Illinois prisons are now scanning most physical mail and delivering it to incarcerated people electronically to prevent drug-soaked paper from entering the facilities.
That’s after AFSCME reps and prison employees picketed across the state a year ago, demanding safer working conditions.
But drugs and violence remain a serious concern inside Hill Correctional Center in Galesburg, with a series of major events inside the prison in a matter of days.
Earlier this month, there was a stabbing at Hill.
The next day, there was a hostage situation in the restrictive housing unit, prompting a response from the prison’s tactical unit.
And the day after that, there was an attempted escape.
Blaze Burford, president of AFSCME Local 1274, said those events take a toll on prison staff.
“It was frustrating. That was the general sense. A lot of my members there are frustrated with what is happening within those walls and just the way everything looks, the way it's ran, what we're told, and then what actually happens and has happened,” Buford said. “So the morale out there is fairly low and we do our best to keep each other lifted up. But when you have weeks like this, it's pretty tough. I won't lie.”
Burford said the same issues are plaguing the prison as last year. They don’t have enough staff, disciplinary policies are not consistently enforced, and drugs continue to circulate. He has worked at Hill for more than a decade.
“When I started it was a holy cow kind of moment, like oh my gosh, I can’t believe we found drugs,” Burford said. “It’s to the point now where when our housing units are calling for assistance, we’re like well, another one is high.”
Burford said it’s too soon to know what impact scanning the mail will have on the drug issue. He said there’s been minimal training on it. Plus, legal correspondence still must be delivered as hard copies, which he said can be a loophole for getting fentanyl, or paper soaked with roach spray, inside the prison.
There’s already a lot of those drugs inside. Buford said in that regard, assaults on prison staff have likely increased since the statewide picket last year.
“We still have a lot of staff getting liquid and other substances thrown on them due to these guys being in an altered state, being high from whatever it is they’re smoking,” Burford said. “We've had staff assaults where they become aggressive and resistant to when we're trying to render aid and get them the help they need. They just, they act out.”
In April of this year, a person incarcerated at Hill was murdered. More recently, someone died from natural causes after being in a fight. There’s currently a prison staff member who is off work recovering from an assault.
Burford said assaults on staff and violence among those incarcerated are directly tied to the drug problem and understaffing.
“We could tackle a lot more problems and help secure this facility,” he said. “They just have us operating on such thin numbers and still not giving us a safe place to work.”
Hill is authorized to have 200 employees. A year ago during the statewide picket, it had 135. Now, it has 141.
“We have to man the housing units because that’s where the individuals are at and that’s where we’re needed,” Burford said. “But we don’t have enough staff to put in the towers on some of the shifts on some of the days. So now we’re looking at, why is it so hard and why does it take so long to get staff hired at this facility?”
There has been some progress on the hiring front statewide, with the establishment of two regional satellite training academies pushed for by AFSCME. Kyle Spencer, the AFSCME staff representative for Hill, said progress can be slow. For instance, it took years to get the mail scanners in place.
“It takes a while, but with a little bit of persistence, we can always try to change things for the better for everybody working,” Spencer said.
Another union concern is what they consider a lax disciplinary system. The Department of Corrections operates under Department Rule 504, a section of state law governing disciplinary tracking and behavior for offenders. Spencer said IDOC has been operating under an unapproved variance to those rules not approved by the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules.
“It used to be, if there was a staff assault, you might get one year of restrictive housing. Now it could be as little as a week,” Spencer said. “The individuals in custody, they know the worst that's going to happen is I'm going to be in restrictive housing for maybe a week and then I'm back out. Oh, if I get over, you know, if I try to escape, I might only get 10 days in restrictive. There's almost no repercussions for the actions within the prison system right now.”
Hill Correctional Center is a medium-security prison that houses around 1,400 men and has been operating at capacity, according to IDOC’s most recent quarterly report.
Spencer also takes issue with the state’s system for ranking where people should serve their sentences. He says people who should be in a max security prison like Pontiac or Menard are ending up at Hill.
“Somehow when it gets to Springfield, it’s always overwritten. And the comment that usually comes up is ‘appropriately placed.’ They’re not listening to the people that are actually on the ground, doing the work,” Spencer said.
Burford said to improve safety for employees and incarcerated people at Hill, the classification system needs to be fixed — and they have to have more staff. He said it’s not just a shortage of correctional officers and security staff.
“The short staffing goes all the way into our health care unit where we have our nurses working over 100 hours a week to try and get medication and proper treatment to the individuals,” he said. “I would say each nurse is probably responsible for well over 100 different individuals every day, working 16 hours a day.”
Burford and Spencer said prison management and state officials need to be better at listening to and sharing information with local unions and frontline staff about the staffing issues and the drug problem.
A new bipartisan bill will require the Department of Corrections to collect and share data on contraband found in Illinois prisons, beginning in July of next year.
For now, Hill remains short-staffed and tense.
FOP Corrections Lodge 263 is calling for the removal of IDOC Acting Director Latoya Hughes, due to the situation at Hill at other state prisons.
They say there also have been multiple assaults on correctional officers at Western Illinois Correctional Center in Mount Sterling, including one where an officer reportedly contracted hepatitis after being struck by feces.
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