MADISON - The leaders of a Department of Corrections internal affairs unit that was recently shut down by Gov. Scott Walker's administration said changes were ordered because they had done too good a job at exposing problems at the state's juvenile prison.

A Department of Corrections spokesman discounted that contention, saying the decision to close the unit was unrelated to the wide-ranging internal investigation into Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls.

The department's Office of Special Operations in 2014 launched a review of those two juvenile prisons, which share a campus 30 miles north of Wausau. It uncovered extensive problems that grew into a criminal investigation that has been ongoing for nearly three years.

Walker's administration shut down the Office of Special Operations in June, contending doing so would allow it to concentrate its resources on investigating and preventing sexual assault behind bars.

The leaders of that office saw it differently, according to a Department of Corrections report that was recently released to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel under the state’s open records law.

Steve Wierenga, the head of the office, and Cheryl Frey, the special investigations chief, said they believe “they have done ‘too good a job’ … and are now being pulled from employee investigations because they ‘found out too much’ at (Lincoln Hills) and ‘made the DOC look bad.’ ”

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Democrats said they saw those comments as a sign Walker was more interested in keeping the public in the dark about Lincoln Hills than cleaning up problems there.

"I think there's a political motivation to why these decisions were made with this governor's race coming up," said state Rep. David Bowen (D-Milwaukee).

“Rather than addressing the abuse of children and staff at Lincoln Hills, there appears to be a coordinated effort among Republican leaders and administration officials to cover up Gov. Walker’s mishandling of this appalling situation," state Sen. LaTonya Johnson (D-Milwaukee) said in a statement.

Wierenga and Frey made their comments to Cindy O’Donnell, a Department of Corrections policy adviser who conducted a review of the Office of Special Operations this spring. Her review helped department officials reach their decision to shift the internal affairs unit's work to another part of the department that focuses on complying with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act, or PREA.

Corrections spokesman Tristan Cook disputed Wierenga and Frey's claims.

"There is no credence to any assertion that OSO was merged into the PREA unit for any reason other than an effort by the department to best utilize the investigative capabilities of the staff and increase the effectiveness of DOC’s efforts to comply with PREA," Cook said in a statement.

The new structure is better because there is now one point of contact regarding all aspects of complying with the Prison Rape Elimination Act, Cook said. The change also made sense because the Office of Special Operations had already been working closely with the department's PREA staff, he said.

The Office of Special Operations and other internal investigators conducted internal probes that exposed instances of juvenile inmates being harmed and contributed to the departures of nearly two dozen employees.

CONTINUING COVERAGE:Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake schools scandal

An FBI investigation of the juvenile prison complex is continuing and several lawsuits have been filed over conditions there.

O’Donnell’s review concluded there was a poor relationship between the Office of Special Operations and the rest of the Department of Corrections. Many at the department believed the office had an “elitist culture,” with one official saying investigators behaved like “cowboys.”

The unit’s internal investigations routinely took more than 30 days, while the subjects of those investigations were on paid leave at taxpayer expense, O’Donnell wrote. The office did a poor job of tracking its investigations and could not give O’Donnell an exact number of investigations it had conducted.

O’Donnell — who misspelled Frey’s last name in the report — criticized the Office of Special Operations for including typos in its reports.

Her review also found that Tim Le Monds, the chief of the office’s preparedness and emergency response section, had to change his time sheets after he was investigated for going to the gym or conducting personal business during work time. He was given what the state calls "job counseling" but was not disciplined.

Le Monds did not respond to an email requesting comment.

Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake hold about 150 inmates. As of Friday, there were 138 boys and 23 girls there.