Progress Illinois

Budget woes and election year politics has led to a vastly overcrowded prison system in Illinois. The Tribune reported today that the state's "prison system is bursting at the seams" because "of a backlash against a policy change by Gov. Pat Quinn that allowed the early release of about 1,700 inmates over four months." (Progress Illinois wrote about this troubling increase in the prison population in late October.) The increased population has put added stress on the state's already ailing facilities. From the paper:

Confronted with putting more offenders in the same amount of space, administrators are doubling up every available cell. As many as four inmates are bunked in slightly larger cells intended for two handicapped prisoners. At the intake facility at Stateville near Joliet, incoming inmates regularly sleep on cots in a gymnasium or prison hospital.

Due to political pressure, Quinn suspended Meritorious Good Time (MGT), the state's early release program, as well as his administration's accelerated MGT Push program, which was implemented to reduce the number of short-term prisoners within the system. According to a report by law professor Malcolm Young, nearly all of the criticism Quinn received about the latter program in both the primary and general elections lacked merit.

We should note that the Tribune got into that act as well, calling the program "a big mistake," an "ill-conceived policy" and a "fiasco" without considering the effects its suspension would have on prison capacity statewide. Perhaps the paper's own reporting will lead the Tribune editors to reconsider its positons.

The U.S. Senate did not authorize a new funding stream for jobs programs like Put Illinois To Work (PITW) as part of a vote on welfare programs today. The decision raises the specter that thousands of PITW workers will be laid off around the state unless Democrats in Washington's Upper Chamber find a way to approve additional dollars in the face of Senate Republicans' intransigent opposition.

Some 27,000 people in Illinois -- most of them young, female, and poor -- found $10-per-hour jobs in the private and public sector through PITW; the federal government paid for most of their wages using dollars appropriated under the 2009 stimulus bill, with the states picking up the rest. PITW was one of the most aggressive jobs programs in the country, and when the initial round of federal funding ran out on September 30, Gov. Pat Quinn committed $75 million in state dollars to keep it going through the end of November.

Quinn -- who took a lot of flack during his gubernatorial campaign for supporting PITW with state dollars -- was hoping that Congress would provide more funding for a successful program that created jobs and generated impressive returns of sales, income, and other kinds of taxes. That hasn't happened in Washington. This is bad news for Illinois.