* The Illinois Answers Project…

Since 2019, eleven Illinois county jails have reported using what they call “pepperball launchers” or “AR pepper ball guns,” according to an Illinois Answers Project analysis of county incident reports. Staff typically decontaminated areas afterward and offered people showers, fresh clothes and medical attention. In some cases, the pepperballs caused bruises, welts, coughing, irritated eyes and difficulty breathing. In Jefferson County, a man who officers shot with pepperballs had to go to a hospital. In Sangamon County, a sergeant fired 30 to 40 rounds into a cell, sickening a fellow officer to the point that they had to go home. […]

Statewide outside of Winnebago County, officers typically fired pepperballs to quell fights and large group disturbances happening in common spaces, with officers first aiming at walls, ceilings or floors before targeting people. Rock Island County Jail records show that in 2023, detained people had caused flooding and refused to return to their cells for over an hour when officers responded with riot shields, Tasers, a dog and pepperballs. […]

In Winnebago County Jail, the state’s second-largest, incident reports show officers have fired at a single person inside a cell 24 times since 2019, directly hitting them in at least 13 of those incidents. Winnebago County has documented more pepperball incidents than any other jail in the state, and it’s becoming a more frequent practice there: Officers used pepperball launchers at least ten times in the first half of 2026 alone.

Asked about the incidents, Winnebago County noted the jail’s large size and said officers have fired pepperballs at fewer than half of 1% of people detained there. […]

Officers documenting the incidents often identified the people they’ve fired pepperballs at as having a mental illness, being housed in a mental-health unit or awaiting transfer to state psychiatric facilities through the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS). The sister of a man Winnebago County officers shot with pepperballs in 2020 told Illinois Answers that he suffered from schizophrenia.

In at least six incidents in Winnebago County, officers launched pepperballs at people who refused to be handcuffed in order to receive medication, according to county incident reports.

The county’s use-of-force policy requires officers to attempt de-escalation techniques and consider additional factors when engaging with people who have mentally illness, such as whether the person was incapable of making rational decisions and whether force is necessary.

* Some of the Winnebago county incident reports…

In 2019, a mentally ill man was lying naked on the floor under his bunk when an officer fired through the food slot in his cell door to try to get him to comply with a medication injection, according to the incident report. “Don’t shoot again,” the man said. Officers then entered the cell and restrained him so a nurse could administer the shot. The sheriff’s office later reviewed the use of force and found the incident was justified, noting the man was a “mental health inmate” and had a “history of violence.”

A month later, an officer again fired pepperballs at the same man — whose “mental-health behavior” had been “declining” — to get him to comply with another injection, according to the incident report. The man used his mattress as a shield, and the officer fired a pepperball at the wall, then at the man’s thigh. Staff then handcuffed the man and administered the injection.

In 2020, an officer fired three rounds directly into a man’s abdomen and thighs to compel him to comply with being handcuffed, according to the incident report. Officers acknowledged the man was unresponsive to orders “due to his mental-health issues.”

In 2021, a man lying under a blanket in the corner of his cell refused to come to the door for emergency medication, the incident report shows. An officer fired a round at a stool inside the cell, then fired more rounds at the floor and wall, then above the man’s head. He eventually came forward to be handcuffed and receive medication.

In 2022, an officer fired into the padded cell of a mental-health unit after a detained person refused to return a piece of jail property, according to the incident report. The man “quickly retreated to the back of the cell as I began to take aim through the food port,” the officer wrote. The man then “took his blanket and used it to shield himself.” The officer fired two more rounds into the cell.

In 2024, a detained person in the mental-health housing unit was refusing to return his breakfast tray and submit to handcuffs. An officer fired “2-3 rounds” through the food slot, hitting the man’s thigh, then “5-6 more rounds” into his thigh, according to the incident report. The man ran to the back of his cell to use his mattress as cover. An emergency response team armed with shields, gas masks and helmets entered the cell and restrained him.

That same year, a man awaiting transfer to IDHS was in a “manic state” and refused to uncover his cell’s surveillance camera, so an officer “aimed at the inmate for a direct impact volley,” according to the incident report. The man attempted to block the round with a blanket, but it hit him in the thigh. Officers then pulled the blanket out of the cell to give the officer “a better line of sight” for more rounds. The officer fired three more rounds, “saturating” the cell with irritants. The man received medical attention afterward and showered. An officer wrote that interactions with the man “have been problematic with compliance having to be forced through the use of OC [Oleoresin Capsicum] spray due to his deteriorating mental state and unwillingness to cooperate with simple instructions.”

In 2025, a man awaiting transfer to IDHS refused to come forward for medication, so an officer fired three rounds through the cell door’s slot, hitting his legs, according to the incident report. As the man used a blanket to shield himself, the officer fired three more rounds above his head. When the man still did not come forward, the officer fired two rounds into the wall. The officer then fired two more rounds, one grazing his leg and another directly hitting his thigh. A nurse then administered a shot and attended to his injuries, which included bruising, welts and abrasions.

That same man was shot again in May, after he refused to return a dust pan that he had pulled into his cell. An officer filled the cell with pepper spray, then fired three pepperball rounds above the man’s head, according to the incident report. The man was “clearly affected by the saturation of OC and began washing out his eyes with water from his sink.” The officer fired three more rounds, hitting the man on his thigh and prompting him to appear at the cell door to be handcuffed.

