Overcrowding is costly and dangerous

They were imprisoned for prostitution, robbery and drug trafficking. They were dog fighters, arsonists, sex offenders and repeat drunk drivers. Almost 2,000 criminals of nearly every stripe short of homicide were released early from Illinois prisons between September and December 2009.

In Sangamon County alone, at least 13 inmates were released early, many serving just a fraction of their sentences. One repeat drunk driver served only a month of his year-long sentence, while another inmate serving time for possession of more than 15 grams of cocaine spent only two weeks of his five-year sentence behind bars.

Part of a plan to save $5 million in prison costs by cutting the state’s inmate population, the releases are troubling by themselves. But they also highlight a much bigger problem in the Illinois correctional system: overcrowding. It’s a problem with multiple causes and some troubling – and expensive – side effects. Critics say overcrowded prisons lead to violence, higher imprisonment costs and undermined rehabilitation efforts.

Data from the Illinois Department of Corrections show the state’s prison system has about 50 percent more prisoners than the prisons were designed to hold, with 25 of the state’s 28 prisons operating over capacity. At least three prisons hold more than double their capacity of prisoners. Correctional officers from around the state describe prisoners sleeping on cots in hallways, doubling up in maximum-security cells and showing up in the dead of winter without enough coats or shoes to go around. In total, Illinois prisons hold about 46,000 inmates – 15,000 inmates over their combined capacity of about 31,000. Those numbers do not include the state’s adult transitional centers, some of which are overcrowded as well.

The Taylorville Correctional Center, 25 miles southeast of Springfield, opened in 1990 to house 600 prisoners. It currently holds about 1,200 prisoners on a daily basis. The Lincoln Correctional Center, 30 miles north of Springfield, holds almost 1,000 prisoners on a daily basis – nearly double its intended capacity of 500. Logan Correctional Center, also in Lincoln, was meant to hold 1,050 inmates, but actually holds about 1,900 on a daily basis.

It’s not a new problem. During the 1970s and 1980s, when the issue was just beginning to develop, IDOC directors repeatedly warned the state about the dangers of overcrowding.

“Overcrowding and neglect do, of course, lead to more serious consequences,” said then-director Charles Rowe in 1978. “Institutions become very difficult to keep clean. It becomes more difficult to provide meaningful academic and vocational training programs. Many residents sit idle in their cells with absolutely nothing to do. Tensions build up and violence erupts.”

In 1985, then-director Michael Lane called the overcrowding issue a “crisis.”

“The increase in numbers of inmates and resulting crowded conditions contributed to a number of isolated incidents of a serious nature in several facilities,” Lane said. “These incidents included violent, assaultive behavior and, on several occasions, resulted in serious injury and/or loss of life.”