SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — About 400 prisoners were moved when Illinois’s run-down Stateville jail closed over the summer. Of those, 278 were found guilty of murder and 100 are serving time for other violent crimes.
Still, almost four out of five of the criminals who used to be locked up in the Chicago suburbs were not sent to the toughest maximum-security jails, which are where the most dangerous criminals, troublemakers, and escape risks are kept. An analysis of Illinois Department of Corrections statistics by the Associated Press shows that they instead went to mid-level, medium-security facilities.
Employees of the prison think that the inmates who were moved were housed based on which facilities had enough beds and trained staff in a system that desperately needs more staff.
The prison agency says all moves were made correctly.
Corrections spokeswoman Naomi Puzzello said that all of the people transferred from Stateville are housed properly and that none of them were lowered in security to fit the prison they were going to. She agreed that a lot of maximum-security beds are empty, but she denied that the lack of staff in corrections had anything to do with the moves.
The AP got meeting minutes from a different facility that happened almost a year before Stateville closed. In those minutes, managers told staff not to move troublemakers to a higher risk level because “maximum security beds are in short supply.”
The AP also found that in more than half of the relocations, ex-Stateville prisoners were moved without following a corrections rule that says people with sentences of 30 years or more should be housed in a maximum security jail.
Stateville was built in 1925 and was supposed to close in the spring when Gov. JB Pritzker set aside $900 million to replace it with a new center for women in central Illinois that was better than the old one. A federal judge sped up the process by saying that Stateville was unsafe to live in and couldn’t be reached. It was then ordered to be closed by September 30.
Lack of security staff is a national issue
A problem across the country is a lack of people in prisons. Wisconsin has a lot of open positions and a lot of deaths in prison. Last fall, the Justice Department released a harsh report on violence, drugs, and sexual abuse in Georgia jails. One of the problems they found was “grossly inadequate” staffing.
A charity group called Safer Prisons, Safer Communities collected data that shows the number of state-employed prison guards dropped from 237,000 in 2012 to 182,000 in 2023.
Wanda Bertram of the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonpartisan, nonprofit study and advocacy group that supports reducing the number of people in prison, said, “To put it simply, it’s a tough job.”
Bertram told them, “You’re going to see violence, and you might see serious mental illness.” “There will be a lot of drug use around you, and this has a real effect on people who work in prisons.”
400 open jobs and 1,750 open beds at most
October department staffing numbers show that the Illinois Department of Corrections is 396 frontline security officers short of what was planned. There are more than 2,800 fewer cops than are allowed by law, or fewer than what is needed to run the business without a lot of extra work.
AP used Illinois’s public records law to get a list of all 406 inmates who were staying at Stateville as of August 2024. They then matched each inmate with the jail to which they had been sent and noted the level of security there. Corrections turned down a request for the pre-transfer security ratings of each inmate.
At the moment, Puzzello said, there are 1,750 empty beds in maximum security jails across the state. She said that short staffing wasn’t to blame because most of the prisoners were in single-occupancy cells and most of the cells were built for two prisoners. The office is still working hard to find security cadets.
Ill-placed prisoners pose a risk.
Employees aren’t satisfied. They think that some inmates who should be in maximum security have been sent to less secure areas, which puts both inmates and staff at risk.
The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Council 31 says that a prison guard who was moved from Stateville to Sheridan Correctional Center in north-central Illinois in November 2023 attacked a prison teacher so badly that the teacher had to have surgery to reconstruct her face. This crime was not part of the most recent transfers.
Since the middle of 2024, at least two prisoners have been killed, but corrections refused the AP’s public records request for information on them. The news agency is going to appeal that ruling.
“There aren’t enough maximum security beds.”
It looks like there was a problem with high-security bed space months before Stateville closed. The AP got copies of minutes from a management meeting at Dixon Correctional Center in northern Illinois in December 2023. At that meeting, managers told staff to “use good judgment” before raising a troublemaker’s risk level to maximum, which would require a transfer.
The minutes say that there are not enough maximum security beds in the whole state. “My guess is that if we try to move all the people with maximum security, they will end up at another medium-security facility.”
Puzzello said again that none of the moves to Stateville had security worsened. She said that people are transferred based on more than just their criminal history. It also depends on what programs, medical and mental health care are needed, and how many staff members are available at the new center.
“This makes sure that each person is classified correctly and based on their unique risk factors, behaviors, and needs, which supports a safe and secure prison environment,” Puzzello said.
A general rule in corrections, though, is that anyone serving a sentence of 30 years or more should be kept in a maximum-security cell. The rule says that people with 10 to 30 years go to middle.
AP review: Of the people who used to be locked up in Stateville, 261 (64%), have been locked up for 30 years or more and are now in medium-security jails.
Anders Lindall, a spokesman for AFSCME, said that jail counselors who looked at each inmate to find the best place for them to be transferred thought that management had already decided where each would go. Puzzello said that didn’t happen.
Lindall said that the union had heard of “ongoing instances of departmental management overruling recommendations made at the facility level by employees whose job it is to evaluate, classify, and place the offenders who they know best.”
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