Wisconsin needs to get its act together when it comes to compensating those who have suffered absolute loss of rights and served time behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit.

Wrongful convictions have been getting a lot of hype recently in Wisconsin. Take the Steven Avery case for example. The Netflix documentary about it, “Making a Murderer,” has brought the small-town Wisconsinite and the Wisconsin criminal justice system into the national spotlight.

Yet, we have the lowest offered compensation rate for the wrongfully convicted across the country.

I could be wrong, but it probably doesn’t look great when a state has a criminal justice system that has gotten such negative publicity recently, and still offers relatively cheap wrongful conviction compensation.

So the State Assembly unanimously passed a bill that would raise the compensation ten-fold. But when it reached the State Senate, they decided the proposed cap was a little too hefty for their liking.

The current compensation rate of Wisconsin’s wrongfully convicted is $5,000 for every year spent in prison, with a $25,000 cap.

Therefore, this only compensates people for a maximum of five years. 

The fact of the matter is there are many people who have been found innocent after spending substantially more than five years locked up. 

In all honesty, the state should be giving higher compensation to those who have been wrongfully forced to spend more years of their life in prison. These people have literally had a significant portion of their lives taken away from them because, frankly, the criminal justice system messed up. So it really isn’t that unreasonable to expect the state to have to pay more to those who have suffered more.

The proposed compensation plan would have offered $50,000 for every year in prison with a $1 million cap. Yes, it’s a little pricey. But the fact of the matter is this compensation plan is supposed to be a worst case scenario, and would only ever come into conversation on occasion — and hopefully never at all.

The fundamental ideal of this nation’s justice system is that all people are innocent until proven guilty. Benjamin Franklin even said, “It is better 100 guilty persons should escape than that one innocent person should suffer.”

To have a Senate, whose criminal justice system has received national attention because of a wrongful conviction case, downvote a bill that would help those who have suffered at the hands of that same system is absolutely ridiculous. Wisconsin and its wrongfully convicted deserve better.