PEORIA, IL -- John Baldwin left retirement to reform Illinois prisons.
Baldwin, the new head of the Illinois Department of Corrections, described his plans for reform to the League of Women Voters of Greater Peoria in a dinner meeting on April 7.
"The Illinois Department of Corrections is going to change dramatically in the next few years," he said, adding it needs better results.
"We are going to measure outcomes," he said. "Now we're going to know which programs work and which don't."
John Baldwin at the April 7 event. Photo by Al Harkrader.
Here is a recording of his talk.
Baldwin was the director of the Iowa Department of Corrections for eight years. Now he oversees the 35 state prisons, work camps and transition centers in Illinois, with 45,000 inmates.
He said there is a lot of work to be done in Illinois. He cited the Illinois recidivism rate of 47.1 percent, way above the national average of 35 percent of inmates who are soon back in prison after release.
He mentioned the large numbers of mentally ill prisoners, and said they need and deserve treatment. Several prisons will be converted into facilities that can treat them with proven types of therapy, he said.
Republican Gov. Bruce wants these reforms, he said, and has budgeted an 8.1 percent increase in the department's $1.3 billion budget next year, solely for the increased treatment of the mentally ill.
The DOC's 11,500 staff members will all receive two days of training in how to interact with the mentally ill, he said, from NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
The various treatment plans used in the prisons will be studied by a team at Southern Illinois University to see what works, he said.
Contracts for programs will be rewritten and enforced, he said, "which I discovered was not always the case."
The DOC will be hiring 375 mental health workers in the next fiscal year, he said.
Better treatment will increase safety, he said, since 80 percent of staff assaults are done by mentally ill offenders. "We can reduce those with more therapy."
Baldwin said, "we will change how we hire correctional officers." They are roll models to inmates, many of whom never learned basic skills of socialization. "They think it's acceptable to beat their significant other. This is behavior we have to modify." He plans a "life skills" prison, he said.
For women inmates especially, he said, "the male officer may be the first positive roll model they have ever seen."
New computer systems are being installed, for efficiency and so officers can know more about the inmates they are dealing with, he said. When he arrived last August 2015, he said, officers were still using obsolete typewriters and green screen computers, and typing names over and over and over."On December 14, we went from the stone age to the cloud."
Many inmates lack basic skills such as reading and math, and these will be taught, he said. Community work programs will be instituted, so inmates can work in the community, be paid the prevailing wage, gain skills and have savings for when they are released, he said. Then they can rent a place to live. Those without shelter soon are sent back to prison, he said.
In other states, the recidivism rate for those in these programs falls, he said.
"We need to expand opportunities for well paid jobs," for those released from prison, another way to lower the recidivism statistics.
These new approaches for offenders are more humane and increase safety inside and outside the prisons, he said. They may take a few years to be successfully implemented, but they have succeeded elsewhere, he said.
Even if there are a few well publicized failures, the overall results should outweigh the risks, he said.
Asked whether he supports private prisons, he said he did not. They end up costing the taxpayers more in the long run, he said.
The state "should not give up the responsibility to treat and house the people it sends" to prison, he said.
He mentioned the Illinois Commission on Criminal Justice and Sentencing Reform which has released recommendations that can be part of reform efforts. Some of these, such as providing inmates a free identification card when they are released from prison, cost little and can help the person survive in the outside world.
Illinois once had a model prison system and can have that again, Baldwin said, afterwards. The governor wants that, Baldwin said, adding he agreed to leave retirement to pursue that goal.
-- Elaine Hopkins
UPDATE May 20, 2016: Here is a story that ran on NPR stating Baldwin is an acting director, as his appointment has not yet been approved by the Illinois Senate.
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