The looming closure of Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, Ill. has some of the men locked up inside worried about what it will mean for their ongoing education, even as they are relieved to leave the dangerous, aging prison.
Earlier this month a federal judge, citing health and security concerns, ordered Illinois prison officials to transfer the majority of incarcerated individuals out of Stateville by September 30. The maximum security prison currently houses around 420 men.
The court ruling gives a hard deadline to the state’s decision to shutter the 100-year-old facility. In March, Ill. Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced the state’s plan to close and rebuild Stateville, along with Logan Correctional Center, a women’s prison.
Incarcerated people have described the horrible conditions at both facilities, citing polluted water, mold, and failing infrastructure. Some have questioned whether the conditions at Stateville also contributed to the early death of Michael Broadway, a 51-year-old who recently graduated from Northwestern University, in June.
Despite its poor physical conditions, Stateville has some of the most robust programming of any prison in the state due to its proximity to Chicago. The prison currently has five colleges operating there, while many other facilities have no higher education at all.
More than a quarter of the current population at Stateville is enrolled in higher education, according to the Illinois Department of Corrections. Northwestern, DePaul and Northeastern Illinois are among the universities with programs at Stateville.
Jennifer Lackey, founding director of the Northwestern Prison Education Program, said that some students had previously chosen to transfer to Stateville from lower-security facilities in order to take advantage of the educational opportunities there.
Educators and students have been left wondering what the impending closure will mean for the thriving intellectual community that has been built at Stateville over the last several years, with many incarcerated college graduates continuing to remain engaged with their academic institutions as teaching assistants and fellows.
The closure of a prison can sometimes mean that students are scattered all over the state in the middle of their education, but representatives of the college programs at Stateville said they have submitted lists of current students and alumni to the department in hopes that they will be able to transfer with them to new facilities.
But educators expressed concern about the feasibility of continuing programs at more distant locations due to travel constraints for both faculty and campus-based students participating in programs. After Stateville, the next closest men’s prison to Chicago is Sheridan, which is more than an hour away from downtown.
Northwestern, which celebrated the graduation of its first 16 incarcerated graduates in November, had been preparing to move around 100 students and alumni to Sheridan since the end of last year, Lackey said, before Gov. Pritzker announced plans to close Stateville. Northwestern also operates a bachelor’s program for women at Logan.
“It’s an unqualified positive experience for us to move from Stateville to Sheridan,” she said.
Other colleges also eyed Sheridan for a possible move, but Lackey said space constraints there would make it difficult for another program to operate during the rebuilding period, which the state projects as taking up to five years.
North Park Theological Seminary, which offers a master of arts in Christian ministry and restorative arts, will likely be moving to Illinois River Correctional Center, said Professor Michelle Dodson, who directs the seminary’s School of Restorative Arts. They have submitted a list of 30 students and 15 alumni whom they would like to move with the program to the corrections department.
“Apart from the distance, Illinois River does seem like a really good fit for our program,” Dodson said.
Jamal Bakr is a North Park graduate who has applied to continue as a teaching assistant at Illinois River. He is hopeful about the new facility but is still unsure if all of the alumni who want to go with the program will be allowed to do so. “There are obviously not many opportunities for professional degree holders on the inside, and my fear is that I, and my very accomplished peers, will be lost in the shuffle,” he wrote. “A lot is weighing on how this transfer deal works out.”
Arianna Salgado, executive director of Prison+Neighborhood Arts/Education Project, said her group fully supports the Stateville closure and would never advocate for a prison to remain open. “It’s not a safe space for anyone to be in,” she said.
But she also acknowledged the challenge that the nonprofit will face in offering the same kind of programming they have at Stateville if they move to Hill Correctional Center in Galesburg as currently planned.
Representatives of multiple schools said that they had explored the option of moving their programs to Dixon, a men’s medium-security facility 120 miles east of Chicago, but were told by prison officials that wouldn’t work.
Professor Christina Rivers said that DePaul had been looking at offering classes at Dixon for a while, even prior to the Stateville closure announcement, because little programming is available to the population there. “But what we’ve been told by the DOC is that Dixon is rife with lockdowns and that there’s a staff shortage, so it’s just not feasible,” she said.
Dixon and Sheridan are about as far away as DePaul would be able to offer programming. Anything further away would effectively “kill off” DePaul’s in-person programming, especially bringing students from their Chicago campus to the facilities, Rivers said.
While there is little disagreement about the need to address the conditions at Stateville, there has been a lively debate about what that should look like. Some advocates are critical of the decision to rebuild Stateville at all, especially given the $900 million budget outlined by Gov. Pritzker. Representatives of the correctional officer union have been particularly vocal in their desire to keep Stateville open.
The opinions among the incarcerated population are mixed. Many want to get out of Stateville as quickly as possible due to the conditions, while others would like to remain there while a new facility is built.
Jamie Snow is one of the current North Park master’s students who might potentially be transferred to Illinois River. “From what I hear, it’s not a bad place compared to this one,” he wrote. “I feel like I’m in a washing machine and I have no idea when it stops where I’m going to end up.”
Others have questions about whether they will continue to have access to programs at their new facilities. At Stateville, the majority of the population is serving life or other extremely long sentences. “My concern moving forward is that programs will not be readily accessible as we’re herded to other facilities,” North Park graduate Benny Rios Donjuan wrote in an email. “The medium and minimum prisons prioritize programming for prisoners with shorter sentences.”
Beyond access to programming, one of the biggest concerns for the Stateville population is how far they might be from their families. “I’m currently 56 and my aging mom is 75. She can’t travel long distances to visit,” wrote Darrell Fair, a graduate of Northeastern Illinois University. “Many people here share that dilemma if forced to relocate.”
Rivers, the DePaul professor, and others like Ill. State Senator Rachel Ventura, a Democrat, have advocated for temporarily moving students to the Joliet Inpatient Treatment Center, which is less than 10 miles from Stateville, during the rebuild. Opened in 2022 as a secure medical and mental health treatment center, the facility currently only houses 68 individuals despite a 168 bed capacity, according to the department. The facility has remained partly empty due to difficulties hiring staff that have the necessary educational credentials.
Both the treatment center and Stateville are in Ventura’s legislative district and she has been running an internship with several incarcerated men there since 2023 in partnership with DePaul.
Ventura told Open Campus in July that the treatment center’s pod structure could allow for both education and inpatient treatment in separate areas. But, she said, corrections officials told her they wanted to keep the inpatient treatment center for its intended purpose. “That would be great if you could hire for it,” she said. “But instead, you have a facility just sitting empty, and that’s really frustrating.”
Illinois Department of Corrections spokesperson Naomi Puzzello said that the treatment center serves a specialized population of patients who require the most intensive level of care for severe mental illness and those who need long-term nursing care.
During a public hearing in June, acting IDOC director Latoya Hughes said the proposed rebuild design plan for Stateville would include an estimated capacity of approximately 1500, which is more than three times its current population.
Ventura said she hopes that the rebuild plans will include shutting down other aging state prisons and creating a campus focused on rehabilitation that will allow more robust education opportunities, community programming and mental health treatment, among other services, for incarcerated individuals.
Other states such as California have recently made similar decisions. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has budgeted $380 million to transform the state’s oldest prison, San Quentin, into a rehabilitative center.
This story was co-published by WBEZ Chicago.