What next for people in facilities being closed?
SPRINGFIELD — Amid all the politics and number-crunching, Gov. Pat Quinn’s plan to close a mix of state prisons and institutions for mentally ill and developmentally disabled people raises a basic question: What happens to all the residents of those soon-to-be-shuttered facilities?
The Quinn administration offered no details Thursday. The changes will be handled responsibly over a period of months, aides promised, while avoiding questions about what they plan or what money is available to make the changes.
Advocates for people with developmental and mental problems greeted Quinn’s announcement cautiously. Many want more residents moved out of institutions and into state-financed community housing, but they fear that a bungled transition could leave vulnerable people without care.
“Those of us who lived through the deinstitutionalization of the `70s and `80s are terrified people will be abandoned,” said Ben Wolf, an attorney with American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. The ACLU was among groups that filed three class-action lawsuits against the state, all now settled, involving housing for disabled adults.
Closing a state prison would mean transferring inmates to other prisons that are already stuffed beyond capacity and, critics say, dangerous for guards and prisoners alike.
The state’s medium-security and high-minimum-security prisons now hold 74 percent more inmates than they were designed for, Corrections Department figures show. Closing a prison with nearly 2,000 inmates could boost that to 90 percent — nearly 23,000 inmates in prisons designed to hold just 12,063.
“If you don’t do this right, it has the potential of blowing up and making things much, much worse,” said John Maki, executive director of the prison watchdog group John Howard Association of Illinois.
Advocates for both prisoners and the disabled and mentally ill said it is vital that Quinn take the savings from closing institutions and spend it on community programs. “If this is a way of shifting significant dollars from institutions to the community, we absolutely support it,” said Zena Naiditch, president of Equip for Equality.
But that is not Quinn’s intent. The closings are primarily meant to cut total spending, not use the money in new ways.
The Democratic governor announced Thursday that he intends to close the medium-security Logan Correctional Center in Lincoln and a juvenile prison camp in Murphysboro. He has also targeted mental health centers in Tinley Park, Rockford and Chester, and developmental centers in Jacksonville and Dixon.
Quinn insisted he had no choice. Legislators approved a budget that simply doesn’t include enough money to operate state government for a full year without some painful cuts to services, he said.
The Department of Human Services said legislators didn’t provide enough money to pay for moving people with developmental disabilities out of state institutions and into community care. Yet department spokeswoman Januari Smith provided little information about how that move will be accomplished.
“Patients will be evaluated to ensure the proper level of care and setting. Therefore, I cannot say how many will move into the community or other state facilities or how much it will cost,” she said in an email.
The parent association at the developmental center in Dixon will hire a lawyer to fight the closure, said Barbara Cozzone-Achino, the group’s president and mother of two adult sons living at the center. She said she’s holding Quinn and the legislature responsible for her sons’ well-being if the center closes.
Quinn “will have this on his conscience for the rest of his life” if something happens to any of the residents, she said.