Safely opening those cell doors

“The crowding of inmates in the Illinois prison system has reached crisis proportions — and the crisis is growing worse by the day.”

That quote is from a state commission formed to look at the Illinois prison system 23 years ago. There were 32,000 inmates at the time. Now there are 48,000. They cost us $1.3 billion a year.

The same quote opens the preliminary report issued this month by the Illinois State Commission on Criminal Justice and Sentencing Reform formed by Gov. Bruce Rauner with the mandate to cut the prison population by 25 percent within 10 years. The bleak picture has bright spots that don’t include dumping thugs onto our streets.

Illinois does a bad job of handling adult criminals. Truth-in-sentencing laws coupled with tough-on-crime laws swelled our prison population by locking up non-violent offenders. Most of them were druggies, and prison made most of them worse by acting as a crime trade school. Also, $116 million a year is spent on non-violent parolees who mess up and return to prison.

The irony is that we in 2004 reformed out juvenile prison system, dropping the inmate population from 1,400 to fewer than 750. We’ve become a model from the nation and saved more than $9 million by giving teens help with their problems, which include mental health, drugs, bad parents, housing instability and learning disabilities.

So the commission is looking at sentencing reform, community-based services for adult offenders, handling parolees differently and a host of other solutions.

Illinois leaders also need to look at expensive, antiquated prison technology including locks requiring multiple workers to open and paper-based purchasing systems. Additionally, our state needs to look at managing the corrections workers who gave us the $325,000 overtime bill when they used their collective bargaining rules to take off on Super Bowl Sunday and our infamous Menard guards who took the workers comp system for $10 million.

We already tried to lock up our criminal element and throw away the key, making them worse and annually costing us $22,000 each. We’re open to changes that keep violent offenders contained and salvage as many as possible.

This story was originally published July 15, 2015 at 2:00 PM with the headline "Safely opening those cell doors."