to change the term from inmate to resident or incarcerated individual. If it was me, if it was my daughter, if it was my son, if it was your grandchild, how would you want them to be referred to as? People make mistakes. There’s accountability. There’s a system we have in place to hold them accountable. But that doesn’t mean we have to treat them poorly or without humanity and respect. And that’s important for us here at Dane County.”
Barrett is also working to evolve how people with drug addiction and opioid issues are handled in the jail. Historically, there was no treatment.
“If you were taking medication on the outside for opioid use disorder, things like methadone, whatever you have been prescribed and you came into the jail, we would stop those medications,” Barrett said. “When you look at that from the standpoint of what if it were diabetes, we would never stop someone’s medication. So I was looking around and asking, ‘What are we doing here?’”
And so Barrett and his team have been working to continue that treatment while people are incarcerated.
“We are implementing for the first time in our history of our sheriff’s office our medication assistant treatment program. In May when I first came in, they said it couldn’t be done. You can’t do it. You can’t have medication assistant treatment here in the Dane County Jail. We have to wait for the new jail to be built. And we have to make some adjustments. I challenged our team and our team did a great job stepping up, not only our jail administrators and deputies, but also our medical provider, Wellpath, did a great job of partnering with us. In April 2022, we started the first time ever continuing medications for those going through opioid abuse disorder. This has been great for us. We’ve always had Vivitrol. We’ve always had a Vivitrol counselor. We’ve also always had a Vivitrol nurse. But now continuing those medications for those who are taking it on the outside in. It’s been so positive for the people who are here. I also think it’s been great for in regards to trying to reduce recidivism and really get to the root cause of what we see out in the community, which is typically poverty or substance abuse. So I think the medication assistant treatment program is great. We actually wrote a grant and now have a deputy who is trained to help those going through it along with the medical staff.”
But that is just the beginning.
“The next step that we have to do is identify people who come in and haven’t been prescribed it,” Barrett said about Vivitrol. “We can have the medical staff identify, evaluate and assess and then prescribe them the medication. That’s the third step that we are going to need to do with additional help like money and resources and the new jail facility. That’s where we are at right now. It’s very important to us to make sure that program was implemented and running really well.”