Logan women’s prison would be moved onto the same site as the men’s maximum security Stateville Correctional Center as part of a plan to rebuild both facilities, according to a proposal the Illinois Department of Corrections has submitted to a state commission.
The recommendations from IDOC come a little more than a month after Gov. J.B. Pritzker unveiled a plan to rebuild Stateville and Logan prisons. The governor said the would cost close to $1 billion while offering few other details.
The proposal to move Logan from its longtime location in Lincoln, Ill., about 30 miles northeast of Springfield, to the Stateville property in Crest Hill, near Joliet, was included in a report IDOC provided to the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability on Friday, part of a lengthy facilities closure process mandated by the state.
IDOC is asking for $161 million in fiscal year 2025 for the project at Stateville and nearly $80 million at Logan. The transition of incarcerated people and staff will cost about $7 million across both facilities, IDOC said. The proposal would help the state avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance costs, the agency said.
Those expenditures are part of the state budget that’s now before the General Assembly. The specific IDOC recommendations are expected to be subject to public hearings.
A move to the Stateville site would better geographically balance women’s prisons in the state “by providing a northern facility to pair with” Decatur women’s correctional center, which is close to the current site of Logan.
In rebuilding Logan, IDOC is also looking to create a facility that is “smaller in footprint, has increased access to essential support services, as well as one that provides a humane space for incarcerated individuals,” the recommendations said. The rebuild could take up to five years, IDOC said.
Stateville, currently a maximum security facility, would be remodeled into a multi-security level facility with enhanced programing for incarcerated people and additional space for “out-of-cell time.” It would have a greater focus on re-entry and rehabilitation, IDOC said.
There’s no intent “to repurpose or reuse the current Logan” facility, the department said.
The union representing prison employees, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31, has said it’s concerned about upheaval for workers during closures. The governor’s office in March said the union’s concerns were “unusual” given the union’s “continued demands to increase the safety and security of the work environment” of its members.”
Logan employees could be relocated to anticipated IDOC openings within a 90-mile radius of their current workplace. They could end up as close as the Lincoln Correctional Center, next door to Logan, or as far away as Pontiac Correctional Center, which is 77 miles away, the recommendations suggested.
Stateville employees could also be relocated to a Stateville’s nearby reception center or other IDOC facilities within 65 miles, the department said.
The IDOC recommendations sent Friday maintain that the Department does not expect any employees to lose their jobs in the process unless they voluntarily choose a layoff. More than 450 people are staffed at Logan Correctional Center and 939 are employed at Stateville, IDOC said.
An outside review a year ago found that both prisons were nearly “inoperable” in their current condition.
In its list of recommendations, IDOC noted that many aspects of Logan are severely outdated. The women’s prison runs on Depression-era coal power, and nearly 1,000 of its beds “were built more than 90 years ago for a mental health population,” the department said. 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. The facility will be demolished, IDOC said.
Lawmakers in the area around Logan weren’t given much chance to form opposition to the decision to move the women’s prison, Republican Rep. William Hauter of Morton said on Monday.
Hauter said he had previous Zoom meetings with IDOC and the governor’s office, but that a planned in-person meeting to lay out the case for keeping Logan downstate is scheduled for later this week, days after the state’s preferred plans to move Logan were posted publicly.
Shutting down Logan would be another blow after recent closures of Lincoln College and Lincoln Christian College in the area, he said. The Lincoln Developmental Center, a closed compound for developmentally disabled adults, remains an eyesore and a “visual empty promise” in the community, he said.
“It’s almost like they’re emptying out our downstate communities of promises that were made and then not kept,” Hauter said.
The Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity and the statewide economic development organization Intersect Illinois would both become involved to “identify future economic development potential” at the current Logan property if the women’s prison ultimately moves to the site of Stateville, IDOC said.
Prison monitors such as John Howard Association executive director Jennifer Vollen-Katz have questioned why the prisons need to be rebuilt at all, given shrinking prison populations in recent years.
Vollen-Katz last week said she believes the push to rebuild rather than consider closing the facilities stems from politics — particularly, the fact that prisons can be a major source of jobs for surrounding towns. While the facilities in some cases may “be the economic lifeline of a community,” that can’t be the only factor considered in keeping them open, she said.
Tribune reporter Jeremy Gorner contributed to this report.
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