Managing prisons, where new inmates are increasingly serving longer sentences, is no easy task. Over the years, the idealistic goal of rehabilitation has collapsed under pressures of overpopulation by young, violent criminals. Carrots for good behavior–reduced sentences or serving time in easier prisons–have all but disappeared because of “get tough” administrative and legislative actions.
Moreover, punishments are difficult to mete out to prisoners already serving lifelong sentences. What do you do to someone who has little left to lose?
There are solutions, but they require money, leadership and a willingness by prison officials to admit how bad conditions have become inside the state’s maximum-security prisons.
A close look at the system has revealed that officials have largely surrendered their leadership to powerful gang leaders. For years, thugs have roamed the prisons at will, using cellular telephones to run drug trafficking and other operations. They have instilled fear in their fellow-gang members and rivals, ordering hits on those who disobey their commands.
Fearing violence, prison officials have failed to enforce even the most basic regulations, such as prohibiting inmates from wearing gang clothing and banning makeshift cell curtains that make it easier to sell drugs, fashion knives and carry out beatings.
In fact, Odie Washington, the new state Corrections Department director, finally banned inmate picnics at the state’s four maximum-security prisons only last August. Guards and other employees had known for years that inmates were having sex and smuggling drugs at the events, which often were attended by hundreds of visitors.
At the maximum-security Menard Correctional Center, officials even allowed a dozen Harley-Davidson motorcycles inside for the annual biker gang’s picnic. Inmates rode the bikes around the prison yard until one crashed into a concrete picnic table. Prison officials had long suspected the motorcycles were surreptitiously packed with drugs.
“It was crazy to let them do that,” said Michael Heltsley, a former prison investigator, recalling that the prison was often hit by a rash of inmate drug overdoses after the picnic.
For two decades, gang rivalry and violence have dominated prison life as inmates realized that they–not prison officials–ran the joints.
Inmate assaults on staff members reached record levels in 1996, despite a huge increase in time that inmates spent confined to their cells. Many guards and inmates said their biggest concern is survival.
It would be easy to dismiss what happens in prisons as irrelevant to the outside world. It would also be wrong. The state’s prisons have become a fertile recruiting ground for the state’s most powerful and notorious street gangs.
Gangster Disciple chief Larry Hoover and other gang leaders have used their prison time to expand and strengthen their organizations.
Prison officials recently have vowed to regain control of the facilities, but there is reason to be skeptical. Repeated efforts at reform over the past two decades have failed because of weak leadership and a lack of adequate funding to reduce overcrowding and modernize antiquated facilities.
For months, inmates at the state’s maximum-security prisons have been locked in their cells virtually round-the-clock while officials conduct sweeps to confiscate weapons, drugs and other items.
Prison personnel have intensified searches of automobiles on prison property, proposed instituting random drug testing for guards and vowed to increase the use of drug-sniffing dogs and employ the latest technology such as X-ray machines to reduce smuggling.
Officials also are increasing by one-third the number of segregation cells at several penitentiaries to isolate troublemakers. And they are planning to send the worst inmates to the Pontiac prison, where they will be locked in their cells 23 hours a day to cut down on opportunities for violence.
The measures instituted so far have reduced the flow of narcotics into the prisons and boosted officers’ morale. These actions are giving guards a degree of control that had been diminishing for years.
But the plans are at best half-measures, designed as much to win a public relations battle as to win the system back from the grip of gangs and other outlaws.
After all, Pontiac already has been on lockdown nearly full time–last year inmates there were confined to their cells round-the-clock for 264 days–yet violence against inmates and guards continues.
Illinois’ maximum-security prisons need comprehensive reforms that include spending money to reduce chronic overcrowding, hiring more staff and expanding educational, vocational and other inmate programs that could ease the idleness and fear.
Most of these ideas are not new. The Illinois Task Force on Crime and Corrections, led by former U.S. Atty. Anton Valukas, made the same recommendations in 1993.
Politicians know that the public has little stomach for bearing the costs of punishing criminals. Ex-Gov. James Thompson and former Cook County State’s Atty. Richard M. Daley built their political careers with tough agendas calling for longer sentences.
The tab for those policies has now come due.
To make Illinois’ prisons safer, the state needs to bulldoze its old, 500-cell maximum-security cellblocks and replace them with smaller, modern cell houses. The old cell houses have too many blind spots for guards to safely supervise the growing number of young violent offenders.
Modern cell houses are divided into smaller, more manageable units and are equipped with the latest locking and security devices. They also are constructed out of materials that are harder for inmates to cannibalize to make weapons or compartments for hiding drugs.
The state also needs to build a new high-security prison to safely house the state’s growing number of hard-core inmates. Only a few years ago, the 500-bed, super-maximum security Tamms prison under construction in southern Illinois was touted as the solution to the state’s increasingly violent inmate population. Now experts agree that Tamms barely will make a dent in helping officials regain control of the system from gang chieftains.
The state also should expand alternative sentencing for non-violent offenders to ease prison overcrowding–something that feeds gang control and violence.
A 1996 study by the University of Illinois at Springfield found that from 1985 to 1994, the number of state inmates imprisoned for non-violent felonies such as minor drug violations increased to 3,961 from 943.
Most of these inmates belong on electronic detention, in day reporting centers or in intensive substance abuse programs–not taking up prison space that should be reserved for the state’s most violent criminals.
Illinois also needs to buttress its prison industry and inmate educational programs to teach prisoners work skills, to lower recidivism and reduce violence inside prisons. Idle inmates cause more disciplinary problems.
Michael Mahoney, president of the John Howard Association, a Chicago-based prison watchdog group, said less than 5 percent of the state’s inmates are employed in prison industries.
An estimated 70 percent of Illinois’ inmates have a history of substance abuse, yet only a fraction are enrolled in intensive recovery programs, Mahoney said. There also are more than 6,000 inmates waiting to get into educational programs–a 31 percent increase since 1991–even though about 30 percent of the state’s new inmates cannot read at a 6th-grade level.
Prison officials also need to take a zero tolerance approach to gang leaders, while encouraging gang members to drop their flag by rewarding non-gang members with the best jobs and cell assignments.
Illinois prison officials argue that taking such steps is useless because other gang leaders would fill the void. But other states have reduced gang violence by taking a hard-line approach.
In Texas, after gang-related attacks took the lives of 50 inmates in 1984 and 1985, officials there began isolating powerful gang members in segregation units. Since then, there have been only 10 gang-related inmate homicides despite a tripling of the state’s prison population.
Taken together, these steps–along with more aggressive efforts by the agency to root out corruption among guards and officials–will not eliminate violence, drug trafficking or gang activity in the state’s maximum-security prisons. There are too many gangbangers for that to happen. But the actions will help restore a measure of control, rationality and credibility to a powder keg system in desperate need of reform.
