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The consultants from CGL Companies found deferred maintenance,
including bad roofs, black mold, broken toilets, crumbling walls
and poor ventilation in Illinois’ state correctional facilities.
The report estimates that more than $2.5 billion in repairs is
needed.
“Twenty percent of the prisons in Illinois opened their doors
before 1926,” Jenny Vollen-Katz, executive director of the
prison watchdog group the John Howard Association of Illinois,
said. The correctional facility in Pontiac, for example, has
been in operation since the 1870s, she said.
“There are facilities that are overrun with vermin,” Vollen-Katz
said. “It is unconscionable to keep people living and working
inside some of these facilities,” she said.
Part of the mission of the John Howard Association is to go into
the prisons and monitor the conditions, she said. “We do our
best to alert the public about the realities inside our
prisons,” she said.
Changing demographics and the astronomical cost of repairs makes
this an opportune time to reevaluate the facilities, Vollen-Katz
said. “The report issued by CGL is a really important tool that
we need to rely on,” she said.
Two factors are driving the need for change at state prisons,
Vollen-Katz said. Number one: There has been a dramatic drop in
Illinois’ prison population. Since 2012, Illinois has had a
close to 40% drop in the number of inmates in Illinois prisons,
WBEZ reported.
“Even if we shut down prisons, we will still have excess
capacity,” Vollen-Katz said.
The second factor that should drive a reevaluation of state
prison facilities is dangerous understaffing, Vollen-Katz said.
“Illinois prisons are woefully short-staffed,” she said. “That
makes working and living in Illinois prisons more difficult for
everybody.”
Guards complain of being forced to work mandatory overtime.
Sixteen-hour shifts are common. The prison workers union reports
that workers are experiencing mental and physical trauma as a
result of long hours and the stress from understaffing. At one
facility, WBEZ found that 40% of its guard positions were
unfilled.
Vollen-Katz hopes the CGL report will be a wake-up call for
legislators, policymakers and agency administrators. The report
is a very thorough assessment of the physical infrastructure of
the Illinois prison system. The issues are documented. "We need
to heed the recommendations," she said. “We can do things more
humanely. We can do things more cost-effectively. We can get
better outcomes and treat people better while getting better
results,” she said.
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