Illinois Jails Overcrowded and Boiling Over

According to a review of internal meeting minutes, inmate logs and interviews with local and state officials by the Brown Institute for Media Innovation’s Documenting COVID-19 project, a current back-log of over 1,000 inmates in Illinois jails is resulting in over-extended imprisonments, overcrowding, strained budgets, and violence, reports the Chicago Star-Tribune. Inmates, including many awaiting transfers for nearly a year, are spending a half-million days in Chicago-area jails when they were supposed to be in state prisons, resulting in frequent fights and tens of millions in costs to continue housing them in Cook County and elsewhere. The inmate backlog has also been exacerbated by the comparatively low vaccination rates among prison staff, which has made it harder to safely house inmates at the state’s penitentiaries due to strict COVID protocols that are still in place. 

Although an agreement was brokered between the state and counties to allow transfers on a case-by-case basis after Gov. J.B. Pritzker halted all transfers from county jails to the state prison system because of the pandemic, sheriffs say the process for transferring inmates has nearly ground to a halt. In the rare instance when inmates are selected to go to state custody, the process is shrouded in secrecy. In Cook County alone, 796 inmates are still awaiting transfer to state custody, as of last week — more than a third of which were sentenced on gun possession charges. Among the total inmate population are some who have waited more than 200 days to be transferred to IDOC custody at a cost of $240 a day for each inmate. Cook County estimated that holding these prison-bound inmates has cost the county about $38.8 million throughout the pandemic, although officials expect some of those expenses to be reimbursed by federal funding.