Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers is accepting responsibility for a false statement he made earlier in the week. Yesterday, Evers’ staff admitted that the Governor made a mistake in his remarks when promoting his broad marijuana plan. In a statement and a tweet, Evers incorrectly said “drug related crimes account for as many as 75-85 percent of all inmates of our prisons.”
Evers’ spokeswoman Melissa Baldauff said that stat is wrong and it was pulled from a 2013 WUWM radio article which talks about Wisconsin’s black male incarceration rate. A study conducted by the Department of Corrections found that marijuana-related prison admissions between 2000 and 2016 accounted for anywhere from five-point-nine to eight-point-five-percent of total prison admissions in the state.
