Sheriff Kalvin Barrett Reflects Back on Five Years of Service: Evolving Enforcement (Part 2 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 aqrea 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.”
Barrett has to play a balancing act when it comes to filling vacant positions. On the one hand, you want to take the time to recruit and hire the best. On the other hand, you don’t want to have vacant positions that an outsider might feel aren’t crucial and then make a move to cut them to save money.
“You have to have people who really understand that you have to think big picture,” Barrett said. “You have to think 25-year career. Being in the jail is a great opportunity to learn, to multi-task, to understand state statute, laws, procedures, practices and also increase your institutional knowledge of this profession. We say this all the time and I tell our deputies and our staff this. A good deputy knows what to do. A great deputy knows why they are doing it. We don’t want robots. We can hire robots to do a job. But being able to understand and really empathize and understand what each situation is and assess it appropriately with the values that we set at the sheriff’s office, that’s what separates us from everyone else. I also tell the youngsters, ‘You may not appreciate it now, but when you are getting ready to retire and you have this institutional knowledge as a deputy with every aspect of the criminal justice system, the courts to the lakes to the water to the patrol to the jail to special teams, when you retire, there are going to be private companies out there that are going to want to hire you as a consultant. And they are going to pay you very well because you have that institutional knowledge of our system, which is so important and that’s what we get here.” Barrett is also concerned about people’s health inside and outside of the jail. The new jail will be equipped to deal with the residents’ mental health needs. But Barrett also realizes that his personnel must be trained and positioned to deal with mental health crises in the community as well.
“Another important achievement is us creating our mental-health deputy team,” Barrett said. “When I came in, we had approximately 7-8 community deputies who were responsible for community-based relationships and issues in serving the communities of Dane County. We came in and looked at the data. We realized that the majority of calls that our deputies were going on were mental health related calls. So again, I challenged our team. What can we do? What can we do to solve this problem? And the solution was if we took four of those community deputies and gave them a little more territory to cover, we would turn them into a mental health deputy team. Then we were able to help people in the community, especially in our rural areas because that is what gets forgotten about. Madison gets all of the attention when it comes to issues and problems. Everything goes to Madison. We forget about our rural communities. I hear that from them all the time when I go out there. ‘What about us? Madison gets this. Madison has CARES. What about us?’ So it’s important that we provide our people out in the rural communities with that. And so we were able to form a team of four deputies who received specialized training and their ultimate job is to take these mental health calls with our embedded crisis workers who are mental health professionals through Journey Mental Health and respond to the issues because it is really important that the community knows that when someone is going through crisis, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s leading up to and afterwards and connecting them with resources where the real time comes. And deputies who are on patrol don’t have time for that. They are going from call to call to call to crash to crash. When you have a dedicated mental-health team, they’re working with the families leading up to the crisis, during the crisis and then after the crisis, making sure things are good, connecting, putting the notes into the computer and into the system so that deputies and police officers know that when they are responding that there is information that is out there. All of these things are done by our teams. That is something that I am really proud of too.”
And it is important to Barrett that he look out after the mental health needs of his staff.
“A lot of times it is very difficult, especially with us currently being short-staffed,” Barrett said. “Overtime is a lot. So time off with family is really important. So it’s really good for our deputies who were at Juneteenth were able to incorporate their families being there too whereas those who don’t have family just need time off. They need that mental recharge. It’s hard to do that when they are working 12-13 hour shifts 4-5 days out of your six day week. That’s tough. That’s why it’s important that we continue to hire and get new people in here so that people can get time off and rejuvenate.”
For many categories, crime in Dane County is down due to the local efforts of Madison, Dane County and other jurisdictions.
“You have to look at the crime rate in multiple,” Barrett said. “We obviously have our Dane County crime data board through our Community Justice Council. I would recommend that people go to that. It’s like a digital counter that provides people with crimes, types of crimes, people who are booked into the jail. It’s anything and everything you need to know about what is happening in Dane County. I, the DA and others are a part of it. I think Madison has reported that they have experienced a significant drop in a lot of their violent crime as well as we’ve seen a significant drop in a lot of the crime that we’ve had in the rural areas. Remember that Dane County is the responsible primary for the rural parts. And we’ve seen significant drops in retail thefts as a whole, sex offense related calls. Sexual assaults remain the same. Vehicle thefts have dropped. Vehicle break-ins have dropped. So there are a lot of things that we are seeing due to the work that we are doing out in the community.”
