Posted by Barton Lorimor (@bartonlorimor)

* Good news first…

The Illinois Department of Corrections is making headway toward the goal of a 25 percent reduction in the state’s prison population by 2025, but continued partisan gridlock over the state budget could undermine that progress.

Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner set that goal shortly after taking office nearly two years ago and established a commission to make recommendations for criminal justice reforms to keep people out of prisons. The state’s inmate population has dropped from 48,214 on Jan. 12, 2015, the day Rauner was inaugurated, to 43,807 last week, a 9.1 percent decline.

The reasons this is good news are plentiful, and they come from both the social and fiscal sides of things. Here’s the troubling part…

“It’s great that we’re down 9 percent,” said Jennifer Vollen-Katz, executive director of the John Howard Association, a Chicago-based prison watchdog. “We’re seeing numbers we have seen in well over a decade.”

However, Vollen-Katz added, the system is still overcrowded and “we shouldn’t rest on our laurels.”

Alan Mills, executive director of the Uptown People’s Law Center in Chicago, which has used a series of lawsuits over several decades to push for reforms within the Illinois prison system, agreed with that assessment.

“This system would still be overcrowded if we had 35,000 people in it,” Mills said.

So if there were AT LEAST 35,000, which is 8,807 fewer people than are in the system this month, there would still be overcrowding. And, as Dan points out, the budget constraints make lowering that number even harder. Then toss in the administration’s current relationship with AFSCME, which staffs the prisons, and it seems to present an uphill challenge.

Not that they cannot do it, and the Department seems to be making at least some progress…

Workers who see inmates every day play a critical role in keeping mentally ill inmates stable, said Dempsey.

“What we’re asking people to do is identify, not diagnose or treat mental illness. It’s about patterns” and documenting changes in an inmate’s behavior so issues can be addressed earlier, he said.

The state also is moving forward on its obligation to open four residential treatment units for seriously mentally ill inmates.

According to Baldwin, work was completed Thursday on renovating a former youth facility in Joliet that will provide 360 beds for mental health care when it opens early next year. Work also is finished on a mental health treatment area at the Logan Correctional Center in Lincoln, and bids have been accepted for a second unit there.

Bids are expected in early 2017 for units at the Dixon and Pontiac prisons.

Related…

* With a swipe of governor’s pen, man’s life changed for the better: Even though he wasn’t in any more trouble with the law, Hendricks felt like he was still under a microscope and eventually left Edwardsville in 2005 and moved to Chicago. When he arrived in Chicago, he enrolled in the Illinois Institute of Art and earned an associate’s degree and a bachelor’s degree in culinary arts. He has worked as a chef for more than a decade.

Each time he applied for a job, though, Hendricks said he was up front with his employers. He told them about the felony conviction, something that haunted him as he got older.

“Being a convicted felon is the ultimate black mark,” Hendricks said. “Telling them you been convicted for selling drugs, it’s an uphill battle. I’ve had to fight for everything that I’ve got.