SPRINGFIELD — The Illinois Department of Corrections said Friday it’s moving forward with a plan to shut down a women’s prison in central Illinois and rebuild it south of Chicago, near the site of another prison being shuttered.
The announcement follows through on a 2024 plan from Gov. JB Pritzker to replace two aging, deteriorating prisons — Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum-security facility near Joliet and Logan Correctional Center, the women’s prison located 130 miles south near Lincoln. Under the plan, both institutions would be rebuilt on or near Stateville’s current site.
“This marks a major milestone in the State’s effort to modernize Illinois’ correctional infrastructure, as capacity replacements for some of its oldest facilities … are beyond their useful life: Stateville Correctional Center, built in 1925, and Logan Correctional Center, which includes buildings dating back to the 1930s,” IDOC said Friday in a prepared statement.
The new prisons will include design features that focus on “creating rehabilitative and gender-responsive spaces with housing, education, programming, medical and mental health, dietary, and recreational areas to support the successful re-entry of individuals into their communities,” according to the statement.
Altogether, Pritzker has said the plan would cost taxpayers about $1 billion. The proposal was meant to avoid the state paying hundreds of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance costs for the two facilities, IDOC has said.
The agency has said moving Logan to the Stateville site would provide a better geographical balance for women’s prisons in the state “by providing a northern facility to pair with” the women’s Decatur Correctional Center, which is only about 36 miles from Logan’s current location. The rebuild could take up to five years, IDOC has said, and there’s no intent “to repurpose or reuse the current Logan” facility.
An outside review found both current Stateville and Logan were nearly “inoperable” and IDOC’s report noted Logan runs on Depression-era coal power and that nearly 1,000 of its beds “were built more than 90 years ago for a mental health population.” It would require some $116 million in deferred maintenance, including converting the entire facility to clean energy, just to remain operational in the long term, IDOC said.
At Stateville, based “upon the environmental assessment, the majority of the buildings are likely to include asbestos, lead based paint, and universal wastes/hazardous material,” the department said.
Shutting down Logan would be another blow to the Lincoln area after the closures of Lincoln College and Lincoln Christian University, and other businesses and facilities over the years. Plans are in motion, however, to reuse the Lincoln Developmental Center, a compound for developmentally disabled adults that was closed years ago, as a juvenile justice facility.
IDOC’s impending closure of the Logan prison is an “ill-advised and devastating decision,” Republican state Sen. Sally Turner of Beason, GOP state Rep. Bill Hauter of Morton, Logan County Board Chair James R. Glenn and Lincoln Mayor Tracy Welch said in a joint statement. They said they intended to continue fighting the decision.
“Let’s be clear, this is the wrong move for the correctional system, for the staff of the facility, for our communities, and for those who reside at Logan,” the statement said. “Illinois should be investing in much needed repairs and upgrades to Logan so that it can best serve its role to rehabilitate people to become productive members of society.
“Moving the facility will do nothing to improve outcomes for those who are incarcerated there, it will absolutely devastate our local communities, and it will force staff to choose between uprooting their families from their homes or going on unemployment,” the statement continued. “This is one more in a devastating series of blows to hit our community in recent years.”
