The so-called swine flu outbreak has affected operations at a number of correctional agencies in the United States

• Cook County IL has limited visitors to immediate family members and attorneys.  There are currently no cases of the swine flu at the jail.
• The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections is canceling offender visitation starting Friday and continuing for up to two weeks, according to a release from the agency. There will be no visitation at any of the state’s 13 correctional facilities.
• Ventura County CA has also canceled visits.  Sheriff Bob Brooks announced Friday that all public visits to inmates are suspended until May 15.
• In Henderson County, KY, the jail is continuing visits but with changes. Colonel Freddie Rowland of the Henderson County Detention Center said, ”We are limiting the contact between the visitor and the inmate. We’re going to allow a quick hug, but we’re not going to allow them to sit as close as they normally do.”

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The union for prison workers is vowing to fight Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn’s budget plans to cut prison spending by about $65 million by implementing new work schedules for guards, ending several programs and closing facilities.  Reported by the Galesburg Register-Mail.

Quinn plans to not fully open the prison in Thomson, cut out funding for the anti-gun violence program Operation Ceasefire and close both the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center and Pere Marquette Youth Center, a youth prison for girls in southern Illinois …

Quinn also wants to make security staff work 12-hour shifts for three or four days a week, on an alternating schedule. Those employees now work five, eight-hour workdays each week.  The agency projects it will spend $61 million in overtime costs in the current budget year. Switching to the new schedule, it estimates, would cut that overtime cost to $13.1 million next year.  Corrections spokespeople say the savings will help the agency hire 183 additional workers to ease staffing issues and give workers who already are working 12-hour and 16-hour shifts more flexible work schedules …

Anders Lindall, a spokesman for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31, calls the 12-hour shift an “accounting trick” that merely “redefines what is currently considered overtime as straight time” … Terry Baker, a correctional officer and union local president at the Taylorville prison, said the additional hires fall far short of helping with serious overtime problems, and asking guards to work longer hours isn’t a solution.   “You’re just asking for problems,” Baker said. “You’re always going to have some kind of overtime. It may not be as much, but you’re still going to have some. There’s no thought given to what you do in that situation. Do you work a person 24 hours straight?” …

The governor says he’s open to resolving the union’s concerns.  “I think we’re going to come up with a good solution,” Quinn said Wednesday at an appearance in Springfield. “Life is sometimes a dialogue and negotiation and that’s the way it should be. The employer, the union that represents the employees, I’m sure can come to a good conclusion. I’m optimistic about that.”

vericatrajkova Economic Issues, Illinois, Officer Contract Issues, Personnel Issues

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn said Thursday he has decided to keep the Pontiac Correctional Center open in a move aimed at preserving more than 500 jobs at one of the area’s largest employers.

Quinn cited jobs as the main motivation behind his decision to reverse ousted Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s plan to close the 137-year-old prison.  “Keeping Pontiac Correctional Center open will ensure nearly 600 people in the region keep their jobs, prevent hundreds of families from being uprooted and allow Pontiac to maintain one of its largest sources of revenue,” Quinn said in a statement …

Blagojevich had planned to close the prison and move many of its inmates to the largely unused Thomson Correctional Center in western Illinois to save money as the state wrestles with budget deficits …

Pontiac Mayor Scott McCoy was jubilant.  “I’m going to go out in the middle of Main Street and do my happy dance,” said McCoy, who has joined area lawmakers in a months long push to keep the prison open …”I know that it has been a very stressful time for the employees, families and the citizens of Pontiac and Central Illinois since former Gov. Blagojevich announced his intention to close Pontiac,” said state Sen. Dan Rutherford, R-Pontiac. “It is refreshing to have a governor who will work with the legislators and do what is best for our great State.”

vericatrajkova Economic Issues, Illinois

A reporter recently visited the Tamms Correctional Center in Illinois, the State’s only super-max facility.  The complete article from the Los Angeles Times is a fascinating view inside one of these centers, and the following are just highlights.

