If you had $900 million to spend toward creating a more flourishing future for Illinois, where would you spend it?
Revitalized, state-of-the-art schools and community colleges come immediately to mind. Expanded parklands and art spaces. Affordable housing, healthy foods, and generous jobs programs. It’s a lot of money, and yet we have a lot of work to do, so let’s dream a bit. Neighborhood health clinics, accessible and wide-ranging public transportation, and on and on.
But the $900 million question isn’t an idle fantasy. In March, Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced plans to tear down Stateville Correctional Center, the men’s prison in Crest Hill, and Logan Correctional Center, the women’s prison in Lincoln. He then proposed spending $900 million to build two new “state-of-the-art” prisons.
His proposal is short-sighted at best — a massive failure of imagination — and potentially a long-term catastrophe for Illinois and its residents.
Illinois led the country when Gov. George Ryan put a moratorium on executions and commuted death sentences in 2000; the death penalty was abolished in 2011. We could lead the country again by working honestly and vigorously to abolish mass incarceration. We should ask our lawmakers and state officials to use every existing tool, and to create new tools where needed, to release incarcerated people.
There are several easy, practical changes that would allow many people to come home. Illinois has no parole or any other system providing a pathway to freedom for incarcerated people who are fully rehabilitated; we need one. Illinois has prohibited most incarcerated people from earning time off their sentence for work or education; we should change that. Illinois foolishly disallows currently incarcerated people from benefiting from recent reforms, keeping people in prison for conduct that would not result in incarceration today; we should turn that around.
Illinois could, as well, implement various forms of categorical commutation; for example, releasing people over 55 who have been imprisoned for 25 years, or people who committed crimes as children and have been in prison for 20 years. The data is clear: these individuals would not pose a threat to society, and their continued incarceration is costly in both dollars and human terms. Decarceration would allow people to reunite with their families, strengthen our communities, and pave the way for closing more prisons — and thus more taxpayer savings.
We have the tools to do this now. Illinois law currently allows the Department of Corrections to give a year of sentencing credit to most incarcerated people; that step alone would immediately reduce the population by more than 5,000 people. Illinois could put most elderly prisoners on electronic monitoring for the last year of their sentences, and more than 700 elderly people would be eligible for immediate release. Illinois could release several hundred terminally ill or disabled people.
Reduce prison population and use resources elsewhere
Death penalty abolition was consequential, but partial—death by execution ended, but “death by incarceration” remains. There has been a necessary focus on wrongfully convicted people, but we need to focus, as well, on the proper way to deal with people who have paid a steep penalty, changed and rehabilitated themselves, and therefore deserve some pathway toward freedom. Today the criminal legal system is characterized by all the ills that plagued the death system, and we need to be smart in developing alternatives. We can start by acknowledging that prison is not just a place, it’s a state-of-mind that limits our imaginations and shuts down our capacity to think more broadly and more bravely. We need to imagine what might lie beyond prison, beyond making a better or more functional carceral system.
I’ve recently done a small (unscientific) pilot study, asking over a dozen Illinoisans — at a bus stop, in a cafe, on State Street downtown — how they could imagine spending close to a billion dollars to build a safe and thriving future for Illinois. One person mentioned extending paid maternity and paternity leave, another suggested drug rehabilitation programs, a third would want an investment in community gardens and public swimming pools, and a fourth wanted more libraries in more neighborhoods. Not one mentioned building a prison.
So, yes, Gov. Pritzker, go ahead and tear down Stateville and Logan, two of the most blighted and dangerous prison facilities in the country. But please seize this unique moment, as well, and work toward decarceration — that is, for reducing our bloated prison population and bringing people home, shutting prisons down, and allocating resources for community-building and community-based support.
Let’s lean away from the cynical assumption that 20 or 30 years from now we will need to incarcerate a predictable number of people from the same predictable communities, even though those people have not even been born yet. We can be better, and we can do better. Let’s think together about how to close the front door, the pipeline feeding the beast, as we thoughtfully and steadfastly open the back door.
William Ayers is a retired Professor of Education at University of Illinois Chicago and teaches writing classes at Stateville Prison.
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