* WTTW yesterday…

James Howe was never found guilty. But he still spent nine years inside of Big Muddy River Correctional Center.

Howe joined some 170 men in Illinois in similar situations: not convicted, but held indefinitely at the southern Illinois prison under a procedure called civil commitment.

After Howe was charged with aggravated criminal sexual assault and domestic battery, prosecutors petitioned to have him evaluated as a sexually dangerous person, or SDP. Under Illinois’ Sexually Dangerous Persons Act, people deemed SDPs are subject to one of the handful of pre-conviction civil commitment statutes in the country.

“That’s the weird thing about that law is that they don’t have to convict you of the crime, but yet they put you in a prison,” Howe said. “I mean that right there says it all, does it not?”

Instead of following through with cases to their conclusions, prosecutors can petition a judge to have the defendant evaluated by psychologists or psychiatrists to determine whether they are likely to pursue sexually dangerous behaviors. If these evaluators deem a defendant a sexually dangerous person, the criminal case halts and the accused is instead sent to the downstate prison for treatment for these behaviors. […]

Though some prosecutors have told men alleged to be SDPs that treatment should last one to two years, stays at the prison have dragged on to an average of 24 years.

There’s a lot more in WTTW’s reports, so go read the rest here and here and let us know your thoughts.

* The Prison Policy Initiative’s Emma Ruth in 2022…

20 states and the federal Bureau of Prisons detain over 6,000 people, mostly men, who have been convicted of sex offenses in prison-like “civil commitment” facilities beyond the terms of their criminal sentence. […]

In Illinois, for example, the Department of Corrections (DOC) facilities are overseen by the John Howard Association, an independent prison watchdog organization. But Rushville Treatment and Detention Facility, a civil commitment center that opened after Illinois enacted its own Sexually Violent Persons Commitment Act in 1998, is not subject to the same kind of oversight because it is housed under the Department of Human Services and is not technically classified as a prison. This is true in many states that have “Sexually Violent Persons” laws on their books, and consequently, horrific medical neglect and abuse proliferate in these shadowy facilities.

A recent report from Illinois goes beyond the numbers and reports that for many, civil commitment seems like a life sentence. This 2022 report, based on a 2019 study of residents at Rushville Treatment and Detention Facility (one of Illinois’ two civil commitment facilities), exposed demographic disparities, discrimination and abuses inside, and flaws with the broader framework of civil commitment. Like the broader carceral system, civil commitment disproportionately impacts Black and Brown people. In particular, the Illinois report noted an overrepresentation of Black, Indigenous, and multiracial people at Rushville. This is in line with the findings of the Williams Institute’s 2020 report, which found that, on average, Black people were detained in civil commitment facilities at twice the rate of white people in the states studied.

Illinois and many other states use the Static-99/99R, which predicts individuals’ risk using data about groups that come from overwhelmingly unpublished studies. This risk assessment tool is notably homophobic, as it assigns a point (and thus, a higher risk value) to those who have a “same-sex victim.” The Williams Institute writes:

In addition to normalizing violence against women, this a priori assigns gay, bisexual, and MSM [men who have sex with men], who are more likely to have a male victim, a higher score, marking them as more dangerous than men who have female victims regardless of any other characteristics of the offense.

The evaluation also considers those who have never lived with a romantic partner to be at higher risk of reoffending, which means that LGBTQ+ people who may not be able to safely live with a partner in a homophobic area and young people who may not have had the opportunity to live with a partner yet would receive higher scores. Accordingly, representation of LGBTQ+ people in Rushville was drastically higher than in the general public.