Carl Rogers, whose story Open Campus and WBEZ first reported in April 2024, walked out of Robinson Correctional Center in Illinois on February 14. By his calculations, his release came more than a year later than it should have.
Rogers was released from prison because of a law that went into effect last year giving sentence credits for work and education. He contends he should have been eligible for release in January 2024, when the change took effect. The new program has been beset by bureaucratic failures, and there are still people in Illinois who believe they would be immediately eligible for release if the Illinois Department of Corrections had properly calculated their sentence credits.
Meanwhile, a December 2023 internal report obtained by Open Campus shows the department was aware of the recordkeeping issues that have plagued the new system before the sentence credit law even went into effect. That report estimates it could take until 2029 to digitize all records necessary for proper credit calculations.
Rogers couldn’t wait that long. After Open Campus first reported on his case, Rogers staged a hunger strike, along with other incarcerated individuals at Robinson, to try and force prison officials to review his case and award him the sentence credits. On Valentine’s Day, he was finally released after spending almost 32 years behind bars.
“It was bittersweet, because I had to fight to get my freedom, … [and] go on hunger strikes to receive sentence credit,” Rogers told Open Campus last week. “But for these last two weeks … it’s just been elating.”
In June, Open Campus reported that two other men also resorted to hunger strikes after failing to make progress through the administrative grievance process. Those two men have both been granted work release, but still remain incarcerated.
Another man, Richard McConnell, was released last April after he was featured in the original story.
An ongoing battle
Angela Bowers, who has been incarcerated since 1995, has a similar story to Rogers. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Lewis University in 1999 while at Logan Correctional Center, a women’s prison. She also worked in correctional industries as a warehouse clerk.
Bowers wrote a letter to Open Campus in February stating that she has not received sufficient credit for work and programming she did prior to 2010, when the corrections department implemented a digital recordkeeping system. She received a counseling summary from June 2024 that explicitly mentions recordkeeping challenges: “Since work assignments did not keep daily attendance and not all records transferred,” the prison had to rely on partial records to calculate her credits, a counselor wrote.
That same counseling summary also reveals that IDOC is only giving half-day credit for jobs in correctional industries prior to 2018. That decision means the agency is choosing to interpret the new law as not being retroactive. That could mean years of difference in release dates for long-serving people like Bowers. It also contradicts the way the bill sponsor told Open Campus last year that the law was supposed to work.
An IDOC spokeswoman said the department is awarding credit to any woman at Logan prison who has documentation of work, and that the department is continuing to review individuals for sentence credits.
IDOC knew about records issues
Corrections officials were aware of challenges with recordkeeping before the law took effect on January 1, 2024. The December 2023 report acknowledged fundamental record-keeping issues, noting that an individual who has been incarcerated for 20 years “may have 12 to 15 master file volumes … requiring dedicated banker boxes and other storage implements for transport when transferring facilities; undoubtedly, these files contain thousands of pieces of paper.”
The master file is the document that is supposed to track everything an individual has done over their entire incarceration.
The report also concluded that IDOC lacks a “uniform, electronic records management system” and that it would take until 2029 to digitize all master record files. The estimated cost for digitization was approximately $250 million.
These findings confirm what Open Campus found in April 2024: Many of the records being used to recalculate people’s sentences only go back to 2010. But most of the people like Rogers and Bowers who are eligible for sentence reductions under the new law have been incarcerated since the 1990s.
As of January 6, 2025, approximately 2,019 individuals have had their sentencing credits reviewed under the law, according to IDOC. Of those reviewed, 1,213 remain in custody and 806 have been released. IDOC records show 47 women have had their records reviewed and 28 women have been released under the new law.
In November 2024, a judge cleared the way for a broader lawsuit to challenge how IDOC has been calculating sentence reductions. The lawsuit, which started as one prisoner’s complaint filed without an attorney, alleges IDOC has “instituted a policy and practice of prohibiting the retroactive award of credit for programs completed or engaged in prior to 2010.”
The state tried to have the lawsuit dismissed, arguing in January that sentence credit awards are discretionary, not mandatory and that the law gives the department broad discretion over credit calculations. In a new filing this month, attorneys for people locked up said the law is “ rife with explicit, non-discretionary sentence credit requirements.”
A hearing in the case is set for next week. Alan Mills, an attorney at the civil rights firm Uptown People’s Law Center, said if successful in court, the case should benefit everyone in Illinois who is eligible for credit under the earned time law.
A spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Corrections did not comment on the class suit, citing the pending litigation.
A long year of waiting
When Open Campus first reported on Rogers’ case in April 2024, he had received enough credits to knock about three years off his sentence, which meant he had around another three years left to serve. At that time, his master file summary only showed work and programming history dating back to 2010, despite him being incarcerated since 1993.
Rogers said that prison officials granted him around 500 additional days after the Open Campus story was published last year — but still not all he believed he was due.
In June 2024, Rogers went on a two-day hunger strike after traditional grievance processes failed. He then received approximately 400 more days off his sentence. Between those credits and others he earned from work and programming in the last year, he was eligible for release in February.
Rogers and others said they struggled with the lack of transparency in how prison staff calculate sentence credits. Sentence recalculations are done by hand on paper, but do not always list which work assignment or program the person is being given credit for. This makes it extremely difficult for people to challenge incorrect calculations.
Now free, Rogers is focused on finding employment and reconnecting with family. Unlike his limited dining options in prison, he savors simple pleasures like fresh grapefruit — a fruit that hasn’t been available to him for decades.
Rogers is happy to be home, but continues to think about the men and women who are still fighting to get the sentence reductions they believe they have earned.
“Just adhere to the law — it’s not complicated. It’s plain language. It says, ‘give them full sentence credit,’ ” Rogers said.