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When I first entered Wisconsin’s prison system in 2013, I did not understand how much of the punishment extended outside the walls. One part can trap people long after release: extended supervision and the rule that erases progress when supervision is revoked.
Under Wisconsin’s truth-in-sentencing law, a judge sets an initial confinement term and a separate term of extended supervision, which requires following at least 18 standard rules, including regular reports to a supervision agent and blanket consent to searches. You serve the confinement. Then you serve the supervision. If your supervision is revoked, you return to prison with no credit for the years you spent. People call that lost “street time.”
Here is the math in plain terms. Say someone gets 10 years of initial confinement and 10 years of extended supervision. They get out, stay incident-free for eight years, then get revoked for a supervision violation or after being charged with a new charge. Those eight years do not count as sentencing credit. They go back to prison, and they can still walk out facing the same years of supervision they already lived. Progress on the street does not count the way many people assume it should.
I lived a version of that trap. After opioid addiction and drug charges in my early 20s, I left prison on strict extended supervision. A relapse put me on a hold. An administrative process, not the original sentencing judge, determined whether to revoke my supervision. I went back behind bars. Freedom on paper felt temporary because one slip could restart the clock on my extended supervision.
Thousands of people are revoked from post-prison supervision in Wisconsin each year. At the end of 2024, Wisconsin had 22,240 adults on parole or other forms of post-prison supervision, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics — 473 people per 100,000 adults, compared with 250 nationally. During 2024, 5,770 people exited post-prison supervision in Wisconsin. Of those, 1,720 — nearly 30% — returned to prison after having their supervision revoked, compared with 18.5% nationally. The BJS data doesn’t show why each revocation occurred. It does show how many people move through the system.
Wisconsin’s Department of Corrections has said it wants fewer revocations for technical violations. That goal matters. So did Gov. Tony Evers’s August 2025 veto of Assembly Bill 85, which would have required the DOC to recommend revocation for people charged with a new crime. The Legislative Reference Bureau estimated that the bill would have sent thousands of people back into prison each year at a projected cost of more than $330 million in the first two years, with hundreds of millions in additional ongoing annual costs. While the veto kept agents’ discretion intact, it did not fix street-time forfeiture.
And revocation is only part of the picture. A federally funded Wisconsin data snapshot found that people released from prison in 2020 after serving time for violent offenses had spent an average of 6.3 years incarcerated, compared with 5 years nationally. That excludes later returns on the same sentence. We should know how much prison time a judgment of conviction actually produces from beginning to end.
Other states handle street time differently. Minnesota cuts one month from active supervision for every two compliant months, subject to its rules and a public-safety review. Michigan counts time on parole as time serving the sentence, except for certain violation periods. Both systems distinguish between time spent following the rules in the community and time connected to a violation.
A fairer rule is not soft on crime. It is honest about time already served in the community without a new conviction. Wisconsin should credit street time on revocation for technical violations, and it should require a clear, public accounting when street time is stripped after a new conviction. Agents should keep their discretion. Lawmakers should stop proposing automatic-revocation shortcuts that fill prison cells without making neighborhoods safer.
Wisconsin once led on rehabilitation: early parole, the Huber Law and belief that people could return as neighbors. Street-time erasure pulls the other way. It turns supervision into a revolving door with a disappearing calendar. If the state wants successful reentry after prison, it must stop erasing the years people already spent trying to rebuild their lives.
Andrew Drasen is the author of “A Vision of Hope: A Story of Redemption and Purpose” and the founder of ReturnPath, a reentry curriculum. He lives in Franklin.
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Guest opinion: Wisconsin should stop erasing ‘street time’ after prison is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
