Progress Illinois

The Illinois Senate this afternoon narrowly passed a bill 31-27 to raise the cigarette tax a dollar a pack – sending it to Gov. Pat Quinn who will enthusiastically sign the measure. The bill impacts smokers, who now must pay $1.98 in taxes per pack.

It is also intended to greatly impact state Medicaid payments – the levy is supposed to generate $700 million a year, which includes $350 million in federal matching funds. Also, included in the bill is $100 million in anticipated revenue from hospital assessments. Read more »

Budget woes and election year politics has led to a vastly overcrowded prison system in Illinois. The Tribune reported today that the state's "prison system is bursting at the seams" because "of a backlash against a policy change by Gov. Pat Quinn that allowed the early release of about 1,700 inmates over four months." (Progress Illinois wrote about this troubling increase in the prison population in late October.) The increased population has put added stress on the state's already ailing facilities. From the paper:

Confronted with putting more offenders in the same amount of space, administrators are doubling up every available cell. As many as four inmates are bunked in slightly larger cells intended for two handicapped prisoners. At the intake facility at Stateville near Joliet, incoming inmates regularly sleep on cots in a gymnasium or prison hospital.

Due to political pressure, Quinn suspended Meritorious Good Time (MGT), the state's early release program, as well as his administration's accelerated MGT Push program, which was implemented to reduce the number of short-term prisoners within the system. According to a report by law professor Malcolm Young, nearly all of the criticism Quinn received about the latter program in both the primary and general elections lacked merit.

We should note that the Tribune got into that act as well, calling the program "a big mistake," an "ill-conceived policy" and a "fiasco" without considering the effects its suspension would have on prison capacity statewide. Perhaps the paper's own reporting will lead the Tribune editors to reconsider its positons.

Mayor Richard Daley isn't the only Illinois official who recently announced his resignation. Last Thursday, Illinois Department of Corrections director Michael Randle said he will step down from his post at the end of the month to pursue a new opportunity in Ohio. While the news was buried before Labor Day and overshadowed this week by the Daley bombshell, it will still have some significance politically this fall. Randle carried the blame for the MGT Push early release controversy, a program for which Gov. Pat Quinn is still receiving heavy criticism.

On the policy side, criminal justice reformers in and out of government are apoplectic over the departure of Randle, who made a big splash early in his tenure by outlining a well-regarded 10-point reform plan for the infamous Tamms Correctional Center. Like the Sun-Times editorial board, they were giddy over the direction in which he was taking the department, calling him in an open letter to Gov. Quinn "the first true reformer the IDOC has had in a generation." "My sources inside DOC say Randle ran the agency in a professional, critical, and progressive way,"  added Northwestern University professor Stephen F. Eisenman. Eisenman and his colleagues are hopeful that Gladyse Taylor, who is taking over for Randle, will not abandon his Tamms' efforts or challenge a meaningful court ruling about the due process rights of Tamms' prisoners that was handed down in July. If she doesn't uphold Randle's commitments, you can bet those advocates will make their concerns known.