Wisconsin Hasn’t Created Prison Nursery Program, One Year After Court Order
On February 6, 2025, a Dane County Circuit judge ruled that the Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC) must immediately provide incarcerated mothers with the opportunity to participate in a nursery program that allows them to continue parenting their children under the age of one.
The order came about as a result of a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Wisconsin, with the pro bono assistance of Quarles & Brady LLP, alleging that the DOC had failed to follow a 1991 Wisconsin law, Wis. Stat. § 301.049, that requires the department to offer a “mother-young child care program.” Now, one year later, the DOC has still not implemented the program—and the ACLU has recently submitted a court filing to re-open the case.
First brought on June 10, 2024, the ACLU’s suit against the DOC named Plaintiffs Alyssa Puphal and Natasha Curtin-Weber. Puphal was incarcerated at the Robert E. Ellsworth Correctional Center in Union Grove, while Curtin-Weber was held at the Taycheedah Correction Institution in Fond du Lac. Puphal gave birth while in prison and, in the ten months following her son’s birth, had only seen him four times as her family lived too far away to visit in-person; Curtin-Weber was eight months pregnant at the time and wished to join the nursery program after giving birth.
The lawsuit outlined how both women met the criteria to join the nursery program as set out in the state statute, but it also highlighted that the “DOC in fact has no such criteria for eligibility and has never established such criteria because the Mother-Child program in fact does not exist.”
Following presiding Judge Stephen Ehlke’s order in Plaintiffs’ favor, the ACLU suggested a time frame of two months to comply with the nursery law, as PLN reported. [See PLN, Nov. 2025, p.21.]. Ehlke did not follow this guidance and, without setting a firm date, said the DOC must comply “forthwith.” This vagueness allowed the DOC to continue to delay following the law. “To avoid another year of excuses—or worse, another 35 years,” the ACLU wrote in its latest motion, “Plaintiffs ask the Court to reopen this case for the purposes of enforcing the Court’s Writ.”
Undergirding the ACLU’s case is the issue of time. For incarcerated women such as Puphal and Curtain-Weber, both of their children have now aged out of the mother-child program. The DOC’s delay in following Ehlke’s order functionally deprived them of a resource they were mandated to receive by law.
Nationally, nine states have implemented prison nursery programs, with Missouri being the most recent. Each year, thousands of pregnant women are locked up in jails and prisons; in 2023, they accounted for around 2% of all women who were incarcerated at state prisons. According to a 2025 report from the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonprofit think tank, women made up nearly 27% of all adult arrests, which is double what their share was in 1980. This increase has brought into focus the fact that these facilities were never designed to meet the needs of new mothers.
“Routine aspects of prison operations just really don’t consider the distinct needs of women, and particularly not of pregnant women,” Alycia Welch, the associate director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, told the Wisconsin Examiner. See: Puphal v. Wis. Dep’t of Corr., Wisc. Cir. Branch 15 (Dane Cty.), Case No.2024CV001711.
Additional sources: Wisconsin Public Radio, the Wisconsin Examiner
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Related legal case
Puphal v. Wis. Dep’t of Corr., Wisc. Cir. Branch 15 (Dane Cty.)
| Year | 2024 |
|---|---|
| Cite | Case No.2024CV001711 |