Back when nobody else wanted state prisons in their back yards, the residents of this small town near the Kentucky border welcomed an innovative new minimum-security institution, then left their jobs in the faltering coal mines and reported for duty.
Over the four decades since, the Vienna Correctional Center has become not only the town’s biggest employer and economic lifeblood but its identity as well.
So when Gov. George Ryan announced Wednesday that he wants to close the prison to save money, townspeople couldn’t help but feel like someone had yanked the rug out from under them. So tightly intertwined are their fortunes with the prison system that the local ambulance service was once staffed largely by inmates, and every day some family members head by the carload to jobs at the prison.
“Eleven people in my high school graduating class work here with me,” said Jeff Jackson, a correctional officer at the prison and president of its union local. “Everybody else left because there is nowhere else to work.”
That’s not far from true. With just more than 400 employees, the prison is the biggest employer in the town of 1,500 and in the surrounding region. At a time when other industry in Illinois’ southern end is weak, Vienna and other prisons dotting the farm fields are considered a force as much for economic development as for public safety.
In announcing the closure, Ryan acknowledged it would create a hardship. But he said it was the fiscally responsible thing to do in a budget crisis, which has led him to call for layoffs of thousands of state workers and the closing of other state facilities.
That state prisons were among those slated for closure came out of the blue, after years in which state officials have repeatedly called for new correctional facilities to cope with a growing inmate population. Many institutions in the Illinois Department of Corrections are already well over capacity.
But now prison officials argue that the growth in the inmate population has leveled off, and that they can house inmates adequately while also closing Vienna and a juvenile prison in west suburban Valley View. Within the fiscal year that begins in July, they believe, the state will be saving money by locking people up in newer prisons and closing old ones that need repair.
That news dropped like a rock into the middle of Johnson County and rippled across surrounding counties full of workers, contractors and businesses that derive income from the prison. There are other correctional facilities in the vicinity (the medium-security Shawnee Correctional Center is on the same grounds, and four others are within a three-hour drive) but Vienna remains the community anchor.
Besides its annual Gospel Fest, where every four years statewide politicians are obliged to come sing for votes, the town is known as the site of a successful penitentiary experiment in trust. When it opened in the mid-1960s in the shadow of the Shawnee National Forest, the prison was set up like a small college campus, with dorms and sports fields and guards posted sparsely to keep casual watch over inmates on their way to classes.
The Corrections Department Web site still describes Vienna as “one of the most innovative prisons in the nation, attempting to instill responsibility in inmates who are in preparation for reintegration into society.”
The prison has no cell bars and inmates wear street clothes, not prison jumpsuits.
Inmate industry welcomed
In the early 1960s, as the state’s inmate population was growing, many communities wanted nothing of prisons, fearing they would be annoying and unsafe neighbors. But the late C.L. McCormick, then a Republican state representative from Vienna, saw opportunity for his hometown.
“A little community like ours, they weren’t going to get a GM plant,” said his son, Mike McCormick. “He realized, and other people in the community came to realize, that they didn’t have a lot of ways to attract major industry.”
With the welcome mat out, state officials were more than happy to build in Vienna and, a decade later, to expand it.
As coal mines began to close, displaced workers turned to Vienna and later Shawnee. When their children graduated from high school, parents encouraged them to start a career in what appeared to be a dependable local industry.
“That was the only thing going on when I was coming up, that and the mines and the rock quarries,” said Larry Flynn, who went to work at Vienna in 1985. “It ain’t bad work and there are good benefits, if you can handle the stress.”
The pay is good too. A correctional officer can make about $40,000 a year, not bad in a place where new homes sell for less than $100,000.
Many workers thought the best perk about a prison job was that it was recession proof. “We figured the prison jobs would always be there,” Jackson said.
Prison pays town’s way
Over time, the local economy has grown up around the prison like a vine. There’s enough foot traffic to keep afloat the Paul Powell Museum, a shrine to the Vienna native and former Illinois secretary of state who died with a shoebox stuffed with hundreds of thousands of dollars hidden in his Springfield hotel room.
Don Sanders bought the Vienna Times newspaper two years after the prison opened and has seen businesses blossom.
“First there was a motel, then there was a Dairy Queen,” recalls Sanders, the current president of the Johnson County Chamber of Commerce. “We got a McDonald’s. We got a package liquor store out near the interstate. You’ve got people coming to and going from the prison, and that’s what brings them business.”
Indeed, on Friday afternoons around shift change, the Dairy Queen by Interstate Highway 24 fills with men and women wearing the trademark green uniforms of prison officers.
“Just about every employee drives right by me,” Dairy Queen owner Greg Walker said. “It’s gonna hurt if it closes, no question about it. We have depended on the prison for so much of our economy.”
But even as Ryan declared closure was imminent, local leaders declared a fight. Union officials think that if they agree to be more flexible in contract negotiations with the Ryan administration, they might be able to save the prison. Others are more defiant.
“My immediate reaction was, the governor better get his head out of his rear end and back on his shoulders where it belongs,” said state Sen. Larry Woolard (D-Carterville).
“He’s dealing with lives and families and the ability to provide a safety net for at least 400 families who will be directly impacted if this takes place. The spin-off jobs, the ancillary support businesses–it’s going to be very hard on our region.”
Woolard is especially puzzled by the new analysis that prison overcrowding is under control, and that four-decade-old Vienna is less cost-effective than older ones elsewhere. In recent years, the state has poured millions of dollars into Vienna to fix it up.
“We’ve got some facilities that are over a hundred years old,” Woolard said.
With almost 44,000 adult inmates, the prisons are at roughly 146 percent of their capacity. Even so, the inmate population is down by about 1,800 from a year ago, and officials think it will continue to decline.
“That gives us some breathing room,” said Donnie Snyder, the state director of prisons.
Under the governor’s plan, budget officials say, Ryan can keep capacity at about the same level as it is now, while saving money with the elimination of inefficient buildings.
`We don’t have the money’
The Vienna prison is prime for closure partly because it is minimum security, and lower-risk inmates are easier to move to other prisons.
“The bottom line is not [that it’s closing] because the Vienna staff is a bad staff,” Snyder said. “The bottom line is economics. We don’t have the money.”
That is little solace to Vienna guard Dana Pearson.
“I hope we can work something out,” said Pearson, as he watched over 20 inmates awaiting release and bus rides to Chicago the other day. “If I can’t work at the prison, I don’t know where I’ll go. Maybe down to the power company. But they’ve already got a wait list a mile long.”
