What's Next for Stateville and Logan?
The Stateville Correctional Facility near Joliet in September. (Photo: Chicago Tribune)
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The Illinois Department of Corrections appears to have met a judge’s order to remove all prisoners from the Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet, but it leaves new questions about the Pritzker administration’s plan to rebuild the century-old prison or what it plans to do with the Logan Correctional Center in Lincoln.
Earlier this summer, a federal judge ordered inmates be removed from the facility after a lawsuit claimed poor conditions at the prison violated the civil rights of inmates.
IDOC spokesperson Naomi Puzzello told The Illinoize late Monday that all transfers from general housing were complete Monday. She said 24 inmates who will remain in the prison health care unit until they can be transferred to a prison that can “properly meet their health care needs.”
Even without most of the inmate population, staff is still reporting to the facility, though Puzzello says they aren’t staffing an empty prison.
“Stateville’s security staff are assigned to the Northern Reception and Classification Center and Minimum Security Units, except for the staff who continue to provide security in the Health Care Unit, visiting room, visiting center, and main gate,” Puzzello said. “The majority of non-security staff have duties that are inclusive to all departments/units within Stateville. All staff will continue assigned duties until after impact bargaining has concluded.”
She says bargaining with labor is still ongoing.
It isn’t clear what the ramped up closure of Stateville will have on the Pritzker administration’s plan to close the Logan Correctional Center in Lincoln. The administration had proposed closing Logan and moving the prison population there to a new facility built on or near the current Stateville site.
IDOC wouldn’t say what the current plan is for Logan.
“The Department is discussing the next steps for the Stateville rebuild with the Capital Development Board (CDB), who will be responsible for managing, funding, and procuring the project,” Puzzello said Monday.
But some Republicans are criticizing the Pritzker administration for not making plans for the two prisons more clear to the public, especially to the staff and community of Logan, located in Lincoln.
"It’s been clear from the beginning that the administration is more interested in ticking boxes than in fostering true transparency,” Sen. Sally Turner (R-Beason) said. Turner lives in Logan County and represents the prison. “The lack of openness around the future of Logan Correctional Center is deeply concerning. Given what is at stake for those who will be impacted, the bare minimum effort by the Department to just meet legal requirements has been extremely disappointing. The staff and residents of Logan deserve better than to be left in the dark about their future. It’s unfathomable that the state would allow this hardship to persist without clear communication or planning."
Governor JB Pritzker appeared to stand by his plan to close the prisons at an event last week.
“This is a system of correctional institutions that have been, I mean, they’re 70 to 100 plus years old, and not really appropriate for modern-day rehabilitation, and that’s what we really want in a corrections system,” Pritzker said.
No timetable has been confirmed, but closing both prisons and combining them on the Stateville site has a projected cost of $1 billion and would take up to five years to build.