Progress Illinois

With Illinois' budget stretched and the outlook for the national economy looking bleaker by the day, state leaders are seeking areas where we can cut back.  But despite its size (5.2 percent of general fund expenditures in 2007), Illinois lawmakers and voters often turn a blind eye to our bloated corrections system. Now might be a good time to reevaluate our priorities, because smart policies could not only resurrect lives but save taxpayers' hard-earned dollars as well.

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With a handful of states too close to call, few votes are being taken for granted in the lead-up to Election Day. In the rush to get ahead of voter registration deadlines, civil rights advocates are hoping to enfranchise an unlikely group of voters come November: Ex-offenders.

A state-by-state campaign is underway to get thousands of ex-offenders on the voting rolls, Stateline.org reports:

Both in little-contested states such as Texas and in perennial presidential-election battlegrounds such as Ohio, activists are knocking on doors trying to find former prisoners and inform them of their voting rights, visiting state prisons and jails to speak with soon-to-be-released inmates and helping to register those who are interested and allowed to vote.

The theory that ex-offenders could have an impact on the election's outcome is not a stretch. It's happened before. Just look at the 2000 presidential election where by targeting ex-offenders, Florida Republicans purged thousands of eligible voters from the rolls. Bush clinched the presidency by a mere 537 votes in the Sunshine State.

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Elderly prisoners were not excluded from the unjust sentencing laws passed during the 1980s and 1990s. "Get tough" politicians and prison officials made sure that aging inmates served out their terms. In Illinois, many of those sentences covered a range — 25 to 50 years, for example— and were subject to a parole decision by the Prisoner Review Board. According to a new report from the John Howard Association, a Chicago-based prison watchdog group, the review board may be too stringent:

The Illinois Prisoner Review Board is too stingy in granting parole requests from the state’s longest-serving inmates, representatives of a prison watchdog group said Monday. [...]

“As long as the Prisoner Review Board emphasizes the original crime, rather than balancing that crime against proven rehabilitation of the prisoners ... justice will continue to fall short in Illinois,” said Malcolm Young, executive director of the Chicago-based John Howard Association of Illinois.

According to the report, only 3.5 percent of inmates sentenced before 1978 have been paroled, leaving 300 inmates between the ages of 50 and 90 housed in the Illinois Department of Corrections' hands. These prisoners, many of whom have taken steps towards rehabiliation and aren't threatening to the public, present the greatest financial and health risks to a state racked with budget constraints.

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Using the newly-launched Huffington Post Chicago as a forum, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart goes into full-defense mode about allegations raised in U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's blistering report on the unsafe and inhumane conditions at Cook County Jail. Dart resents Fitzgerald's work, it seems, because the federal prosecutor's findings did not feature "the plethora of changes I've introduced in the 20 months I've been in office," even after the sheriff opened up his facility for inspection:

But we also recognize the need to highlight many of the successes overlooked or completely ignored by CRIPA [Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act] inspectors in their recent report. Just as we plan to use their recommendations as a road map for future success, we also plan to build upon the achievements already gained in the last 20 months of my administration in order to ensure the jail is a safe environment for inmates and workers alike.

Dart boasts an accomplished resume and shows a reformer's bent, so hopefully the changes he's implemented really will turn the facility around. But now is not the time to pass the buck. As the report lays out, that's been going on way too long. In fact, many of the cases of abuse and medical malfeasance raised by Fitzgerald took place in the past two year.

Both prisoners and the communities to which they ultimately return are in danger because of conditions at the jail. The public should be fully aware of it and the jail staff should quickly address the deficiencies laid out by Fitzgerald.

Guest blogging this week for Ezra Klein, University of Chicago professor Harold Pollack has a must-read post on the striking intersection between mass incarceration and public health.

Reflecting on a recent visit to Cook County Jail, Pollack flags research by Theodore Hammett that found "[o]ne-fifth of all Americans living with HIV, one-third of all Americans infected with hepatitis C, and forty percent of all Americans living with tuberculosis disease passed through correctional facilities in 1997." The population that passes through local prisons like the unconstitutional Cook County facility is especially vulnerable:

These inmates are especially hard to serve during their typically-brief incarcerations. Many have not seen a doctor in years. The same behaviors that land them in jail expose them to serious physical and mental health risks. When these issues go unaddressed in the correctional system, thousands of people quickly bring these problems back to their families and local communities. These physical and mental health problems frequently resurface when former inmates require emergency care—or when something worse happens.

Yet funding dedicated to protecting prisoners (and the communities to which they eventually re-enter) is often first on the chopping block for budget-strapped state and local governments.

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As if U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation wasn't enough, the Tribune is now reporting that a federal judge has ruled as unconstitutional the practice of strip-searching male detainees ordered released from Cook County Jail. A decade earlier, similar strip-searches of female detainees were outlawed. It's not hard to see why:

Quentin Bullock, 53, a former county jail detainee who is a party to the lawsuit, said he was taken back to the jail and strip-searched after he was found not guilty of armed robbery in 2003. He said officers ordered between 50 and 70 detainees to line up in a jail hallway and told them to take off their clothes and squat down.

"It's very degrading," Bullock said.