Barrett also feels it is because of what is also going on in the jail while people are serving out their sentence. The residents are not in a holding pattern. They are taking real steps to make improvements in their lives.
“When each individual comes in here, they are issued a tablet like an i-Pad,” Barrett said. “When I first came in, there were maybe 15 in a pod of 50 jail residents and that created a lot of issues. It wasn’t very fair in terms of the 50 people, who get to use the 15 all the time. So now, each individual is issued their own tablet and that is where they are able to use the information. Now it’s not free access to the Internet. There are limitations on where they can go, what they can do about programs. We have a partnership with Madison Public Library where they have access to over 2,500-3,000 books and entertainment and different things like that. It is really good and beneficial to the rehabilitation process here in the jail. Not everyone takes advantage of the programs. But those who really want to change, those who get to that mental maturity where they are like, ‘You know what? I’m done with this. And I need help.’ We’re here to help them. And I want those who aren’t ready for the programming or who haven’t matured to that level yet to know that we’re here and we’re going to be here for them when they are ready. We’re not going anywhere.”
As the 2027 budget deliberations begin in earnest fro Dane County, the county is facing a severe budget crunch as the federal ARPA funds end on December 31, 2026. This “cut” of federal funding — on top of the cuts the Trump administration has implemented — means that there will be hard choices that the Dane County decision-makers will be facing. And Barrett is concerned that any vacancies in his department will be looked at as an easy cut.
“The number one issue we are facing is the budget,” Barrett said. “The county board has frozen 20 positions. They initially tried to take over 25 positions. The community kind of pushed back on that, so they ended up freezing 20 positions. And the four percent budget cut that we had to take last year and another $1.8 million budget cut this year. That’s going to come from services. It’s got to come from somewhere. It’s very sad that we are at that point. If we continue to be provided with the appropriate level of budget, we can keep people safe and do it in the appropriate manner. If you look at our budget over the past five years that I have been sheriff, it has remained pretty much consistent, around $100 million. When I came in, it was around $100 million and it is still sticking around that $100 million budget. And if you look at the size and the scope of what we do, Madison’s police department budget is estimated around $90 million. And they don’t have a jail. Of the 1,200 sq, miles of Dane County, Dane County Sheriff’s Office is responsible primary patrol for 1,025 sq. miles of it. We’re responsible for all of that outside land. The other 200 sq. miles plus is cities and villages that are covered by their own law enforcement agencies.”
Overall, Barrett is concerned with how mental health issues are dealt with not only in Dane County, but across the entire country. Oftentimes, mental health issues are looked at as character defects that people must be punished for when they break the law in order to change their behavior. But to Barrett, it is so much more complex that that.
“We have to decriminalize mental illness,” Barrett emphasized. “I see one of the largest driving forces in our jail population is those who are suffering from mental illness. It is sad to say that we don’t have a place here in Dane County where we can take people. We are one of the most forward-thinking and progressive counties in the country and we need a one-stop shop in Dane County facility in Dane County to bring people. It’s a terrible fact that the largest mental health facility in the United States are jails and prisons. This cannot be the greatest country in the world and this is what we have resorted to. We need a facility where law enforcement or the community members can go to get mental health help. And the jail is not the place for it. We’re good. Our deputies are good. We’re educated and hard working. We have character, competence, compassion, courtesy and communication. But we are not mental health professionals. That’s not what we are trained to do. There needs to be a place where we can take people or people can walk up to who are going through short-term mental health crises, long-term crises where they need medication redone, they need an evaluation or people just need a place to have a sandwich, get some sleep and take a shower. We need to have that here in Dane County for it to be accessible. And I think it would be a great revenue source for the county if it gets involved with private investors. It could definitely help with our budget deficit because I do know that counties from across the southern part of the state would take advantage of it.”
Barrett feels that they are making progress in evolving enforcement. He would like to know for certain through some program evaluation.
“We would love to partner and get more interns, especially UW-Madison students who would be willing to come in and really track people once they are released from the jail to see how they are doing and what they are doing and if they are coming back, just to see how well the programs are working and if they are being connected with the resources that we have out there,” Barrett said. “But we just don’t have the funding right now to have people follow up and do those things. But this is definitely a shout-out to our universities in the state of Wisconsin. If they want to come and do an internship and really start looking at people once they are being released, I think it would be a great opportunity for our criminal justice system to learn more about the data here.
Sheriff Kalvin Barrett is evolving enforcement for the needs of all Dane County residents.