Progress Illinois

Ten years in service. Seventy-three million dollars to build. Sixty-thousand dollars per-year, per-inmate to run.

Zero sense.

Tamms Correctional Center opened on March 8, 1998, in the southernmost tip of Illinois, further south than Louisville, Kentucky. It was designed to be a 500-bed Super-Max facility to house the “worst of the worst” offenders, those who show an inability to live with other inmates or refuse to obey prison guards. These were supposed to be inmates who committed crimes in prison, including gang leaders. However, a recent report by the Tamms Year Ten organization claims that over half of the men currently imprisoned at the facility are not there for disciplinary reasons.

Convicts were originally sent to Tamms for one to two years of solitary confinement, but recent news reports indicate that nearly one-third of the inmates have been there since the first year it opened. If this was a normal prison, these extended stays might not be such an issue. But at a recent hearing I attended, former inmates described the conditions as mental torture. 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.

Barack Obama may not have technically won Indiana Tuesday night, but by holding Hillary Clinton to a whisker-thin 11,000-vote margin, he administered the final blow to her tiny hopes of victory. Indiana did indeed turn out to be the “tie breaker."

Even before North Carolina and Indiana, the delegate math made it almost impossible to deny Obama the Democratic nomination. But Clinton’s Pennsylvania victory, her constant attacks, and Reverend Wright’s re-emergence into the campaign had some Democrats feeling queasy.

Obama’s 14 percent landslide in North Carolina did much to reassure them that he was not mortally damaged by the weeks of negative attacks. But it was when the numbers narrowed in Indiana that you could feel the cold winds shift, as if a political warm-front had swept in, bringing with it the breezes of victory. The pundits' tone morphed from “big night for Hillary” to Tim Russert’s assertion that “We now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be, and no one is going to dispute it.”

Something interesting happened last week: longshoremen up and down the West Coast held a one-shift work stoppage to protest the Iraq war -- on economic grounds. “We won’t stand by while our country, our troops and our economy are being destroyed.” said Bob McEllrath, president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.

The interesting part about this protest is the broadening of the union agenda beyond the wages, benefits, and working conditions of its members. While their reasons for coming together may differ, anti-war protesters and blue collar union workers represent a potent alliance that could move the war debate forward.

More important, however, is the example it sets for the Democratic Party – nationally and locally.

A number of recent newspaper articles have reported on the presence of trace amounts of pharmaceuticals and other chemicals in our water supply, both here in Illinois and nationally.

Hormones from birth control pills and Viagra. Chemicals such as DEET from insect repellent. Drugs such as painkillers and Prozac. All of the above have been found in very small amounts (parts per trillion) in water samples taken from Chicago area waterways.

We really shouldn’t be surprised. Think about how many drugs we take: from prescription medications such as antibiotics, cancer treatments, and anti-depressants, to over-the-counter products like vitamins, nasal decongestants, and ibuprofen. It's gotten to the point where major pharmaceutical companies are now developing two new drugs for dogs – one to address obesity and another to help with sleep problems.

These substances are entering our waterways because people flush unused or expired medicine down the toilet and because we excrete what our bodies don’t absorb.