Crisis can cloud judgment. Or it can foster creative thinking.
And Illinois may have reached just this critical juncture in its correctional policies overall, and in its procedures for imposing the death sentence in particular.
We’ve been coming up on this crossroads for some time. Over the past two years, at a minimum, this magazine has closely followed mounting concerns about this state’s over-capacity prisons, its confusing, and perhaps too-punitive, criminal statutes and the close-call imperfections of its capital punishment system. But now, two crises could serve to clarify the purpose of, or spur change in, these policies. Or not. At the least, there are sufficient pressures to force this choice: Move forward or run in place.
The more immediate problem is that there are too few dollars to sustain in the near future what had once appeared to be the state’s most reliable growth industry. For nearly three decades, in the wake of a political mood to get tough on crime, Illinois has promul-gated, feverishly, a prison building program of boom-time proportions. In the last decade alone, the state built or planned 21 prisons, work camps and juvenile detention centers at an estimated cost of $818.7 million. When imposing stiffer penalties no longer carried as much political urgency, the state rested its case on a far-more-naked appeal to local economic development.
Now, Tim Landis writes, beginning on page 14, that Illinois is among those states looking for ways to downsize the prison industry in an effort to solve a budget crisis. Options under discussion in this state include shuttering some prisons and issuing more contracts to private service providers.
Landis reports that Illinois is not yet exploring some of the more fundamental changes under way in other states. For example, California, Florida, Michigan and Ohio are among states that already have approved plans to divert nonviolent drug offenders to alternative treatment programs. “Backers of the California reforms,” he writes, “estimate that 36,000 prisoners, and probation and parole violators, will be diverted from prisons at a savings of up to $150 million a year.”
A gubernatorial commission is currently reviewing Illinois’ sentencing statutes with an eye to making them more coherent and consistent. But after that panel meets its straight-forward mandate, policymakers might want to consider more fundamental changes in sentencing strategies.
They’re unlikely to consider the most far-reaching change: abolishing the state’s death penalty. Still, a separate Commission on Capital Punishment, which released its report in April, has given them other reform possibilities to chew on.
Gov. George Ryan, a proponent of capital punishment throughout his political career, created that commission after 13 of Illinois’ inmates walked off Death Row because they were wrongly convicted. To put this social and political crisis in perspective: Only a dozen inmates have been executed since Illinois reinstated the death penalty in 1977. Ryan asked the commission, whose 14 members included judges, prosecutors and public defenders, to review every step in the process and recommend ways it could be made more error-free. They suggested 85. We outline some of them in this issue.
But the commission went further. Daniel Vock writes, beginning on page 17, that a scholarly analysis conducted alongside the panel’s review uncovered other disturbing shortcomings in the death penalty system for which there may be no ready solutions: The decision to impose this state’s ultimate sanction is greatly affected by where a murder occurs and the race of the victim.
Illinois is not alone, certainly. But that doesn’t absolve this state, or give Illinois policymakers a free pass on the search for solutions. This crisis, too, should motivate all of us to do some creative thinking.
Illinois Issues, June 2002
