* John Howard Association…

Today, we are sharing a joint monitoring report for Big Muddy River and Taylorville Correctional Centers, IDOC’s only two male prisons that offered voluntary sex offender treatment programming (VSOTP) in 2025. The report includes input from our 2025 surveys and visits.

VSOTP has traditionally been difficult for IDOC to provide, and when available has not provided enough spots for those who want to participate. During our visits, we were informed that availability of the VSOTP program continued to fail to meet high demand.

Per agency policy, completion of the program is mandatory for people who have been convicted of sex offenses to access earned sentence credits. However, long waitlists and IDOC’s practice of prioritization by outdate has resulted in people being too near release upon program completion to take advantage of months’ or years’ worth of earned credits.

Staffing vacancies had contributed to IDOC’s inability to consistently run the program at its intended capacity – exacerbating the long waitlists – despite some progress to lessen delays, such as offering remote assessments for treatment need.

In 2025, IDOC reported more than 1,500 individuals were waitlisted for VSOTP, and JHA consistently heard from people throughout IDOC that this was a programming need. IDOC reported a maximum capacity of 200 treatment spaces; programming rarely operated near this capacity, with only 70 participants at one point in 2025.

In draft review, IDOC shared there had been some improvements to existing treatment utilization, and that VSOTP had been expanded to Centralia with the aim of adding 100 treatment spaces. While this is good news, it still falls short of meeting demand. Nearly one in five people in IDOC custody is there for a sex offense. Not all these individuals are assessed as needing treatment, however.

The full report is here.