Analysis: More than half of new jail bookings include disorderly conduct; many tied to housing insecurity and repeat bookings

Tamarine Cornelius, the Community Justice Council research analyst, told the council that disorderly conduct was the most common offense recorded on new jail bookings in Dane County from 2020 through 2024.

Cornelius said the council’s analysis covered about 23,000 new arrest bookings and found that 54% included a disorderly conduct charge, far more than the next-most-common charge, battery. “Disorderly conduct is the most common offense on bookings by a lot,” Cornelius said.

The nut graf: The analysis — produced with sheriff’s office data under a data-sharing agreement and reviewed by local partners — breaks out a subset of largely discretionary arrests (disorderly conduct with no other offense and no statutory enhancer). That subset points to concentrated geographic, demographic and system-use patterns that council members said warrant follow-up by the CJC and partner agencies.

Cornelius described the dataset and definitions used in the analysis. It excluded bookings that were solely for serving sentences or for warrants and focused on bookings tied to new arrests. Over five years, about 23,000 such bookings were analyzed. In the subset labeled “simple disorderly conduct” — bookings with only a disorderly conduct charge and no enhancers — there were about 1,300 bookings across five years.

Key quantitative findings the presentation flagged include: 54% of new-arrest bookings had a disorderly conduct charge; about 58% of disorderly conduct charges carried a domestic-abuse enhancer; roughly 5% were county-ordinance violations; there were about 4,400 bookings…