Progress Illinois

The Chicago City Council held its full monthly meeting yesterday.  We've got some of the highlights:

Budget Priorities Take A Beating

All eyes have been on Mayor Daley's 2010 spending plan as of late, which relies on $370 million from the city's asset-sale proceeds to help balance next year's $6.14 billion budget. Despite this windfall, the safety net is still going to take a hit.  During the public portion of yesterday's meeting, several social service providers testified in favor of restoring the cuts to substance abuse and mental health funding. As regular readers may recall, the city's 12 mental health clinics will lose an additional $3 million in state funding this year because of the Daley administration's own incompetence at implementing a new $16 million billing system.

In response, Ald. Joe Moore (49th Ward) voiced support for rescinding the cuts and blasted Daley's "property tax relief" gimmick -- a plan introduced yesterday to pull $35 million from a reserve fund created by the parking meter lease to refund some taxpayers between $50 and $100 on their bills. "What impact is that going to have on those homeowners lives? It's very negligible," Moore said. "I think you're going to get a lot more bang for your buck by helping the mentally ill lead productive lives through counseling and other support services."  Listen:

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Ald. Moore isn't the only one slamming Daley's meager property tax rebate.

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The rhetoric offered up by the Illinois GOP in response to the proposal to transfer detainees from Guantanamo Bay to the Thomson Correctional Center in Northwest Illinois has so far been irrational and irresponsible. After all, Illinois already houses 35 inmates arrested on terrorism charges. Since put behind bars here, they have gone "totally unnoticed," writes the Tribune editorial board today. "They have shown there are no special risks from confining suspected terrorists in the Land of Lincoln."

Responding to the rash letter penned by GOP Rep. Mark Kirk and signed by numerous Illinois Republicans, the Sun-Times editorial board adds:

What troubles us is the fear-mongering among those who oppose the plan -- beginning with U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk, whom we once viewed (and repeatedly endorsed) as a moderate and thoughtful fellow.

Kirk and other excitable Illinois Republicans are warning that Illinois "will become ground zero for jihadist terrorists plots."  Can we get real here?

But none of the comments were more unreal -- and reprehensible -- than those from U.S. Rep. Don Manzullo, whose congressional district includes the Thomson prison. Speaking to WREX about the plan to sell the facility to the federal government, Manzullo said of the detainees, "These are really, really mean people whose job it is to kill people, driven by some savage religion." Watch it:

A "savage religion," Rep. Manzullo? 

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Illinois' prison system is finally making major headlines.  But not for the reasons we had hoped.

Over the weekend, the White House announced that the near-empty Thomson Correctional Center in rural northwest Illinois has emerged as a potential candidate to house terrorism suspects from the Guantanamo Bay military prison. Federal officials, at the behest of the White House, are scheduled to inspect the facility today. Gov. Pat Quinn and Sen. Dick Durbin will hold a series of press conferences outlining the potential plan, which they argue would spur the local economy. If approved, the federal government would purchase the 1,600-cell, maximum-security prison and fill it with regular inmates. They would then set aside a section for the less than 100 Gitmo detainees as a way to help close the controversial prison in Cuba.

Yesterday, like clockwork, GOP lawmakers pounced on the issue, unleashing a barrage of attacks on Quinn and the White House for even considering such a move.

In a letter signed by the seven-member GOP congressional delegation, Rep. Mark Kirk warned that "our state and the Chicago Metropolitan Area will become ground zero for Jihadist terrorist plots, recruitment and radicalization."

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Combing through the Illinois political coverage today, we found ourselves frustrated by a handful of things.  Here's a rundown:

Stantis on early prisoner release

Tribune political cartoonist Scott Stantis published a brutal cartoon about the state's early prisoner release plan this morning (you can view it here).  It depicts a pack of snarling dogs leading a group of ominous-looking animals -- snakes, bats, etc. -- out of a prison cell. On a stool next to the door, a quivering piece of jello with the label "Quinn for Illinois" says "I'm pretty sure this will work ... unless it doesn't."

Where to begin ...

On the merits, the cartoon is wildly sensationalistic. The 1,000 inmates being released (62 this week) are nonviolent offenders serving sentences less than one year long. These are not hardened criminals -- many are likely in for drug offenses -- and they were scheduled for release anyway.

