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Illinois Issues
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End and Means: Overcrowded and Understaffed, Illinois Prisons Are in Crisis

Charles N. Wheeler III
WUIS/Illinois Issues

The litany was depressingly familiar: overcrowded, understaffed, with limited access to medical and psychiatric treatment, rehabilitative services, education and jobs for inmates.

This time, the dismal review was of the Menard Correctional Center, but its authors, a prison monitoring team from the John Howard Association, could have been writing about any of Illinois’ prisons. In fact, in earlier reports, the venerable prison reform group routinely has documented similar conditions throughout the state’s correctional system, which for years has been trying to cram close to 50,000 inmates in facilities designed for slightly less than 34,000.

But the tone of the Menard report, released a few weeks ago, seemed a bit more urgent, as monitors cited “an alarming number” of reported staff and inmate assaults and a “significantly large number of mentally ill inmates” whose needs “cannot begin to be met” by the relatively few mental health professionals on staff.

Indeed, Menard is a special case. Opened in 1878, Menard is the second oldest prison in the state — seven years younger than Pontiac — and with some 3,600 inmates, the second largest behind Stateville, which houses almost 4,000, according to the Illinois Department of Corrections’ most recent quarterly report.

Menard also has the worst inmate-to-staff ratio — 6-to-1 — of any of the state’s four maximum security facilities. That resulted in the prison being on lockdown roughly half the time during the last year and a half, with inmates confined to their cells 24 hours a day.

Even when not on lockdown, the average Menard inmate spends 21 to 22 hours a day locked in his cell idle because the facility lacks the space, staff and resources to provide educational, vocational or job assignments to the vast majority of inmates.

The story is much the same everywhere the monitors go, as they visit about half of the state’s 27 adult prisons each year. And the reformers are quite clear that the fault for the current overcrowding, understaffing and lack of resources lies with Gov. Pat Quinn and state legislators.

“The response of Illinois elected officials to the crisis in prison overcrowding has been to strain correctional facilities further — by slashing DOC’s budget, eliminating education, treatment and rehabilitative services for inmates, suspending meritorious good time credit and reducing prison staffing levels — all the while doing nothing to reduce the population,” they charged in the Menard report.

One’s first inclination, of course, is to shed no tears for the guys behind bars along the banks of the Mississippi River or elsewhere. More than half of Menard’s inmates are convicted murderers, and a quarter are doing time for serious crimes such as rape and armed robbery. If they live long enough, though, one day most will have done their time and be released. Indeed, only about 3 percent of inmates systemwide are lifers; for the other 97 percent, the average length of stay is less than two years before they’re back in the community. That’s a point the John Howard monitors underscored in criticizing what they consider the short-sightedness of the governor and state lawmakers.

“Time will tell that these actions served only to compromise the safety and stability of Illinois prisons, and the safety and welfare of the public, by releasing inmates back into the community with serious untreated physical and mental illnesses, and without job skills, education or rehabilitation,” they warned.

And, they might have added, continue to contribute to prison overcrowding when roughly half of those ex-convicts get arrested and returned to prison within three years of their release — the state’s current recidivism rate.

Prison crowding is not a new issue, of course. Rather, its roots go back decades, reflecting a “get-tough-on-crime” attitude among the general public that politicians were only too happy to indulge with new crimes and longer sentences for existing ones, as well as a War on Drugs that has done little to curb Americans’ appetite for recreational pharmaceuticals but has swelled prison populations.

At the close of the 1970s, for example, Illinois’ nine prisons held some 11,000 inmates, with about 3 percent of them serving time for drug offenses. Since then, the numbers have grown steadily, so that today, about 20 percent of the almost 50,000 inmates in the state’s 27 adult prisons are behind bars for drug crimes. The corrections department budget, meanwhile, has ballooned from about $200 million to some $1.2 billion this fiscal year.

What to do about prison crowding also has been clear for decades: Stop sending so many people to prison by expanding alternative programs such as electronic monitoring and community-based sanctions, and do a better job of preparing those who do go for life on the outside by providing more educational opportunities, vocational training, drug abuse treatment and life skills training. Currently, only about 8,600 inmates are in educational or vocational programs, and waiting lists are long at most institutions. Similar recommendations emerged from a 1993 task force, only to be largely ignored by lawmakers fearful of voter backlash fueled by “soft-on-crime” attack ads. Now, the stakes could be even higher. Should Quinn and Illinois legislators lack the political will to tackle the prison crowding problem, “it is all but inevitable that this issue will end up being litigated in the courts,” the monitors warned in the report.

In that event, a more radical fate might be waiting in the wings: A federal judge could order the state to open its prison doors, as California is now doing after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in May that overcrowding there violated inmates’ constitutional rights, requiring a court-mandated cap on inmate population. 

That prospect is so unappealing, one would hope, that the governor and lawmakers finally will enact sensible reforms like those proposed by the 1993 task force, the John Howard Association and others over the years. Better late than never, as they say.

The reformers are quite clear that the fault for the current overcrowding, understaffing and lack of resources lies with Gov. Pat Quinn and state legislators.

 
 
Charles N. Wheeler III is director of the Public Affairs Reporting program at the University of Illinois Springfield.

Illinois Issues, November 2011

 

The former director of the Public Affairs Reporting (PAR) graduate program is Professor Charles N. Wheeler III, a veteran newsman who came to the University of Illinois at Springfield following a 24-year career at the Chicago Sun-Times.
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