Milwaukee County recently launched their ‘CYSF Youth in our care’ dashboard. It shows the demographics of youth in Milwaukee County who are in corrections and detention facilities.
Last week, the dashboard showed 96% of youth in corrections and detention were Black. Four-percent were Hispanic. None of the youths were white.
Dr. Monique Liston was floored by the data. She's Ubuntu Research & Evaluation’s Founder and Chief Strategist. As someone who works to make sense of data for community members, she posted the data on social media. She wanted to know if other people saw what she did: systemic racism.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Dr. Monique Liston: The thing that was interesting, or why I made a call-out, is folks started having conversations about what the parents are doing and the behavior of the kids, and that's not what this data tell us. This data is not talking about behaviors.
It's a reflection of the decisions that are made by whoever is in the court. I'm saying whoever because I know in various cases it may be a judge, it may be a commissioner, it might be different people who can make those decisions. It's really data about those decisions and the results of those decisions. We can't talk about behaviors because behaviors are about four or five data points away from this, but that's where some of the community conversation was going.
What we're actually seeing here in this dashboard are decisions by the court system. We are not seeing what parents are doing or what young people are doing. We're not seeing surveillance, cops in schools. All of those things, though related, are not measured by this dashboard.
And so I think it was important to say, in wanting the community to have more control over data, we also got to understand what data can tell us and what it can't.
Jimmy Gutierrez: OK, so we have this data. And I'm curious, what does accountability look like after we know what this data is telling us and what this data is not telling us?
Liston: So while I had some folks going down the wrong behavior path, I also got a lot of folks who were like, "How do we address this? What can we do with it?"
Now, I know that there's been many organizations and young people addressing the various facets of why our young people are caught up in the system in this way. So I'm not trying to say that I'm the first by any means, but I wanted to also connect that there was a number of people who were like, "How can I help? What can I do?" Can we continue to raise this issue, which was exciting in a good way, and where it could go. I feel like being able to see it is good fertilizer, good seed for folks to really talk about the most critical issues.
Some connections that I would personally make is Milwaukee County has already talked about racism as a public health issue. If racism is a public health issue, the populations of our detention centers are also a public health issue. We need to talk about that.
I also am not advocating that we need more young folks to even out the proportionality. That is not what I'm saying. I'm not an advocate for detention centers or police or jailing of young people.
But I think now people are a little bit more curious of like, "How do people end up here? What allows us to be true in our city? Where do I contribute to this? Where can I challenge this?"
I think it allows, in my mind, a greater connection of a network of folks who touch young people's lives in the city around one particular data point that's influenced by many, many factors.
Gutierrez: I want to zoom out for a second and ask, why does it matter what data we collect?
Liston: What I love to say is what matters is measured, and what's measured matters. So at the end of the day, if whatever we're measuring becomes priority, and those things that become priority become the narrative, the things that become the narrative, become the moral judgments, those things that become the moral judgments become the budgets. And that's exactly how our policy system and our communities work.
We all know racism is real. I know racism is real. Next to data, this is the other fact of life that I deal with every single day. It's also very rare to come face to face with that kind of systemic inequity around young people that you know.
Ryan Clancy is the state representative for District 19, and he’s very familiar with the dashboard. Three years ago, back when he was a Milwaukee County supervisor, he, along with Supervisor Felesia Martin, introduced a resolution that would become today’s youth corrections dashboard.
Ryan Clancy: I was overjoyed that at the end of April, Dr. Monique Liston, posted about this and pointed out, rightly, that every single child locked up is either Black or brown. Really critically, she said this data does not reflect youth behavior or community norms. It reflects targeted criminalization. And that's really why I pushed for this in the first place. It was to have these conversations about why we're locking kids up, which kids were locking up and how do we do better.
Gutierrez: So we have an idea about what the dashboard is telling us, but where did the idea for the dashboard come from?
Clancy: So the resolution to make this came from me and from Supervisor Martin three years ago. It was passed in the same year, but only came online in March of this year. But it was because it was incredibly frustrating when members of the media or parents, or people doing abolition work would ask me, ‘How many kids are locked up right now?’
I could never answer that question without making a bunch of different calls to a bunch of different facilities. By the time I got all those numbers together, the numbers changed. So the dashboard was first, a way to have that information available. But second, to have big conversations about how we failed this many kids in Milwaukee County and what we can do better.
Gutierrez: Is there anything that struck you or you wanted to add to this conversation, coming from a supervisor's point of view, that really caught your attention? What other angles about this conversation could we be talking about?
Clancy: I'm a former county supervisor, but at the state, we're trying to get the same thing done. What we need is a dashboard statewide so we can talk about both the number of kids that we lock up and the number of adults. And again, focus on how we do better because we know that locking up our community just doesn't make it safer.
I was really struck by a lot of those comments from community members, expressing both shock and outrage. And I think we have to go from there into policy and say, how do we do better? How do we better serve the needs of people, adults and kids? Because if we're only focusing on students' needs and kids' needs once they're incarcerated, and ignoring all the many off-ramps they would have and should have, then we are doing our community a huge disservice. And that looks like taking some money away from the carceral system that targets Black and brown children and putting it into actual opportunity.
I was an MPS teacher, and by and large, the students that were there were both targeted and at risk, and we’re really missing an opportunity. And as long as we continue to invest in punitive things rather than opportunity in our community, we're going to keep seeing these numbers rise.
Note: A spokesperson from Milwaukee County’s Health and Human Services office didn’t dispute the data, but said there was initially some confusion about what facilities were represented and they’ll continue to work to refine the dashboard for full transparency.
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