And why are the animals so darkly colored? "Without knowing the race of the prisoners being released," quips The Beachwood Reporter's Steve Rhodes, "it's never a good idea to depict criminals as dark animals when the incarcerated are disproportionately people of color." Indeed.

Sweeny on Jim Ryan

Next up is the latest column from the Rockford Register Star's Chuck Sweeny, which runs down Republican gubernatorial candidate Jim Ryan's "proposals to return the state to solvency."

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Is accountability so sparse in the Chicago Police Department that even a recommendation by the superintendent isn't enough to get an officer fired by the Chicago Police Board? Based on the latest research (PDF) by the non-profit Chicago Justice Project (CJP), it seems so. Here's what the organization examined in their report:

[T]he Chicago Justice Project (CJP) examined ten years of the Board’s decisions in cases for which the Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department sought the termination of either sworn officers or civilian employees. We included the cases involving civilian employees for comparison purposes. Our study covered 310 cases over the course of a ten-year period starting in January 1999 and ending in December 2008.

Over this period, CJP identified 248 instances in which the superintendent recommended that a particular officer get the ax.  The mayoral-appointed board, however, only fired only a fraction (37 percent) of these cops. In most of the remaining 63 percent of cases, the board didn't retain the officer in question on the grounds that they were unfairly accused. Rather, they agreed with the superintendent's conclusion, but chose to handed out less severe punishments, such as suspension.

The big mystery is exactly how the ten-member board arrived at those decisions.

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Last year, The Chicago Reporter launched an investigation revealing gaps in supportive services -- from counseling to financial assistance -- for some 90,000 Illinois children whose parents are behind bars. One of the most personally devastating holes was the lack of contact between the incarcerated and their children, a majority of whom live at least a three hours away by car from where their parents are locked up. As The Reporter noted, many are starting to use alternatives to travel, like a Lutheran Social Services Program that helps inmates record messages to their children. They revealed the deep connections that come of the simple communication:

“It really don’t matter what book I read to them, they love it to death,” said [inmate Rodney] Strohmayer. His 4-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son in Sterling, Ill., have been getting tapes for the past four months. His daughter walks around all day and night, “playing this tape over and over again,” Strohmayer said. This time they will get Dr. Seuss’ “Green Eggs and Ham.”

The program doesn’t just help the children; it has had a profound effect on Strohmayer himself. His incarceration helped him understand how much his children mean to him, and knowing that he has a family to go home to makes it easier.

While lawmakers still have a long way to go in addressing the problems exposed by The Reporter, a key piece of legislation (HB1995) that could serve as a lifeline for those families is making steady progress. The bill, which was shepherded through the House earlier this month by State Rep. Karen Yarborough (D-Maywood) and is now sponsored by Chicago Democrat Sen. William Delgado, would require the Department of Corrections to create a video conferencing pilot program. The hope is that over the next two years, the program will help quantify the impact of keeping inmates engaged with the outside world. "We have to make our criminal justice system more than a warehouse with a revolving door," Yarborough said at a press conference highlighting the legislation yesterday.

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New Illinois Department of Corrections Director Michael Randle has had a busy first few months on the job. In September, he issued a set of 10 proposals to reform the Tamms Correctional Center, a flawed yet important plan that finally acknowledges the human rights abuses that have been taking place under the state's watch. Now, facing massive budget deficits and an immense prison population, Randle is leading the Quinn administration's effort to roll out an early release program.

Thankfully, he's taking the correct approach. In an interview with the State Journal-Register over the weekend, Randle said his department is "using [the budget crisis] as an opportunity to review every facet in this department," including the state's punitive and inefficient approach to handling what he calls "short-term offenders":

Randle says 47 percent of all inmates released from Illinois prisons have been there six months or less; 22 percent have been in state custody for fewer than 63 days. This is largely because of a combination of prisoners having already received substantial credit for time served in a county jail while awaiting trial and a cumbersome and costly intake process that precedes their assignment to the prison where they are to serve their sentence.

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New York Gov. David Paterson probably will not be elected to serve a second term in Albany, but his legacy may have been cemented yesterday when the state officially repealed significant portions of the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Instituted in 1973, the strict and punitive provisions removed judicial discretion in sentencing and mandated harsh penalties for nonviolent drug offenses, which ultimately increased New York's prison population dramatically. While the reforms that were passed this spring and signed by Paterson still leave some room for improvement -- mandatory minimum sentences are maintained, for example -- drug treatment programs were expanded and judges were provided more discretion to divert nonviolent criminals into those programs. Approximately 1,100 individuals currently serving long sentences for are now eligible for re-sentencing.

