Progress Illinois

Last year, State Rep. Julie Hamos introduced legislation to "establish clear criteria for transferring a prisoner to Tamms supermax prison" in downstate Illinois.  Despite some disturbing hearings on the facility and a decent amount of press coverage, the bill ultimately died in the Rules Committee.  This year, Hamos has re-introduced the legislation as HB 2633 and is reviving her effort to ensure that individuals like Reginald Berry -- profiled by the Reader last April -- don't end up languishing in solitary confinement at Tamms for years and years on end.  

The State Journal-Register has more:

Hamos wants Tamms to adhere to its original goal of being a short-term incarceration facility.

“Hundreds of people reside there and live there for long after the one year they are supposed to be there -- sometimes as long as 10 years, under very extreme conditions in total isolation,” she said.

Chicago lawyer Jean Maclean Snyder, who helped draft Hamos’ legislation and filed a lawsuit challenging the treatment of the mentally ill at Tamms, said the prison creates and worsens serious mental illnesses in prisoners.

“When you have a prison that is as isolating and as harsh as this, sometimes people (mentally) decompose and become seriously mentally ill,” she said.

Hamos' bill would require that the Department of Corrections "review the status of all prisoners currently housed at a super-maximum security institution" within 90 days of its enactment.  It would also mandate that those prisoners who have been housed at Tamms for over a year be granted a hearing on their status that examines the "specified criteria."

Rep. Karen Yarbrough, one of the 22 current co-sponsors of HB 2633, wrote a Progress Illinois guest column on the topic last spring:

These men spend 23 to 24 hours of every day in solitary confinement, and when they have to endure this for months and years on end, it is hard to see any rehabilitative value in the way things are done at Tamms. Even more troubling is that those who testified at the hearing do not understand why they were sent there.

And yet we continue to hold these men at Tamms indefinitely. Extended stays of this sort tear families apart because the prison is so remote. While it is clear that we need such facilities to separate the most dangerous inmates, keeping them in mentally abusive living conditions does no good for the prisoners, no good for their loved ones, and no good for the communities in which we ultimately release them.

More from a recent Tribune article on the prison:

[C]ritics said a dearth of educational programs and jobs should be a concern to the public. More than one-fourth of the inmates at Tamms are scheduled to be freed in the next decade, prison officials confirmed.

While acknowledging that a few inmates need to be held in the strictest conditions because they are so dangerous, critics contend that most prisoners could be safely housed at one of the state's three maximum-security prisons. Yet more than a quarter of the inmates have been at Tamms since its opening in 1998.

We'll be watching for any further movement on Hamos' bill.  Opposition is coming from two quarters: the local state representative, who worries that the legislation will result in less prison guard positions; and AFSCME Local Council 31, which is concerned about the safety of the prison guards it represents across the state.