No longer ‘the abandoned prison city’

The opening of a new school for inmates at Stateville Correctional Center last week was one sign of a renewal of activity at local prisons.

This week, a contractor will be in town for an outreach meeting on the $150 million inpatient facility to be built at the new Joliet Treatment Center, a facility providing mental health treatment for inmates throughout the state prison system.

And the reopening of the old Joliet Correctional Center as a tourist and visitor destination, now called the Old Joliet Prison, has been one of the biggest developments of the year.

For better or worse, the Joliet area has become a hub of prison activity again.

It’s for the better from the perspective of Greg Peerbolte, director of the Joliet Area Historical Museum.

“It’s jobs for people. It’s money in the city,” Peerbolte said. “I think it’s a good thing.”

The museum and city of Joliet have led the reopening of the Old Joliet Prison, despite some opposition that doing so would bring back the city’s reputation as a prison town.

“As I said to people before, being the abandoned prison city is worse,” Peerbolte said.

Not so long ago, Joliet was “the abandoned prison city” after the Joliet Correctional Center closed in 2002 followed by the Illinois Youth Center-Joliet shutting down in 2013.

When the state announced in 2016 that it would close the roundhouse at Stateville Correctional Center, there were fears the prison in neighboring Crest Hill could be next.

Worries about the public image of having big prisons in town paled before the potential effect of losing the 1,100 jobs Stateville provided.

But Stateville stayed open, and there are no plans to close it, Illinois Department of Corrections Director John Baldwin said last week, when he was at the prison for a ceremony marking the opening of the School of Restorative Arts, a program the North Park Theological Seminary is running.

“It’s going to be here. It’s not going anywhere,” Baldwin said when asked about the future of Stateville. “It’s one of our three maximum-security institutions. It’s close to the Chicago area, and it’s been here a long time.”

When the roundhouse was closed, Crest Hill Mayor Ray Soliman was concerned about the future of Stateville, especially since former Gov. Rod Blagojevich once proposed shutting it down.

“Twenty-five percent of our water and sewer budget comes from Stateville residents,” Soliman said. “If that were to close, it would be very detrimental to the city of Crest Hill.”

Soliman said that he believes Stateville now has a stable future, which not only is good for the city’s water budget but for many of its residents.

“A lot of employees – whether it is in the cafeteria or in buildings and grounds, or as guards – are residents of Crest Hill,” he said.

The number of Department of Corrections employees in Joliet has grown from zero, since the Illinois Youth Center was closed in early 2013, to 300 with the opening of the Joliet Treatment Center a year ago.

The Joliet Treatment Center, operating out of the buildings formerly used for the youth center, is among a group of new Department of Corrections facilities providing treatment for inmates with mental illness, and it is the largest such treatment center in the prison system.

The Department of Corrections announced in August that it will expand the Joliet Treatment Center with construction of a $150 million inpatient center to care for inmates with severe mental health problems.

River City Construction, an East Peoria company that is one of three finalists in the selection process for a design-build contractor for the inpatient center, will be in Joliet at 10 a.m. Thursday to hold a contractor outreach meeting at the Holiday Inn and Suites, 1471 Rock Creek Blvd.

The company is looking for local firms that could be subcontractors in its proposal to design and build a project that includes a 200-bed inpatient center, new administrative building and central utility plant. River City Construction and the other companies seeking the contract will need to show participation by minority-owned subcontractors to meet state standards.

“We’re just trying to reach out to additional firms in the area that we may not know about,” Greg Bachler, director of estimating for River City Construction, said of the Joliet meeting.

The reopening of the old Joliet Correctional Center has given new life to a prison that sat unused for 15 years and that vandals and arsonists raided over time, before the city took out a lease from the Department of Corrections in December to put it to new use. The lesson, Peerbolte said, is that the prisons are better used than unused.

“These places are there,” Peerbolte said. “As we learned from the Old Joliet Prison, you can’t just make them disappear.”