Eye On Illinois: DOJ probe likely to shed further light on failures of developmental disability services

Try as it might, Illinois cannot outrun the reality that it fails to adequately treat people with developmental disabilities.

Reporters Beth Hundsdorfer and Molly Parker this week added another report to their Culture of Cruelty series, a joint effort of ProPublica and Capitol News Illinois. (Visit propublica.org/series/culture-of-cruelty if you have the free time and thick skin.) The latest entry explains the U.S. Department of Justice’s new investigation into the state’s procedures.

The Illinois Department of Human Services informed its workers of the investigation last week through a letter from Tonya Piephoff, who directs the agency’s developmental disabilities division. She reported the feds are invoking Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act.

In addition to exploring if “the state unnecessarily institutionalizes, or puts at serious risk of institutionalization, adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities,” the DOJ also will evaluate conditions at three state institutions and whether residents there are exposed to abuse and neglect.

Although Piephoff noted “no conclusions have been reached,” anyone who has followed reporting on this issue knows a federal investigation will quite likely verify established trends.

“People with developmental disabilities living in Illinois’ publicly run institutions have been punched, slapped, hosed down, thrown about and dragged across rooms,” according to Parker and Hundsdorfer’s earlier work. “In other cases, staff failures contributed to patient harm and death, state police and internal investigative records show.”

The women explained the state police division charged with investigating criminal allegations against state employees started 200 such queries at developmental centers over a decade, which represents “more allegations against workers at these seven residential centers than it does at any other department’s workplaces, including state prisons, which house far more people, according to an analysis of state police data.”

In July, CNI detailed the state’s effort to end disability services oversight from federal courts. To read an IDHS overview, visit tinyurl.com/LigasOverview, and understand the underlying litigation dates to July 2005. A consent decree didn’t take effect until June 2011, almost six full years later and a dozen years after the 1999 U.S. Supreme Court ruling forcing states to accommodate preferences against institutional care.

The rejection of that request was unsurprising, and neither should this investigation come as a shock. Illinois has indeed made efforts to improve conditions, but the gap between promised change and delivered results persists.

We’re not talking about a large number of people compared to the overall state population. But that context is useless when engaging with stories of victims – people’s families entrusted to the state for critical care and protection – and then consider all of us are paying into a system that inflicts these damages.

Illinois can and must improve.

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.