The Cook County Sheriff's office defended the practice on the grounds that men are more violent than females and more likely to smuggle weapons and contraband back into the jail from court. Yet the sheriff's own statistics indicated that female detainees are proportionally responsible for more acts of violence than male detainees.

WBEZ has more.

Instead of owning up to the reported facts, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart went into full denial mode about the immoral conditions at Cook County Jail. From the Tribune:

"For them to come out with criticism and then flavor it with some horribly incendiary language and try to paint this picture that we don't care or we don't know is completely inaccurate and horribly unprofessional."

As Steve Rhodes remarks, "horribly unprofessional" is not a very good description of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, whose investigation should be taken extremely seriously.

And what did that 98-page report reveal about an institution that houses men and women waiting for trial (which means many haven't yet been convicted of a crime)? The Sun-Times editorial board runs through a few of the more disturbing incidents:

One man, arrested for driving on a suspended driver's license, got into an argument with an officer at the jail and found his head being used as a "bongo drum."

Another prisoner's jaw was broken after he was accused of planting contraband, according to the report.

Worse still, prisoners reported that guards threatened them with worse treatment if they reported the violence.

Health care at the jail hospital, run by the Cook County Health Bureau, also leaves much to be desired.

One prisoner's leg had to be amputated after staffers took too long to treat an infection.

Another inmate died from sepsis because a gunshot wound became infected after he came into the jail.

A female prisoner with HIV died from a preventable infection.

It will be interesting to see the reaction from Cook County Board President Todd Stroger, who will need to spend the money to make the necessary changes. If he has a sensible bone in his body, he'll make it a priority to clean up these egregious abuses.

After a 17-month investigation initiated by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, the Department of Justice has released a report finding that Cook County Jail “systematically violates inmates" federal constitutional rights. The Sun-Times has more:

- The jail failed to adequately protect inmates from harm and serious risk of harm — including excessive use of force by staff and violence by other inmates.

- Failure to provide adequate medical and mental health care — including suicide prevention.

- Failure to provide safety and sanitation — “all resulting in unconstitutional living conditions,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s office

Thankfully, U.S. prosecutors can now force a correction of deficiencies at the county jail, which are a long time coming. As you may remember, this is the same institution where a 2004 Cook County special grand jury found widespread abuses, including a massive beating of inmates by guards in 1999.

Today, Reps. Julie Hamos (D-Evanston), Karen Yarbrough (D-Broadview), and Eddie Washington (D-Waukegan) held a press conference in Chicago announcing House Bill 6651, which "establish[es] clear criteria for transferring a prisoner to Tamms supermax prison."

In her recent Progress Illinois column, Rep. Yarbrough noted that Tamms was originally intended to hold the "worst of the worst" in solitary confinement for one to two years:

[B]ut recent news reports indicate that nearly one-third of the inmates have been there since the first year it opened. If this was a normal prison, these extended stays might not be such an issue. But at a recent hearing I attended, former inmates described the conditions as mental torture. These men spend 23 to 24 hours of every day in solitary confinement, and when they have to endure this for months and years on end, it is hard to see any rehabilitative value in the way things are done at Tamms. Even more troubling is that those who testified at the hearing do not understand why they were sent there.

HB 6651 establishes three criteria which would qualify a prisoner for transfer to Tamms:

(1) while incarcerated, the prisoner committed or attempted to commit acts of violence which resulted in serious injury or death; (2) the prisoner has engaged in the second of 2 acts that occurred within one year of each other, which caused serious disruption of prison operations; or (3) he has escaped from within a security perimeter or custody, or both, or direct supervision.

The bill also specifies that those current Tamms inmates who have been held there for over a year "may continue to be held at a super-maximum institution only on the basis of specified criteria and must be provided a hearing within 6 months of the effective date of the amendatory Act."

To learn more about the situation at Tamms, check out the Chicago Reader's recent feature story.

While she doesn't dig into the politicking, Pam Adams' column yesterday in the Peoria Journal-Star nicely situates Gov. Blagojevich's decision to close Pontiac Correctional Center in the broader debate of justice reform and fiscal responsibility:

When prison towns rely on prisoners for jobs, there is little incentive to reduce prison populations. When there is no incentive to reduce prison populations, there is little reason to effectively address sky-high recidivism rates, little motivation to reform sentencing policies that keep prisons crowded even when crime rates drop.

[Anders] Lindell, the spokesman for the state workers' union, is correct also. There is a reason not to reduce the latest outrage over prison closings merely to job-saving rallies or political shenanigans.

Housing, feeding and providing minimal health care for prison inmates drains the state budget at a time when there's little to drain. Speaking of geriatric prisons, it can cost as much as $70,000 a year to keep an aging, infirm inmate incarcerated.

Crime pays, all right. That's why it's so tough to close a prison. But the state needs to take a deep, hard look at the best way to get its money's worth.

This is especially true when research shows that prisons add few economic benefits to the communities in which they are located. As Rep. Karen Yarbrough argued in her Progress Illinois column earlier this week, it's long past time for the state to reassess the costs and benefits of our bloated prison system and redirect those funds to policies that keep Illinois residents safer and more productive.