Prisoner phone law among those signed
Gov. Bruce Rauner signed a suite of bills into law this week focused on criminal justice reforms, including one which limits how much prisoners pay for phone calls.
The laws come as Rauner seeks a 25-percent reduction in Illinois’ prison population by 2025. The signing of the bills coincides with the release of a new report detailing the “collateral consequences” of having a felony conviction in Illinois.
Rauner signed the bills at a ceremony in one of the Illinois Department of Corrections’ adult transitional centers near Chicago.
“We need to approach our criminal justice system with more compassion,” Rauner said. “I want those who did something wrong to face punishment, but we must make sure that the punishment fits the crime. We need to explore new avenues so that we’re balancing punishment with rehabilitation and not needlessly tearing families and lives apart.”
Shortly after Rauner took office at the start of 2015 he created the Illinois State Commission on Criminal Justice and Sentencing Reform, a bipartisan task force focused on devising reforms to the state’s justice system and reducing the inmate population without compromising public safety. The group includes prosecutors, public defenders, judges, state senators and representatives and experts on the criminal justice system.
The first portion of the group’s final report was released in December, and one of the bills Rauner signed on Monday came from the commission’s recommendations.
That law, Senate Bill 3164, requires judges to review a “presentencing” report before sentencing someone to prison. Rauner’s office says that in 2015, 60 percent of new inmates convicted of Class 3 or 4 felonies (the two least serious classes of felony) had no previous violent crime convictions. Sending first-timers with nonviolent convictions to prison “inefficiently uses prison resources and potentially makes low-level offenders more susceptible to reoffending,” Rauner’s office says.
A separate law, House Bill 5973, addresses bans on convicted felons holding licenses to perform a variety of jobs like funeral director, embalmer, roofing, cosmetology and more. The law specifies certain felonies which would preclude a person from holding one of those occupational licenses and directs the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, when weighing whether to grant a license, to consider mitigating factors like how long ago the conviction occurred or how old the person was at the time.
Under another law, inmates in Illinois prisons can’t be charged more than seven cents per minute for phone calls. The law aims to limit how much families must pay to talk by phone with incarcerated loved ones. (Prepaid and collect calls will be capped at 23 cents per minute.) The state Department of Corrections contracts with an outside company to provide call service for inmates, and the new law requires IDOC to choose the lowest per-minute bid for such service. A provision which would have banned IDOC from collecting commissions on inmate calls was removed before passage.
Rauner also signed a handful of other bills related to criminal justice, like Senate Bill 3005, which removes a lifetime ban on people convicted of certain drug offenses from working at a park district. Under the new law, park districts may hire someone with certain drug convictions seven years after the person’s sentence is completed.
Another new law, House Bill 2569 requires that before a judge accepts a defendant’s guilty plea, the judge explain several things, like the possible consequence on the defendant’s ability to find housing, get a job or obtain certain licenses. That bill relates to a report published this month by the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority on the effects of being convicted of a felony in Illinois. The report says 1.5 million people in Illinois were convicted of felonies in the past 30 years, leading to both official and de facto limits on jobs, housing and more. Illinois has 1,449 laws limiting the rights of convicted felons, according to the report.
“…[C]ollateral consequences create barriers to rehabilitation in the aftermath of a criminal conviction,” the report says, “as they limit employment prospects, constrain wages and limit wage growth.”
Contact Patrick Yeagle at [email protected].
