Eye On Illinois: New Choate report reinforces what we know about broken system

By now the word “Choate” in any headline triggers a preventive response: everything that follows will be on the spectrum between unpleasant and gut-wrenching.

We quite rarely consider Clyde Choate, the 30-year veteran of the Illinois House who also won a Medal of Honor as a U.S. Army sergeant stationed in Europe during World War II, but his namesake: the Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center in his longtime home of Anna.

Much can be written about Choate himself or the history of the 1869 Anna State Asylum, but in the last year the name has come to be synonymous with abject failure of state government.

Capitol News Illinois and Lee Enterprises Midwest worked with ProPublica on a scathing investigative report on conditions at the facility. Read it all at propublica.org/series/culture-of-cruelty, but I’ve often returned to this paragraph, written after successful Freedom of Information Act requests to access eight Department of Human Services inspector general reports:

“These newly released reports, relating to events that occurred between 2017 and last spring, come on the heels of a series of news stories documenting repeated failures at the Choate facility. In September, reporters found that the IDHS inspector general had investigated more than 1,500 reported incidents of abuse and neglect over the decade ending in 2021, though staff have rarely faced serious consequences.”

On Friday, the Illinois Department of Human Services got ahead of FOIA queries and released a new report from DHS Inspector General Peter Neumer. Along with a letter from DHS Secretary Grace Hou, the 34-page document is available at dhs.state.il.us/page.aspx?item=152646.

The report says nothing new about Choate: staff repeatedly and systematically covered up their own abuse and neglect of residents, state state is scrambling to try to make things marginally better and ultimately, per the report, “a fundamental overhaul of the system is needed to establish a new culture where the reporting of abuse is automatic and not an act of courage.”

Enacting a zero-tolerance policy for abusing residents shouldn’t be controversial, but apparently we must first clear lower bars.

Unfortunately, the takeaways from Friday are much more broad and less impactful on the people actually suffering in Anna. That DHS made the report so easily accessible is commendable but is more accurately another example of something that simply ought to be standard procedure. Not just at DHS, but at every state agency.

Pulling that thread yields another lesson: administrators in every corner of state government should read the Choate report to identify possible commonalities with their own agencies. What are the systemic vulnerabilities and potential solutions?

It’s too late to fix some of the damage inflicted on Choate residents, but there’s always time to build a safer state.

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Media. Follow him on Twitter @sth749. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.