* CNI..

To Illinois prisoners, commissary is more than candy bars, shaving cream and socks. It represents normalcy and choice.

“It’s everything to them,” said Melly Rios, whose husband is in Stateville Correctional Center serving 45 years for murder.

A recent report from the John Howard Association, a prison watchdog group, detailed widespread supply shortages at Illinois Department of Corrections prison commissaries around the state. Soap, deodorant, detergent, writing materials, thermal shirts, socks, underwear and canned meat and noodles are all in short supply.

“It’s not like luxury items like candy bars or the hot new Christmas gift. These commissaries provide items that are basic necessities,” said Alan Mills, Executive Director of the Uptown People’s Law Center. Mills has litigated prisoner civil rights cases for more than 40 years.

* WUIS…

A decade after Illinois Department of Corrections inmate Anthony Rodesky began developing the blisters that would eventually lead to a below-the-knee leg amputation, a federal jury in Peoria last week awarded him $400,000, finding the state violated the Americans with Disabilities Act in its treatment of Rodesky’s type 1 diabetes.

The jury did not, however, side with Rodesky in his Eighth Amendment claims of “deliberate indifference to serious medical need” — a long-held interpretation of constitutionally prohibited “cruel and unusual punishment — against the warden of Pontiac Correctional Center, where Rodesky’s condition deteriorated, culminating in his 2015 leg amputation.

Alan Mills of the Uptown People’s Law Center, which represented Rodeksy in the case, called the jury award “extraordinarily satisfying…quite the vindication of what he’s been through for really a decade.”

But Mills said Rodesky’s path to a $400,000 jury award is emblematic of longstanding issues in the Department of Corrections, which is under a three-year-old consent decree for inadequate medical treatment for prisoners — a consent decree for which a federal monitor has repeatedly said isn’t being followed — along with a handful of settlements in other massive suits requiring institutional change within the department.

“The outcome [in Rodesky’s case] was particularly egregious but…unfortunately, the care is also typical,” Mills said. “People shouldn’t lose their legs because of a blister. And that’s what happened here. And it shows not only, I think, the poverty of medical care that’s being provided, but also it shows just how little the Department of Corrections does to deal with people who have a disability.”

* Meanwhile, from the AP…

Illinois courts are taking steps toward better understanding mental illness and its growing impact on the judicial system, which state Supreme Court Justice Anne Burke said Tuesday too often lacks compassion, treats mental disorders as a crime and skirts alternatives to jail.

Burke told reporters that her “call to action” came in response to a report her committee issued last year after months of study. It’s part of a national effort to review courts’ interactions with defendants or litigants who deal with mental health issues and so-called co-occurring disorders such as substance abuse.

“The prevalence of mental illness and co-occurring disorders has been greatly impacting our nation, our states and our communities and has had a disproportionate effect on our courts,” said Burke, adding that the courtroom’s approach to mental illness should be one of “compassion and hope.”

Research by the National Center for State Courts-led initiative found that defendants with a serious mental illness remain longer in jail than others facing similar charges, that access to appropriate health care is rare or often unavailable, and that courts rely too heavily on competency to stand trial, which leaves too many defendants waiting in jail for “restoration.”