Wisconsin gov't pays high cost to house, bus sex offenders, audit says

A sex offender, required by law to be monitored and driven to activities, boards a bus.

The bus service, having contracted with the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, gets paid $30.87 an hour.

That same bus service, having contracted with the state Department of Health Services to do the same thing, gets $69.89 an hour.

That's not a hypothetical.

It's fact.

And real examples like that have legislators -- Democrats and Republicans -- looking at DHS's program for supervising the release of sexual offenders into the community and thinking, "Hmm, something's not right."

"It's apparent the Department of Health Services could benefit by analyzing the procurement strategy used by the Department of Corrections for monitoring sex offenders," Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca, D-Kenosha, said in a statement.

Barca said he requested that the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau analyze the DHS program after a Racine news report indicated that, upon being released back into the community, a sex offender almost was housed near his victim's home.

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