The so-called supermax section of the prison was built in the 1990s to house Illinois’ most dangerous inmates. Human-rights activists persistently criticize it. The long isolation of supermax prisons, opponents say, drives inmates to mental illness — when the inmates aren’t already ill.  Legislation introduced last week in Illinois would prohibit the seriously mentally ill from being sent to Tamms’ supermax incarceration and would make it more difficult to keep inmates there indefinitely …

For at least 23 hours a day, prisoners are in solitary confinement in 7-by-12-foot cells. Meals are shoved through a hole in cell doors.   For the rare visits from relatives and friends, inmates are strip-searched, chained to a concrete stool and separated from visitors by a thick glass wall.  There are no jobs and limited educational opportunities …

Prison officials hail it as a success. Assaults against inmates and staff at other prisons have dropped, they say, because the most disruptive offenders are in Tamms.  Officials note that Tamms’ supermax sector has been at just half its capacity during its 11 years, saying they’ve been selective about who is housed there.  Tamms — which also includes a 200-bed minimum-security unit — costs $27 million a year to run. That’s about $60,000 for each inmate, almost triple the state average …

A few times a week, Joseph Dole stands in a back corner of the outdoor recreation area at Tamms Correctional Center, straining to catch a ray of sunlight.    “About four feet gets sun,” said the rail-thin Dole, who is serving a life sentence for murder. “You can only get it if they call yard between 11 and 1. I just stand there. You feel warm, you feel refreshed.”  Another murderer, Adolfo Rosario, said he hadn’t shaken anyone’s hand since his transfer to Tamms 11 years ago. “There is no contact at all, none,” he said.   “The hardest part is the isolation,” said Tyrone Dorn, serving time for carjacking. “It’s like being buried alive.”

vericatrajkova Illinois, Super-Max

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Criminal Alien Program has led to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants being detained in jails across the country. The program identifies illegal aliens that come through jails and then detains them until their sentences are served, at which time they are deported.  Reporters were invited to Lake County IL Jail to see the work.  This report from the Waukegan News Sun:

With immigration officials flanking them, two men shuffled toward a waiting vehicle at Lake County Jail.   Once inside the low-profile Chevy Trailblazer, the two Mexican nationals were whisked away by immigration officials, possibly never to return to Lake County again.   It’s a scene that has been repeated dozens of times a month at the jail …

Since the program began in September 2007, roughly 260 inmates at the jail have had detainers placed on them. And a majority of them were eventually deported, said Gail Montenegro, a public affairs officer with ICE.  Lake County was praised Tuesday as one of the jails that works well with ICE officials. James McPeek, a field office director from ICE’s Chicago office, said the dedication shown by Sheriff Mark Curran and his staff is vital to the program’s success.

McPeek said Lake County has among the greatest number of detainees for Chicago’s collar counties. According to Curran, 152 of the jail’s 655 inmates are foreign born. And of those 152, roughly 90 percent are illegal aliens … Though all of the men interviewed Tuesday were of Mexican descent, not everyone detained is Hispanic. While the number is much lower, the jail also has illegal European immigrants, said jail chief Jennifer Witherspoon.

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McLean County IL officials agree that because of the expense involved, construction of additional beds to ease overcrowding should be a last resort.  So, the agenda of the recently-formed Criminal Justice Coordinating Council will include discussion of possible alternatives to jail.  Report from the Bloomington Pantagraph.

Options for Justice is an advocate of electronic monitoring, a system that tracks inmates’ whereabouts via an ankle bracelet.  Committee member Carol Reitan said releasing pre-trial detainees and people sentenced on lesser offenses could help parents stay with their children and keep novice criminals from coming into contact with serious offenders while in jail. At a cost of about $10 per day, monitoring also saves money, she said.    “With electronic monitoring we’re not providing a public bed and food every night,” said Reitan.

