By Alan Scher Zagier
Associated Press
ELIZABETHTOWN, Ill. — Hundreds of residents from southern Illinois’ farthest reaches on Monday appealed to Gov. Bruce Rauner to reconsider a cost-cutting proposal to shut down a minimum-security prison work camp that, along with Shawnee National Forest tourism, serves as one of the region’s few economic bright spots.
Prison workers, local politicians, union leaders and area residents told the state Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability that the proposed Hardin County Work Camp closing would further damage an isolated corner of Illinois where the poverty and unemployment rates already exceed the state average.
“Southern Illinois cannot afford this,” said Mike Stout, a business manager with ISEA-Laborers’ Local 2002, a state employees’ union. “This is an economically depressed place that needs every job it has.”
Leaders of the state Department of Corrections told the bipartisan panel of state lawmakers that the prison camp’s roughly 60 workers would be offered jobs at two other southern Illinois prisons — both about an hour drive from Cave-in-Rock, where the Hardin County camp is located.
The move would save the state $1 million annually and avoid the expense of as much as $9.8 million more in needed repairs, including a new kitchen after a recent fire, said Gladyse Taylor, acting director of the state prison system.
The first-term Republican governor announced the planned shutdown and several other state facility closures in early June amid a budget stalemate with majority Democratic legislators. That deadlock continues nearly one month into a new fiscal year that still lacks a spending plan. Illinois lawmakers last week sent Rauner a stop-gap budget plan that would cover the state’s bills for just one month.
The panel of state lawmakers that convened Monday in Elizabethtown can only make a non-binding recommendation to the governor.
Rauner’s predecessor, Democrat Pat Quinn, opted in 2012 to move forward with the closing of state prisons in Dwight, Murphysboro and Tamms despite the accountability commission’s recommendation to the contrary. Quinn also closed several residential treatment centers for people with disabilities the previous year after the commission suggested otherwise.
The Hardin County camp’s nearly 200 inmates would be dispersed to several other minimum-security prisons with available beds, Taylor said.
But several current and former prison workers told the panel that the proposed move doesn’t take into account the benefits derived by local communities that have counted on inmate labor to fill and place sand bags during floods from the nearby Ohio River, clean trash from rural highways, and tend to gardens and beehives that help stock food pantries serving the poor and elderly.
Sgt. Jerid Pickford said the inmates equally value their work on behalf of their neighbors as they prepare to return to society.
“You just don’t see this attitude in other facilities,” said Pickford, who is with the Department of Corrections and works at the Hardin County camp. “It sets their minds right to go back out into the public.”
Rauner’s proposed cuts also call for closing two juvenile detention centers and the 138-year-old Illinois State Museum in Springfield, and reducing spending on child care and senior services.