EX-COP REFUSED TO FLINCH FROM TOUGH PAROLE DUTY
By Joel McNally
In an age when lily-livered politicians prefer to avoid controversy at any cost, Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle's appointment of Lenard Wells as chairman of the state's parole commission back in 2003 was a gutsy move.
Heading the parole commission is a lightning rod position, no matter who holds the job.
Parole has become such a dirty word in today's mean-spirited, tough-on-crime political climate that the entire process was eliminated when the state passed its so-called truth-in-sentencing law. Parole has been replaced by a period of extended supervision after an offender returns to the community upon serving every day of a sentence.
Unlike parole, which takes into account the behavior and rehabilitation of an offender in prison, extended supervision is set at the time of trial by the judge without any knowledge at all about what sort of person the offender will be when he returns to the community.
But for all those prisoners sentenced before 2000, someone still has to decide whether they are ready to be paroled. In Wisconsin, that decision is in the hands of one person, the chairman of the parole commission.
For one of the most controversial positions in state government, Doyle chose a retired law enforcement officer who has always seemed to thrive on controversy.
Lenard Wells' 27-year career with the Milwaukee Police Department was a passionate crusade for social justice.
Wells was one of the founders of the League of Martin, an organization of minority police officers that battled in courtrooms and on the job against openly racist police practices in the department and in the community under Police Chief Harold Breier.
One of Wells' fellow insurgents, Arthur Jones, later became Milwaukee's first black police chief. Wells gave Jones fits just as he had the police chiefs before him.
Wells always recognized the limitations and unintended consequences of relying on the police alone to solve community problems rooted in poverty and racial inequality.
After retiring from the department, Wells became director of the community justice program at the Benedict Center, a Milwaukee nonprofit agency that operates drug treatment and education programs as an alternative to incarceration and advocates for criminal justice reform. (Where his boss was my wife, Kit Murphy McNally.)
Wells took his passion for justice to the parole commission. That meant not ducking tough decisions, even when it meant paroling offenders who had been involved in the shooting of police officers.
For Wells, it was a matter of integrity. If an offender who had spent decades in prison met all the requirements for parole by completing required programs, accepting responsibility for past behavior and becoming well-adjusted to return to the community, Wells would grant parole.
State law did not permit Wells to recuse himself even if he had a personal conflict of interest. It didn't matter whether he'd worked with a police officer fatally shot by the offender. It wouldn't even have mattered if the offender had been a relative. The parole decision was his alone.
That's why when a reporter called Wells in early May to ask about his decision to parole one of the participants in a 1975 barroom shooting that killed a Milwaukee police officer, he didn't hesitate to tell the reporter he'd already paroled another offender in the same shooting.
After the resulting controversy, Wells abruptly resigned from the parole commission. Many speculated publicly that Doyle might have pushed Wells into resigning because of re-election concerns.
The truth is very different, and typical of Wells. Wells told me he voluntarily resigned so Mark Green and the Republicans wouldn't be able to use the controversy surrounding his parole decisions, for which he takes full responsibility, to smear Doyle in the election.
He said there were at least three more offenders coming up for parole before the election who had been involved in police shootings. The press would have gone crazy, but he would have felt honor-bound to use the same standards in determining whether to grant those paroles.
Republicans clearly were gearing up to make Wells an issue. Jessica McBride, a former reporter who now has a right-wing radio show, filed an open records request to examine every parole decision Wells ever made. McBride is married to Waukesha District Attorney Paul Bucher, a Republican candidate for state attorney general.
One of the reasons parole is controversial is that the hard-line incarceration policies advocated by conservative politicians are such a failure. Many offenders come out of prison worse than they went in.
Even a conscientious parole commissioner such as Wells who attempts to release offenders with the best chance to succeed knows that some will fail.
* Wells would never be one to run away from a fight. He says he just didn't want to become the ammunition for a dirty political campaign against the man he wants to see re-elected governor