* As I told you yesterday, the Illinois State Police was down at the Tamms prison yesterday to apparently interrogate Department of Corrections workers about recent leaks to the media. After my story was published, other articles began to appear…

Two weeks after officials searched guards and other employees at various state prisons for contraband, the Illinois State Police is conducting an investigation at the Tamms Correctional Center.

The state police probe is the latest wrinkle in Gov. Pat Quinn’s attempt to close the state’s only supermax prison — a controversial move that has been challenged by state lawmakers and is the subject of a court hearing in Cairo today.

A state police spokeswoman confirmed the investigation Tuesday, but wouldn’t divulge its purpose.

“We are not at liberty to comment on a pending investigation,” spokeswoman Monique Bond said in a statement.

* More…

One of those interviewed told The Associated Press the encounter lasted a few minutes and said “they were trying to intimidate me.” Gov. Pat Quinn, who wants to close the high-security Tamms lockups, said through a spokeswoman he did not order the investigation. The union representing prison employees called on the Democrat to “renounce these heavy-handed tactics.” […]

A correctional counselor called before the investigators said a police special agent displayed her badge and explained it was a criminal investigation involving a leak of private health information. The employee, who described the scene as “very dramatic,” said the special agent briefly turned over a stack of papers but what it contained wasn’t visible.

The counselor, who was also questioned several weeks ago by the Corrections investigator after a news report based on internal data, submitted a written complaint Tuesday.

“I felt like I was being harassed, that they were trying to intimidate me,” said the counselor, whose job includes preparing Tamms inmates for transfer. “It creates a hostile work environment and a distraction, and I don’t feel like I can do my job.”

* Meanwhile, some Tamms inmates are attempting to get a lawsuit tossed…

(S)even inmates at the Tamms prison in far southern Illinois are trying to get a lawsuit thrown out of court. The correctional officers’ union last week filed the suit, which seeks to stop Quinn’s plan to close prison facilities throughout the state.

The inmates, in their response, argue conditions at Tamms are deplorable and that closing the facility will not cause an increase in violence in prisons throughout the state, as the correctional officers have asserted.

The Uptown People’s Law Center in Chicago, representing the inmates, filed motions to intervene in and dismiss the AFSCME suit. Slated for closure are prisons in Tamms and Dwight; adult transition centers in Carbondale, Chicago and Decatur; and youth centers in Joliet and Murphysboro.

AFSCME has requested a temporary restraining order to stop inmate transfers and other closure activities already in motion. A hearing before a circuit judge is scheduled for 9 a.m. Wednesday in Cairo at the southernmost tip of Illinois.

The facility closures were to be completed by Aug. 31. Quinn has said Illinois cannot afford all of the prison facilities that are open, arguing that Tamms, in particular, is only half full and costly to operate.

AFSCME argues that closing facilities and consolidating inmates will add undue pressure on an already crowded and understaffed system. Violence will increase, and lives are at stake, the union argues.

“The Quinn administration is failing its duty to ensure a safe workplace for its employees. Instead, it is sending men and women to work each day in prisons that the state’s own actions are making more dangerous,” said AFSCME executive director Henry Bayer.

Nicole Schult, an attorney with the law center, said the threat of going to a “super-max” prison does not deter inmate violence within prison systems.

“On the contrary, once Mississippi reduced (its) super-max population, there was a dramatic reduction in prison misconduct and violence,” she said.

State and local lawmakers have argued that the loss of jobs from the closures will be devastating, particularly in southern Illinois, where unemployment remains high.

A hearing is scheduled for today.

* Gov. Pat Quinn defended his decision to close Tamms yesterday…

Quinn said making the decision to shutter Tamms and 56 other small and large facilities “wasn’t easy.”

“We had to do that in order to have a budget that is balanced. I inherited a $10 billion budget deficit. I did not create it, but my job is to repair things,” he said. “I’m doing that.”

* And WBEZ reports that Quinn and his Department of Corrections have blocked their access to a minimum security prison…

Our initial efforts to get inside were denied with one-line emails. Spokeswoman Brooke Anderson eventually had one ten-minute telephone conversation with me explaining their stand. She said I couldn’t go in the prisons because it was a safety and security concern, and it would strain the department’s resources.

I was a little mystified as to how my visit would strain the resources of a billion dollar department, but Anderson said if I visited a prison then they’d have to let other reporters in too. Anderson refused to talk about this on tape. Over the course of weeks she said simply that she was too busy.

* Former inmates report big problems…

When Jerome Suggs was sentenced for driving on a revoked license he was sent to Vienna, a minimum security prison near the southernmost point in Illinois, about 350 miles from Chicago. Suggs was assigned to live on the third floor of a building but there was absolutely no view.

“When I moved up there there was boards up on the windows and I was just looking like, ‘Wow! What is this?” Suggs said. This was Building 19.

Suggs says there was not a single window letting in light and that he was put in a large room with several hundred other men. All of the men were crowded onto bunks with nothing to do. There are 600 inmates in the building and only seven showers and seven toilets, and the toilets often broke and overflowed, resulting in a strong sewage smell.
“The smell that came from the showers and it came into the living quarters and yeah, I used to go to sleep with my pillow over my face, the smell was horrible, man,” Suggs said.

When the weather turned hot the boards came off the windows but then bugs could easily get in through the broken windows. Suggs, who got out just last month, says the place was also overrun with cockroaches.

“Yes! On my bed! Oh yeah. Used to have to swat them off the bed,” he said.

“Okay, my name is Mayo and I was incarcerated for 29 and a half continuous years.” Mayo, who asked that we use just his first name, was convicted in the early ’80s for committing armed robbery. For the last three years of his sentence he was in Vienna and spent some of that time in the now notorious Building 19.

Mayo says, “I thought to myself this is supposed to be a minimum security institution, but this was more like a maximum security institution in that I couldn’t believe that they would actually expect people to live under those type of conditions. The place is infested with rats and the rats were so aggressive that we used to call them kangaroo rats ’cause while I was there quite a few guys had rats actually jump up in bed with them.”