Felon report has serious shortcomings

Much has been made in the last few days over the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau's report on felons working within the University of Wisconsin System. The document has startled many – including certain figures in the state assembly – with its revelation of 40 convicted felons residing on the UW System payroll as of last fall, and no less than 27 of them working right here on the Madison campus.

What concerns me, however, is not the numbers produced by this report but, rather, the absolute shoddiness of the report itself. These figures are almost impossible to believe and it is not because they are too high but, rather, because they are too low.

Behind Madison, the campus with the most felons was UW-Milwaukee, claiming four on its payroll. The disparity is stunning – the state's flagship campus somehow has nearly seven times as many felons as any other school in the system?

Perhaps not. To borrow from the old cliché, the devil may well be in the details.

This report only lists those who have been convicted of felonies in Wisconsin and who are still under some level of state supervision (parole, probation, etc.).

Take a second – think about that.

This report does not, ergo, include those who have paid their debt to society in full and moved on. With the nature of plea deals, it is possible that there are people on the UW payroll who have committed felonies as recently as this decade and yet managed to coast through the judicial system, escaping the wrath of state monitoring by the time this audit was commissioned.

More troubling, though, is the inherent limitation of only using Wisconsin records. UW-La Crosse, UW-Platteville and UW-Superior are three of the seven non-two year schools to have escaped the wrath of this report altogether, registering no felons on their payroll. What do they all in common? They are all within spitting distance of another state. Had Minnesota and Iowa criminal records been examined, it is tough to say whether these schools may have emerged with the same pristine claim.

And such a theory doesn't stop there. UW-Madison's faculty is decidedly international, with people from all over North America and the world. So that figure of 27 felons is likely low as well.

Senior administrators at any of the UW schools could have had some very gut-wrenching run-ins with the law in Florida, California or Italy and the LAB report would not have caught these newsworthy indiscretions.

It is good to have a debate about whether felons should be on university payrolls and whether schools ought to be allowed to discriminate based upon one's past. Personally, I shy away from absolutism on this subject and prefer a case-by-case approach. But if the State Legislature is really looking to engage in a shouting match with Bascom Hall and the administrative wings of every other UW school, they ought to at least make a better effort at getting some accurate information.