Eye On Illinois: Prison plan shows lessons learned from Thomson travesty

We’re no strangers here to writing about the Department of Corrections, though often the focus is what happens inside state prisons.

There are optimistic positives, like the Northwestern University bachelor’s degree program turning inmates into teachers, and extreme negatives, as in renewing a contract with the troubled prison health care provider that might cost more than $4 billion over a decade.

But recent news brings us to the prisons themselves: Gov. JB Pritzker Friday issued a release explaining his fiscal 2025 capital proposal includes spending up to $1 billion over up to five years to replace Logan Correctional Center in Lincoln and Stateville in Crest Hill.

It’s an expected development. In May, contractor CGL Companies released a 150-page report (tinyurl.com/IDOCstudy) detailing $2.5 billion in deferred IDOC facility maintenance. According to the report, 20% of prison beds are in facilities built before 1926.

“Logan Correctional Center opened in the 1870s as the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children,” according to the report. “Nearly 1,000 of Logan’s current housing unit beds were built more than 90 years ago for a mental health population.”

GCL said 65% of beds statewide “were built during the extreme prison population growth period from 1970 to 2000, and many are now experiencing significant physical plant issues.”

“People should pay attention,” Pritzker told Illinois Public Media’s Brian Mackey in August. “The Legislature should have hearings about this. And we should talk about: Do we need to put more money into the capital needs of those facilities?”

According to Friday’s news release, Pritzker is asking lawmakers to allocate $900 million to demolish and rebuild the facilities, which his office estimates will save an average of $34 million in annual operations costs through a reduction in utilities, maintenance and staff overtime. It’s also arguably a buyout of the price tag for fixing the current joints.

GCL said Stateville had $286 million in deferred maintenance, most expensive of all 32 IDOC facilities. Logan checked in at $116 million in fifth place. (In between are Pontiac, $235 million; Dixon, $222 million; and Menard, $176 million).

Those figures remind that replacing these two prisons would be just the first of many significant IDOC capital investments. While acknowledging concerns about Pritzker suggesting a temporary Stateville closure instead of building the new prison first, it’s worth noting Springfield seems to have learned lessons from the ill-fated construction of a supermaximum prison in Thomson.

One: Don’t build a $140 million prison without also setting aside $50 million for operations; and two: Don’t solve problem one by trying to transfer an entire staff and inmate population from 120 miles away and risk tanking a local economy.

New prisons are far from a done deal, but Illinois must takes steps in this direction.

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Media. Follow him on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, @sth749. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.