Teen inmates stole phone from manager, made 600 calls

It took staff more than 2 weeks to recover device

MADISON – Inmates at Wisconsin’s scandal-ravaged teen prison made more than 600 phone calls on a cellphone they stole from a manager over two weeks before prison staff got on top of the situation, state records show.

Prisoners at Lincoln Hills School for Boys snatched the phone and its charger from the office of Rick Peterson on Oct. 19, but Peterson didn’t report it missing until Nov. 1, when a colleague told him guards had recovered a charger during a prison search.

Peterson told his bosses he rarely used the phone and hadn’t realized for two weeks it was missing. They recov-

ered the phone the next day.

By then, the inmates had talked on the phone for more than 71 hours in 663 phone calls.

Juvenile Corrections Administrator John Paquin gave Peterson a day off without pay for failing to keep track of his phone, records show. It was the latest discipline imposed on Peterson, who was demoted two years ago for failing to review sexual assault investigations conducted by his staff.

“You were negligent in the fact that your cellphone was missing from October 19, 2017, to November 2, 2017, and you did not notice,” Paquin wrote.

Details about the incident came to light as Gov. Scott Walker prepared to sign legislation to close Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake School for Girls, which share a campus 30 miles north of Wausau.

The facilities are the subject of multiple lawsuits — including one that resulted in an $18.9 million settlement last week — and a 3-year-old criminal investigation into prisoner abuse and child neglect.

Prison officials around the country try to limit inmate access to phones and computers. Nonetheless, the Lincoln Hills inmates were able to easily swipe the phone and charger without detection, records released under the state’s open records law show.

The device was a flip phone that could not connect to the internet, so it was not used to broadcast scenes from the prison on Facebook Live, as one inmate had told a guard. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on that claim in November.

But the teen inmates were able to use it to make extensive phone calls. Two late-night calls to Milwaukee lasted more than two hours each, records show.

Department of Corrections spokesman Tristan Cook wouldn’t say whether prison officials had determined whether the inmates used the phone to contact criminals or victims. He also did not say why the department didn’t have an arrangement with the phone provider so that it could have quickly detected a surge in the use of the phone.

“DOC employees are responsible for maintaining control of state government-issued mobile phones and immediately reporting a lost or stolen cellphone to their supervisor so DOC can disconnect the phone and investigate the phone’s disappearance or theft,” Cook said in a statement.

Peterson no longer has a Department of Corrections-issued cellphone, according to Cook.

An internal investigation determined the phone and charger were stolen from Peterson’s unlocked office on Oct. 19. Officials concluded another guard, Gregory Brasure, may have been the one to leave the office unlocked. His bosses talked to him about the importance of making sure the prison is kept secure but did not discipline him, according to Cook.

Guards found the charger after a lockdown and prisonwide search was conducted starting Oct. 31. Supervisor Kyle Hoff said he told Peterson that the missing phone might be his. Peterson patted his pockets and said he couldn’t remember when he last had it, according to Hoff.

“It should be noted that his response when I asked him to try to confirm the rumors whether the cellphone was his was awkward in nature, consistent with a response that someone would do if they already knew they didn’t have their cellphone and they were going through the motions as if they didn’t know,” Hoff told internal investigators in November.

After being told about the missing phone, Peterson wrote a memo to his bosses saying his cellphone may have been stolen but that he didn’t realize it was missing. Prison staff recovered the phone in a bathroom the next day.

Peterson told internal investigators that he didn’t use the phone for months at a time and didn’t know its number. He usually left it in his office because it had become “an extra thing to carry in my pocket that served no real purpose,” he said.

“I didn’t look for it because I didn’t need it,” Peterson told internal investigators. “If I don’t need a pen, I don’t look for a pen. It should be in my office. There’s no expectation that anything should be removed from my office except by me.”

Peterson became Lincoln Hills’ security director — the No. 3 post at the institution — in 2015 but lost the post within eight months because he did not properly oversee more than two dozen rape and sexual assault investigations, the Journal Sentinel reported in 2016.

His pay was cut from about $76,000 to about $68,000, but he was allowed to remain a supervisor.

Peterson received a $2,500 bonus last spring for exemplary work, but prison officials rescinded it after the Journal Sentinel asked why he had gotten it in light of his demotion.

Officials in Walker’s administration have known for six years about extensive problems at Lincoln Hills. The administration in recent years provided workers with additional training and equipped them with body cameras. In January, Walker got behind the idea of closing the prison and housing teen inmates at regional lockups.

Lawmakers unanimously approved that plan, Assembly Bill 953, last month and Walker signed it into lawon Friday.