The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

"What it comes down to for me is the state is releasing people when they violate their paroles, the state is not re-violating them, bringing them back into the system," McCoy told a local TV reporter.

McCoy pointed to the case involving William Balfour, a suspect in the murders of three members of Jennifer Hudson's family, as an example of the state's negligence.

"This person should have been behind bars. He was arrested this summer, and he should be behind bars, and that family would be alive today if it turns out he actually committed that crime," McCoy said.

Balfour has been questioned but has not been charged with the murders.

But he is in prison awaiting charges on a parole violation. Balfour served seven years in prison for a 1999 conviction for attempted murder and vehicular hijacking.

Allegedly, Balfour failed to meet his anger-management requirements stemming from that decade-old conviction.

On June 19, Balfour was arrested for possession of one gram of cocaine. A judge dismissed the drug charge. Balfour was given a break instead of a trip back Downstate.

So McCoy has a point.

But the debate over closing Pontiac has little to do with keeping felons like Balfour off the street.

This debate is really about this prison town keeping its jobs.

It doesn't matter that there are open beds at other facilities, and that there is a near-empty $140 million, seven-year-old prison in Downstate Thomson.

That's why three lawsuits have been filed by AFSCME, the union representing Pontiac's workers, in an attempt to stop Pontiac's closing.

On Tuesday, a judge in southern Illinois issued a temporary restraining order barring the state from transferring any more prisoners out of Pontiac.

These prisoners weren't being released into the street to wreak havoc. They were being transferred to other prisons with open beds so the state could close Pontiac -- one of the oldest prisons in the Department of Corrections.

Pontiac is slated to be closed Dec. 31, and about 500 employees will be moved to other prisons.

Trina Keller, wife of a correctional officer, told ABC-owned WLS-Channel 7 reporter Paul Meincke how difficult she expected things to get.

"[E]very day I ask how are we gonna handle this? Am I gonna have to declare bankruptcy?" she said.

Bereft of industry, Livingston County, where Pontiac is located, has depended on Chicago sending it its criminals for the last 137 years.

Think about that.

Generations in that area of the state have paid for their homes, sent their children to college and retired on the backs of criminals.

And let's face it.

Many of those criminals, too many in fact, are young black men from the South and West sides.

So if Downstate communities are desperate to keep the prison industry going, where is the real incentive for legislators to reduce recidivism?

The fight the union is putting up to keep Pontiac open (and before that Stateville) tells me there isn't any.

That would be like the liquor industry urging its patrons to stop drinking.

Even when Blagojevich argues that "statewide reforms have led to historic reductions in crimes by former offenders,'' and that is a savings for taxpayers, he is fighting a whirlwind.

Given the recent heinous crimes, it isn't difficult for prison towns to convince the public that the state has accomplished its goal by ignoring parole violators.

Young black men who fall into the prison trap are indeed fools.

They should have figured out by now that their poor choices have become the stuff that builds other people's dreams.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/mitchell/1290133,CST-NWS-mitch20.article
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Adams: Hudson 'link' a red herring in prison saga
By PAM ADAMS
Journal Star
Posted Nov 19, 2008 @ 11:48 PM

Prisons don't die easy.

Pontiac Mayor Scott McCoy has made the strongest accusations yet against a state prison system and a governor accustomed to strong accusations. The horrible situation in Pontiac goes much farther than the state's plan to close the century-old prison there.

Basically, according to Mayor McCoy, the murders of Jennifer Hudson's mother, brother and nephew are partly the governor's fault. Basically, according to the mayor, the Hudson family deaths could have been avoided. Basically, he said, state officials are deliberately allowing dangerous parole violators free to roam the streets, rather then returning them to prison, in a cynical scheme to make the governor's prison-reduction programs look successful.

According to the mayor, the person of interest in the Hudson family tragedy is one of those dangerous parole violators, thus some of the blame for their deaths should land at the governor's doorstep. But the governor was too concerned about his public face to consider the public's safety. With the prison population down, the state not only saves money but state officials can use the alleged reductions as the logic for closing a prison.

Bottom line, Mayor McCoy explained during a much-hyped press conference earlier this week, no one is safe.

The situation, he suggested, is what put the Hudson family in harm's way and, as he told reporters, is "putting my family and every one of your families in harm's way."

The implication is, of course, that if Pontiac prison remains open we can all breathe a sigh of relief.

Pontiac residents and their supporters rallied again this week in Springfield. The mayor is scheduled to speak at a House committee hearing today. Though a Johnson County judge has temporarily halted the transfer of Pontiac inmates prior to the scheduled closing later this year, a few other judges have yet to weigh in on lawsuits filed to save the prison.

You can't blame a town for fighting to save its second-largest employer. You can't blame Pontiac for being suspicious of the Department of Corrections' logic for closing Pontiac Correctional Center, coming as suddenly as it did after the change of mind about closing Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet.

The mayor is right when he says closing Pontiac prison is a lot bigger than Pontiac. There may be cause for concern regarding the record-setting reductions in the number of Cook County parole violators returned to prison since 2002. But his data should have undergone a lot more scrutiny before he threw in the Hudson family as a trump card in a desperate bid to keep Pontiac open.

William Balfour, the parole violator who piqued the mayor's interest, remains only a "person of interest," not a suspect in the Hudson deaths. The mayor's numbers on parole violations in Cook County don't separate violent offenders from the non-violent ones who contributed to the bulk of the incarceration boom, nor do they offer firm evidence that parole violators are responsible for Chicago's rising murder rate. Nor do they make mention of the judicial role in revoking parole.

Coincidentally, a day after the mayor's press conference, Illinois State Police reported crime, from murder to theft, dropped statewide again last year, continuing a 13-year slide.

Mayor McCoy admitted he didn't know much about recidivism rates - that is, the number of felons who return to prison within a year of their release. "And if it wasn't for the Hudson case, I probably wouldn't have looked at this as much as I'm doing."

If he keeps looking, he'll realize Pontiac's rural pain is Chicago's inner-city misery. Inner cities and rural communities share similar problems - high unemployment rates, as well as poor access to decent, affordable housing, health care, transportation and grocery stores.

The jobs and the families McCoy is trying to protect are intimately linked to the jobs and the families who weren't helped when a confluence of interests conflated incarceration into economic growth beginning 30 years ago, not to the tragic deaths of a celebrity's relatives.

Pam Adams is a columnist with the Journal Star.
http://www.pjstar.com/opinions/x2067099653/Adams-Hudson-link-a-red-herring-i
n-prison-saga