Prison drug treatment vendor waited a year for $1.8M in payments

Every week, inmates at the Southwestern Illinois Correctional Center in East St. Louis receive about 20 hours of drug treatment in the form of classes and group therapy with 25 to 30 inmates.

With the guidance of private vendor Community Education Centers, inmates have to change the behavior that coupled with the addiction led to them being incarcerated, such as burglarizing a house in order to buy drugs.

The substance abuse treatment process, which is tailored for each individual, can last one to three years for inmates, said Anita Bazile-Sawyer, warden of SWICC.

However, services for the 731 drug treatment beds at SWICC, which are among the 1,200 beds provided by the vendor, were not paid for more than a year, according to records obtained by the Belleville News Democrat.

The service provider was among the many providers who have not been paid during the ongoing budget impasse which has added to the ongoing state bill backlog which has reached $12.9 billion, according to the Illinois Comptroller’s office.

The company, which was recently sold, was owed about $1.8 million for services dating back to December 2015.

The service provider bills were finally paid on March 24, said Abdon Pallasch, director of communications for the comptroller’s office.

He said there is a six-month to one-year wait on all bills around the state, citing that no balanced budget has been proposed by the governor’s office nor the general assembly, during the budget impasse that has lasted almost two years.

“Every bill in the state is being held up because we have no budget,” Pallasch said.

Pallasch said there are times during the year, such as the holidays when people are buying presents and paying more sales tax, and during March and April when people are paying their income taxes, when the comptroller’s office is able to pay off more bills because of an influx of cash.

“It would be good to get a budget passed before the summer months,” Pallasch said.

He said the comptroller’s office is doing daily triage on which bills to pay.

He added priority of payments is pensions, bondholders and payments for people and services that are under court orders and consent decrees.

“Every month, 90 percent of money is spoken for,” Pallasch said.

Governor Bruce Rauner’s office criticized the order of bills that are paid by the comptroller’s office.

“The order of which payments are made are a question of Comptroller (Susana) Mendoza’s priorities,” said Eleni Demertzis, a spokeswoman for Rauner’s office. “We continue to encourage her to avoid creating a crisis and further harm to service providers by releasing the funds necessary to pay those most in need.”

Pallasch said vouchers for payment of services from the Department of Corrections had not been turned into the comptroller’s office for several months after services were rendered.

A sale of Community Education Centers to Florida-based Geo Group was completed Wednesday.

“GEO has a very positive, longstanding relationship with the State of Illinois, and we fully expect that to continue in the future,” said Monica Hook, vice president of strategic marketing. “I am not at liberty to discuss any of the state’s financial obligations.”

Inmates, who usually spend about one to three years in the vendor’s programs, have a lower recidivism rate than those who don’t get into the drug-treatment program.

The statewide recidivism rate is 46 percent. Those who go through the drug-treatment program have a 15 to 22 percent lower recidivism rate, according to the state department of corrections.

In order to be admitted into the program, offenders have to have low risk factors for escape, have a low aggressive potential, and be willing to go through the program, Bazile-Sawyer said.

Community Education Centers has 60 full-time employees at SWICC including counselors, among other roles. There also are about 250 state employees at the facility, including correctional officers, nurses and other support staff.

Without the provider, there would be a void.

“It really would be pulling out the purpose of Southwestern Illinois Correctional Center,” Bazile-Sawyer said if the services went away. “We are totally (a) substance abuse dedicated treatment facility with the department of corrections. It would leave a void in terms how we treat offenders with those types of problems. It would leave a significant gap in terms of the services that we could provide.”

SWICC even includes a fatherhood program and a family-reunification program to address the dysfunctional family systems that may trigger bad behavior if they’re not fixed when they return.

Bazille-Sawyer said programs offered at SWICC, is like the 12 steps on steroids.

“They get the full assessment when they walk in the door and the treatment plans of what they need to be drug free when they leave here,” Bazille-Sawyer said. “Again it might not be the same for each offender. It’s not one-size fits all, it’s really tailored to what the offender needs to keep them from coming back here.”

This story was originally published April 7, 2017 at 11:23 AM with the headline "Prison drug treatment vendor waited a year for $1.8M in payments."