The occasion presents an opportunity for Illinoisans serious about criminal justice reform to reflect on our own state's progress in this field. And New York could serve as a good example for how to begin tackling reform. Even before the Rockefeller laws were paired down, New York officials had taken significant steps to diminish its prison population, according to Northwestern University School of Law's Malcolm Young:

New York never enacted rigid determinate sentencing and, apart from the notorious Rockefeller drug laws, avoided high mandatory minimums, according to the report. New York also invested in an infrastructure of alternatives to incarceration. It rapidly disposes of thousands of minor cases without lengthy pre-trial or post-sentencing incarceration and recently revised stiff drug-sentencing laws to keep low-level drug offenders out of prison and accommodate the release of rehabilitated offenders before the end of their sentences.

These smart policies resulted in a 9 percent decrease in the Empire State's prison population between 1995 and 2007. During the same period, Illinois prisons grew by another 20 percent.  (We now house over 45,000 inmates at a cost of $1.36 billion dollars per year.) However, instead of spearheading serious anti-recidivism and sentencing reforms, our top prison official is busy withering criticism of an early release plan that won't endanger public safety and will save the budget-strapped state money.

To be blunt, we are still way behind the curve.

In the crowded field of Democratic contenders for Cook County board president, Ald. Toni Preckwinkle (4th Ward) has stood out from the pack when it comes to defining and articulating her platform.  For months now, before potential voters and press, she has made her reform agenda quite clear.  Meanwhile, some of the other candidates still haven't provided their full view on the issues.

Most recently, Preckwinkle appeared on ABC 7 this past weekend, where she reiterated three ways she would break from Todd Stroger's administration: begin to roll back the sales tax hike gradually; make permanent the Cook County Health System's independent governing board; and expand jail diversion programs already being administered by the Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart's office (including the Day Reporting Center, Sheriff's Work Alternative Program, and the Sheriff's Boot Camp). Watch as she talks at length about the last priority and emphasizes that back-end support for the formerly incarcerated should be a key component of any strategy to limit the county's jail population. It's a point she's been making for months:

For more depth, you can check out Preckwinkle's recent sit-down with Jeff Berkowitz, who has also interviewed incumbent Todd Stroger and challengers Terry O'Brien and Dorothy Brown.

By acknowledging that changes need to be made at the Tamms supermax facility in southern Illinois and outlining reforms to mitigate some of the prison's worst practices, the Department of Correction's interim director Michael Randle took an important first step to ensure human rights are upheld in Illinois. Still, the most vocal critics of the prison think that Randle's review overlooked some key problems in his review. And the Sun-Times agrees. Today, the editorial board emphasized that Randle and the state legislature have more work to do to address the facility's flawed review process and the way it houses and treats mentally ill inmates. Here's an excerpt:

Randle's reforms, laudable as they are, fall short because they rely on the good faith and professionalism of the director and his department to carry them out. They are not codified in the law, which would assure they remain in effect long after Randle and Gov. Quinn have moved on. Nor are they spelled out in the state's administrative code, which would give them the strength and protection of legislative oversight.

Randle's reforms do little to beef up the cursory quality of quarterly reviews conducted by prison staff to determine whether an inmate should remain at Tamms. The proof that such reviews are inadequate is in the numbers -- 194 prisoners have been at Tamms for at least five years, many of them unnecessarily so. When prison officials, at Randle's direction, finally began conducting special reviews of these 194 cases, they quickly identified at least 45 inmates they felt confident could be returned to less restrictive prisons -- and the special reviews continue.

Easily the biggest problem at Tamms, addressed only in part by Randle's reforms, is mental illness among inmates. The very actions that can land an inmate in Tamms, such as attacking a guard, can be signs of mental illness, and the intense social isolation of a supermax prison only exacerbates the problem. The solution to the problem, unfortunately, is undoubtedly expensive and politically unpopular, beginning with a dramatic increase in mental health services in our prisons and communities.

The paper also praises Sen. Dick Durbin for chairing a hearing last week in D.C. on mental illness in U.S. prisons. It's time state legislators do the same.