The Dane County Office of Equal Opportunity presented the final report from a task force investigating racial disparities in the Wisconsin criminal justice system Wednesday.

The Office of Equal Opportunity appointed the task force one year ago in response to a report from Gov. Jim Doyle’s office highlighting problems throughout the system. The task force was asked to review Doyle’s recommendations and judge how they could best be implemented in Dane County.

The task force’s findings showed in Dane County, black people are 30 times more likely to be arrested for certain drug offenses than white people and 20 times more likely to be arrested for robbery. More than one-half of young black males in Dane County are either in prison, on probation or parole, or on extended supervision.

“It’s a tragedy,” the task force’s co-chair, Celia Jackson, said. “How in the world did we get here?”

Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk introduced the task force and the plan. She applauded them for their work and implored people to support the report and its recommendations.

“[The report] calls upon all of us to take action in our community,” Falk said. “I am taking [the task force’s] work seriously.”

Jackson echoed Falk’s call to action.

“We need everybody to come to the table on this issue,” Jackson said. “We really have to find a way to change our hearts.”

The 82-page report contains information on the county’s criminal justice system’s racial disparities and theorizes how the disparities came to be. The report also offers recommendations for each stage of the justice system and gives ideas for funding these recommendations.

The members of the task force unanimously approved the report.

The task force made their recommendations based on both statistics and personal testimony. More than 200 individuals from the community came forward at public forums to share their stories with the task force.

According to the report, some of the task force’s top-10 priority recommendations include requiring funding for a driver’s license recovery program, hiring a criminal justice grant writer and providing additional funding to diversion programs.

Also in the report are the task force’s top-10 priority recommendations that may not require funding, including establishing community education programs to teach residents about their rights, increasing representation of people of color working in the criminal justice system and conducting testing for employment discrimination based on race. Jackson classified these 10 recommendations as things that the county should start implementing right away.

Every speaker at the meeting thanked the task force members.

“The issues are very complex,” Jackson said. “They are very deeply rooted, and they are challenging just to even talk about.”

The next step for the task force will be working with different agencies of the county government and helping them to implement the suggestions.