* Starting off with some background from Capitol News Illinois…
Union County State’s Attorney Tyler Tripp cut a deal with a worker caught on tape beating a resident, allowing the worker to walk free — seven weeks before he filed a federal lawsuit to stop the removal of people with developmental disabilities from a state-operated facility in southern Illinois.
After numerous news reports of residents being whipped, beaten, neglected and abused at the Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center, Gov. JB Pritzker announced a plan in March 2023 to improve residents’ safety. It included installing 75 surveillance cameras and increasing security staff and management presence in resident living areas, but he also warned that Choate’s future depended on correcting these safety conditions.
Then, less than a year later, a camera caught worker John Curtis Spaulding repeatedly hitting a man who had developmental disabilities. No one reported the assault for days — evidence of a continued code of silence at Choate. […]
Another Choate worker, Joseph Clark, was caught on camera abusing a patient and charged with a felony in May 2024. […]
Three days after Spaulding entered his plea more than two years later, in late July 2026, the Pritzker administration announced cuts at Choate, phasing out services to the general intellectual and developmental disabilities population, currently at 15, by the end of September 2026 and all 75 civil mental health beds by March 2027.
The elimination of services for developmentally disabled and mentally ill residents will result in the loss of 250 of the existing 500 jobs at Choate. This has spurred litigation both from Tripp and the union that represents Choate workers.
* The Southern…
The Illinois Department of Human Services cites a combination of hiring difficulties, aging infrastructure and a small local patient population in its proposal to make cuts at Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center. […]
The application is currently in the review process, during which the Health Facilities and Services Review Board staff will conduct a comprehensive review of the project. […]
Along with the inpatient psych unit, the application states the facility’s general units for developmental disabilities have already been dramatically reduced. […]
“Choate has faced chronic challenges in hiring and retaining licensed clinicians necessary to provide adequate inpatient psychiatric care,” the application reads. “There is a limited pool of health care professionals in the area surrounding Choate, making recruitment inherently more difficult as Choate competes with private regional facilities.”
* Gov. Pritzker was asked about his administration’s decision to scale back services at Choate at an unrelated press conference yesterday…
Reporter: I wanted to ask you about Choate, three years ago you said you were going to ramp up the mental health side and kind of pull back on the [developmental disability services] side. Back in July, you decided to change the scope. Can you take us through that?
Pritzker: I said, as you may recall, early on was that if we couldn’t fix the problems that existed at Choate, that we may have to close it. And I said that from almost day one that we needed to go work on fixing it but that the problems may not be fixable. It may be endemic. It may be part of the culture of the people who work in each of those facilities. And so we tried very hard, as you know, but we saw repeated instances of people abusing their roles at Choate. So I think the decision was that we want to make sure, first and foremost, that we are protecting the patients, the people who live in those facilities. That’s what we’re attempting to do by changing up the facility. As you know, we’re not closing all of Choate, and indeed, we’re going to have continue to have jobs there, and we continue to have jobs elsewhere for many of the people who work at Choate.
And we made sure to talk to AFSCME about that long before we ever made the announcement. And now I think there are folks who want to complain about the result. But my number one consideration is protect the people who live there.
* Related…
- Flyin' Elvis'-Utah Chapter - Tuesday, Oct 6, 26 @ 12:05 pm:
Lifelong resident of Union County.
That facility has been slowly closing for over two decades.
Cite all the studies you want, decry the loss of mental health services in southern Illinois until you’re blue.
It’s a fact, and only the willfully stupid refuse to accept it.
- Irreverent - Tuesday, Oct 6, 26 @ 12:43 pm:
And Tyler Tripp gets to keep on trucking. He’ll fight to keep people in that torture hole, but he folds immediately when it’s time to address it being a torture hole. No guessing involved to see where his priorities are.