About 20 inmates at Redgranite Correctional Institution in Wisconsin are raising and tagging monarch butterflies ahead of their fall migration to Mexico, through a rehabilitation program now in its second year, according to a report published Sept. 22, 2026.
Inmates Raise Monarchs Through Prison Conservation Program
The program, called The Refuge for Growth, Change and Inspiration, is organized by Carrie
Jahnke at Redgranite Correctional Institution. Participants receive caterpillars from Monarch Watch’s breeding center, raise them through metamorphosis and tag the adult butterflies before their release, positioning the insects for the multigenerational journey south each fall.
The Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin helped the facility build a dedicated habitat structure, known as a lepidopterium, where the caterpillars are raised in a controlled environment. Nathan Lecker, an inmate participant, said the work gives him a sense of purpose beyond the prison walls. “I enjoy being part of this program and being able to give back to the community. We can make a big impact from the inside,” Lecker said, according to Good News Network.
The program’s name, The Refuge for Growth, Change and Inspiration, points to a dual purpose behind the effort: it is framed as a conservation project first, but it also gives participants a structured, ongoing responsibility that runs on the insects’ own biological timeline rather than the prison’s daily schedule. Raising a caterpillar through metamorphosis takes several weeks, and tagging and release only happen once the butterfly has fully emerged, meaning the participants’ involvement in each individual insect’s life cycle spans a defined and repeated stretch of time throughout the growing season.
Shelly Torkelson, communications director for the Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin, said the participation fits into a broader conservation need. “Monarch butterfly populations have been declining for years, and it’s wonderful that RGCI is getting involved with efforts to conserve them,” Torkelson said, per the same Good News Network report.
Caterpillar Count Climbs 67% in Program’s Second Year
The numbers show a program that scaled up quickly. In its first year, 2025, participants raised 60 caterpillars. In 2026, that figure rose to 100 caterpillars, an increase of 40 caterpillars, or about 67% year over year.
The growth lines up with the facility’s investment in infrastructure between the two seasons. The lepidopterium, built with help from the Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin, gave the program a fixed, controlled habitat that the first year’s effort did not have. A dedicated structure built after year one offers a plausible explanation for why the caterpillar count grew by roughly two-thirds rather than staying flat or rising only modestly: a purpose-built space for raising caterpillars removes many of the constraints that limit an ad hoc setup, from temperature control to protection from predators and disease.
How Tagging Tracks a 2,000-Mile Migration
The butterflies raised at Redgranite Correctional Institution are not simply released. Each one is tagged, a step that turns the program’s work into a data point for continental migration science rather than a one-time symbolic gesture.
Monarch butterflies that hatch in the northern United States each fall travel roughly 2,000 miles to overwintering sites in central Mexico, a journey no single butterfly completes more than once in its lifetime. Monarch Watch’s tagging program relies on small, lightweight tags applied to each butterfly’s wing, which allow researchers and citizen scientists to identify individual monarchs if they are recovered later along the migration route or at the overwintering grounds.
The 100 monarchs tagged at Redgranite Correctional Institution in 2026 become part of that same continent-wide tracking effort, adding real, individually traceable data points to a citizen-science network that spans thousands of participants across the United States and Canada.
That distinction matters because monarch populations have declined significantly over the past two decades, a trend Torkelson referenced directly in describing why the prison’s involvement stood out. Tagging data collected through programs like the one at Redgranite Correctional Institution feeds into population and migration-pattern research that scientists use to monitor the species’ status over time.
Monarch Watch’s national tagging network depends on exactly this kind of distributed, volunteer-driven effort, since no single research team could track a migration spanning the entire eastern half of North America on its own. Every additional site raising and tagging butterflies, whether a school, a nature center or a correctional institution, adds another cluster of data points to a map that researchers use to study how the migration’s timing, route and survival rate shift from year to year.
A facility that nearly doubled its output between its first and second year represents a meaningfully larger contribution to that map than a static or shrinking program would.
What Happens Next
The tagged monarchs released from Redgranite Correctional Institution will be tracked as part of the broader continental monarch migration data-collection effort as they make their way toward Mexico this fall. Researchers and citizen scientists elsewhere along the migration route may recover and report tags, adding to the record of each butterfly’s movement. The Refuge for Growth, Change and Inspiration is expected to continue at the facility, and the jump from 60 caterpillars in 2025 to 100 in 2026 suggests further growth is plausible if the program continues operating out of its newly built lepidopterium next year.