Another option is establishing a reporting center that would require offenders to check in daily … The county’s drug court, in place since 2006, is helping divert some people from prosecution.  A mental health court that would put larger numbers of inmates on track for treatment instead of jail is in the early stages of development.

vericatrajkova Drug Treatment & Diversion, Early Release, Electronic Monitoring, IL McLean County, Overcrowding, Pre-Trial

The author of a study showing Illinois would gain $4 million by closing Pontiac Correctional Center and opening a prison in northwestern Illinois says that number is based on faulty information, according to the Pantagraph.com.

Hanna said Wednesday he is raising questions about his own study in hopes new Gov. Pat Quinn uses updated numbers in assessing whether to close Pontiac and open the mostly unused Thomson Correctional Center.  “It would seem if the new administration is going to make some decisions on this, I would think they would want to have as full of information as possible,” Hanna said.   Hanna said data given to him by the Illinois Department of Corrections for the study last year did not allow him to accurately compare the economic effects of closing Pontiac and fully opening Thomson.  “It wasn’t oranges to oranges,” Hanna said. “The comparison is not real” …

The department seized on the $4 million figure as a key reason for closing Pontiac and opening the new prison in Thomson. Soon after, however, that number began to be whittled down when other costs of opening Thomson arose.  For example, parts of the prison had to be repaired after a ceiling collapsed. Special fencing had to be erected to accommodate additional prisoners. The state also had to buy books for the prison library.

Note that the Pantagraph includes on its site a fascinating 6-min video history of the Pontiac prison facility.

vericatrajkova Economic Issues, Illinois

The local press has likened the dispute between Cook County Jail and the Illinois DOC over fees to an episode of “Judge Judy“.

On Jan. 21, the Cook County Board of Commissioners has directed the county state’s attorney’s office to explore suing the state over several million dollars’ worth of back fees for housing inmates who violate the terms of their parole.  Now, the Illinois Department of Corrections has fired back.  The department called the allegations simply false, and said Cook County never took the proper steps to collect the fees. The county disputes that contention.  “The sheriff’s office has annually requested [the money] and the [department] has basically ignored it,” said Commissioner Pete Silvestri (R-Chicago), “so what are the county’s options?”

At issue is three years’ worth of reimbursements that Cook County says it’s owed for holding prisoners on the state’s behalf. Illinois law requires that the county detain prisoners for state parole violations—but it also says that the state must cover half of the cost. The Cook County Jail handles about 1,600 such prisoners every day, according to the board’s Jan. 21 resolution. Its daily population is about 9,800.  Cook County officials say they’ve held up their end of the bargain—but the state has not. But the Department of Corrections asserted that Cook County hadn’t followed the proper protocol to ensure payment

vericatrajkova County-State Issues, IL Cook County, Illinois

Union officials are claiming that Logan Correctional Center in Lincoln IL did not have enough staff to handle an incident this week in which a prisoner struck a guard.

After refusing to take his medication, an inmate ran to a utility closet where he got a razor and began slashing himself repeatedly. When a guard confronted him, he struck the guard, said American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees spokesman Anders Lindall.   “If Logan had the staff it needs to operate safely employees would be able to respond more quickly and contain incidents when they occur,” Lindall said.  The incident was one of three altercations last week at the medium-security prison in Lincoln.

Illinois Department of Corrections spokesman Derek Schnapp confirmed fights broke out last week.  “When you have nearly 46,000 prisoners across the state you will have these types of incidents,” Schnapp said. “Every day we look at our staffing levels and they are handed out appropriately.”

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Fewer federal prisoners has meant a drop in revenue at DeWitt County IL Jail, which has county officials worried about how the money will be replaced.

According to the 2009 county budget, $700,000 of the sheriff’s $2.1 million budget is expected to come from boarding prisoners for the federal government and neighboring counties experiencing overcrowding in their facilities.   DeWitt County Sheriff Roger Massey says the county’s bill to the federal government for December was $39,000, down from $70,000 in previous months. He said the jail, which has a capacity for 95 inmates, had been nearly full until about three months ago, when the number in custody dropped by up to 30 prisoners.  Massey said whatever the reason for the drop in revenue, a backup plan should be explored to avoid cuts in services.

vericatrajkova Federal Payments, Female Inmates, IL DeWitt County