Share information on criminally insane
It's the fear of the unknown that often scares us the most.
What is going on behind the barbed wire of that youth prison down the road? Who is living in that mental health facility? Am I in danger?
Every once in a while, the state of Illinois reminds us how scary those answers can be.
You can learn a great deal from the state about its adult prison population with a few keystrokes. But as we learned with the recent suicide of a teen at the St. Charles youth prison, there is precious little information available about the facilities that house our youth, who is staying there or what happens to them once they get there.
A recent escape from the Elgin Mental Health Center revealed, too, that we really know nothing about what goes on behind its medium security walls.
Barbara McNally of Bartlett has been worrying for more than a year that James Masino, the man who was found not guilty by reason of insanity in the murder of her husband, would escape the Elgin Mental Health Center and visit what's left of her family one train stop away in Bartlett.
You can imagine her state of mind when she learned an inmate at the state hospital escaped on Sept. 19 and ended up in Bartlett.
It wasn't Masino but Maikobi Burks, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity for the murders of his parents and sister 16 years ago in Chicago. He stole a key and escaped in the early morning hours when security was light, officials say, and the proper chain of notification, in which the hospital calls Elgin police and Elgin alerts surrounding towns, didn't happen according to plan. Bartlett police were unaware the man they found wandering in a resident's yard at 8:22 a.m. was an escapee.
Burks' "elopement," as they euphemize it in mental health circles, shows that people like Barbara McNally are justifiably concerned.
Yes, escapes are rare. It was only the third in 10 years from the unit at Elgin that handles people who are deemed unfit to stand trial or are being held in lieu of prison because they are insane. But the episode points to two problems: patients are given deference over victims or families of victims in determining where they are placed; and the community is kept in the dark about the dangers behind the walls of mental health facilities.
State Sen. John Millner and state Rep. Randy Ramey say they'll work in January to change the policy of placing patients in facilities close to family members and instead take into account the proximity of that patient to his victims.
We feel that is long overdue. But we'd like to see Illinois go a step further and require the release of basic information about the criminally insane and a better and more public notification procedure when one escapes.
We appreciate the rights of people who are mentally ill, but it's time we start thinking, too, about the well being of the rest of us outside those walls.