Employees of Illinois prisons staged more than two dozen demonstrations across the state on Thursday afternoon, pleading with the Department of Corrections to make their jobs safer.
In Galesburg, members of AFSCME Local 1274 gathered along Linwood Road near Hill Correctional Center, a medium security prison that houses around 1,200 men.
Union members say there have been more than 30 assaults on staff at Hill so far this year, and drug use inside the prison is skyrocketing.
“Ten years ago, it was almost non-existent. Like if you actually had some kind of a drug type case ten years ago, it was an anomaly,” said James Stickle, president of AFSCME Local 1274. “Everyone was like, holy cow. Now unfortunately, as bad as it sounds to say, it's commonplace. It happens all the time.”
Stickle, who has worked at Hill for more than 25 years, said there have been 75 drug-related incidents at Hill since November of last year.
In March, a correctional officer at Hill noticed an oily substance on two greeting cards that were mailed to people incarcerated there. The cards tested positive for fentanyl.
Two weeks later, two pieces of paper in a cell also tested positive for fentanyl.
Stickle said in addition to fentanyl, synthetic drugs are also inside the prison, and incarcerated people are smoking paper that has been coated with bug spray.
A growing plague
Elsewhere in west central Illinois, there were more than 200 drug-related incidents last year at Illinois River Correctional Center in Canton. At Western Illinois Correctional Center in Mt. Sterling, there were 183 in six months.
That’s according to “The Growing Plague of Drugs in Illinois Prisons,” a report released last month by AFSCME Council 31. The union says while drug use is soaring in prisons across the state, the Illinois Department of Corrections doesn’t have a coherent and consistent strategy to address the problem.
AFSCME represents more than 10,000 prison workers in Illinois. They’re asking the Department of Corrections to do more to prevent drugs from getting inside and to enforce consistent disciplinary measures as a deterrent.
“AFSCME members should not have to face violent assaults, illegal drugs and chronic staff shortages as common occurrences when just doing their jobs,” Council 31 Executive Director Roberta Lynch said in a release. “We demand that leadership of the Department of Corrections step up and do more to make this essential work safer.”
Drug use has exploded
AFSCME is also asking the state to expedite hiring correctional officers to address significant understaffing in Illinois prisons.
Stickle said Hill is authorized to have 200 employees, but currently has around 135 — and turnover has increased in the last few years.
“A lot of people, they'll work here for a year or two and decide that they can't do it. And it's completely understandable, because you have that short staffing component on top of the rise in the assaults and the rise in the drug issues,” Stickle said. “The state doesn't really appear to be concerned in any way. Outwardly, they appear to just pretend like it's not happening and it'll go away type of mentality. And that's very disheartening for staff to see that.”
Stickle said disciplinary policy changes in the last few years caused the current problems at Hill — and that union members working in prisons across the state have been approached by incarcerated people who want the problems addressed.
AFSCME Council 31 submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for IDOC’s counts of illegal drug incidents per month, but IDOC denied them. So the union has been gathering the data from union leaders and frontline employees.
“In interviews with employees across the Illinois prison system, at every level of security, staff have reported that drug use has exploded over the past two years, to the point that smelling burning smoke is a daily occurrence for many corrections employees,” the AFSCME report reads.
For Stickle, the safety they’re talking about at Hill Correctional Center is also community safety.
“Because our job is to keep these places secure. Not being able to do that because of the staffing, because of the drug problems that the state is just not addressing, and just the general deterioration of working conditions makes it more unsafe for the community at large,” Stickle said.
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