* More…

Illinois Answers obtained copies of internal use-of-force reviews that some jails conducted to assess whether officers deployed pepperball launchers appropriately. Those reviews typically found the deployment justified. Other jails relied on outside review from the Jail and Detention Standards Unit (JDSU) within the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC), which monitors jails for compliance with state standards.

Illinois state standards require jails to report an array of “extraordinary or unusual occurrences,” such as the use of a control device or chemical agent, to the JDSU. Those reports require staff to provide details about what happened and offer “recommendations to prevent future occurrences.”

In state fiscal year 2025, the JDSU received thousands of “extraordinary or unusual occurrences” reports from county jails, but only reviewed about a dozen. The JDSU didn’t review any of the nine pepperball reports it received over that period. IDOC previously told Illinois Answers that the unit makes every effort to review reports but is not required to do so.

Some incidents may never have been reported to the unit in the first place. Neither Winnebago County nor the JDSU could provide documents showing any of the nine incidents where guards fired pepperballs in 2026 had been reported to the JDSU.

Only some of the reports jails submitted to the JDSU since 2019 offered “recommendations to prevent future occurrences.” One officer urged the state “to have people being held because they are deemed unfit for trial by the courts placed in DHS custody in a more timely manner.” Another wrote: “DHS needs bigger facilities or I suggest prioritizing their patients, accepting the most severe first.” Others said that they had a “possible mental-health subject” or that a detained person “needs mental-health treatment.”

Others left the field blank.

* Also from the Illinois Answers Project today…

* Unsanitary, unsupervised, understaffed: Most Illinois jails aren’t meeting minimum state standards: Last year, more than half of Illinois county jails were cited for at least one violation. Cook County Jail, the state’s largest, violated standards for supervision, security, admissions procedures, reporting, sanitation and more, the inspection found. Detained people had to wait “hours” before receiving showers upon entry. The facility also wasn’t submitting required data about restraints used on pregnant prisoners. Despite the persistent problems, the Attorney General’s Office said it hasn’t received a referral from IDOC in over a decade. And it’s unclear if IDOC is taking any local enforcement action. In practice, jails continue to subject detained people to subpar conditions, year after year. Neither IDOC nor the office of Governor J.B. Pritzker, which oversees the department, responded to requests for comment.

* Dozens of deaths in Illinois jails missing from state records: Dennis Barrett is one of hundreds of people who died in Illinois county jails, or shortly after being released, between 2019 and 2025. But his case was not included in data on deaths in custody that the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority (ICJIA) is required by state law to collect and make public. He’s not the only one missing from the data. At least 63 of those people — more than a quarter of jail-related fatalities statewide during that time period — did not appear on the state’s list of in-custody deaths, Illinois Answers found.

* Escapes. Fires. Rebellions. Trove of records reveals chaos inside Illinois county jails: Cook County recorded the highest number of forced medication incidents between 2019 and 2025. Will County reported the second-highest number over that seven-year period. One man there was forcibly medicated 14 times over the course of 2018. Of these instances, in the course of 12 months, he was pepper sprayed six times. He was restrained in a chair every single time prior to being medicated. Forced medication “should be a pretty rare thing,” said Amanda Antholt, a civil rights attorney with Equip for Equality, a nonprofit that advocates for people with disabilities. She added that its use “raises a ton of questions for me.” […] Illinois jails reported more than 300 fires, with the vast majority in Cook County. The jail was reporting nearly a fire every other day in 2022 and 2023, but that trend tapered off in 2024. In some cases, people who started fires, or whose cellmates started fires, ended up in the hospital. At least one incident was fatal: Last November, Martinez Duncan , 24, died after his cellmate started a fire. Officers removed Duncan from the cell and restrained him to a bench, where he fell unconscious. The coroner ruled the death a homicide, and the autopsy revealed soot on Duncan’s body.

* State standards designed to prevent jail suicides don’t always work: Suicide is a leading manner of death in correctional facilities, according to a 2025 report from the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority (ICJIA), the state agency tasked with tracking in-custody deaths in jails and prisons. According to records ICJIA provided in response to Illinois Answers’ public-records request, at least 30 people died by suicide in Illinois jails between 2019 and 2025. An Illinois Answers analysis of coroner records identified more than two dozen suicides in jails during that time period that were not included in ICJIA data. […] People who are deemed unfit for trial because they have a mental illness often wind up in county jails while they await beds at a state psychiatric facility. Connor said Madison County Jail can’t handle them. “The state has dropped the ball for many years of not putting them in facilities that they need to be” in, he said. “And we don’t have a staff that is properly trained, or a facility that’s properly equipped for that.” Connor said his jail works with Franklin, Kankakee and McHenry counties, which are better equipped to house people with mental illness. But the number of people in need of mental health beds far outweighs those jails’ capacities. Connor said more capacity is needed from facilities managed and run by the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS), which operates state-run inpatient psychiatric hospitals.

* Two years after Illinois Answers exposed restraint-chair abuse, jails are doing better: The investigation found that only half of all incidents jails logged internally were being reported to the state. Staff at Cook County Jail used the devices nearly 900 times over five years and never reported it to the Jail and Detention Standards Unit (JDSU) within the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) as required under state rules. Champaign County also failed to report dozens of incidents. As a result of the investigation, the JDSU began citing facilities in annual inspections for failing to report such incidents. Jails in Cook, Champaign and other counties started reporting their use of restraint chairs, and, in the years that followed, reports of other extraordinary events also increased statewide as awareness about reporting requirements spread. The average number of reports fell statewide last year.