ALLOUEZ (NBC 26) -- The walls of the Green Bay Correctional Institution have long-held some of Wisconsin's most dangerous criminals.
Now, though, it's more than a century old and reaching the end of it's life.
"It's a really old prison," Ex-Incarcerated People Organizing's Sarah Ferber said. "We know that it needs to be torn down."
It that happens, the state will have options. Green Bay Correctional could be rebuilt. Advocates for criminal justice reform hope it's not.
"There's better alternatives than incarcerated people," Ferber said.
Ferber joined 'A Converstion About GBCI' on Thursday and shared the alternative she went through - a treatment court in her home city of Eau Claire.
"It changed my life," Ferber said. "I've never had to step foot in a prison."
Ferber and others hope not rebuilding GBCI could give others that chance.
"It's about the whole state correctional system," criminal justice reform advocate Marianne Boyle Rohloff said. "Green Bay Correctional presents this opportunity to really explore the future of our corrections system and the opportunity reform."
GBCI currently houses more than 1,000 inmates, most of them violent offenders. They won't be walking free if Green Bay Correctional closes. Advocates said treatment alternatives would lower the population in medium and minimum security prisons.
"Our prison system and having it overpopulated does not make us safer, and there's many people incarcerated that really would be a benefit to our workforce and communities," Boyle Rohloff said.
The leaders of this push hope the hundreds of people who heard their message in Green Bay will share it in their communities around the area.
