Governor again uses power over prisons

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SPRINGFIELD - Four years ago, then-Gov. George Ryan proudly announced he would build a new prison in poverty-stricken Hop-kins Park, just outside his hometown of Kan-kakee. Today, the construction site is silent, the project abandoned. Ryan's predecessor, Jim Edgar, used the power of his office to make a similar decision in 1998. He would build a prison in Thomson to create jobs for a region reeling from the closure of a federal Army depot. The prison was built but never opened, a victim of budget cuts. Now Gov. Rod Blagojevich is the one exercising his power over prisons. He already reopened one prison shut down by Ryan, and in last week's budget address he called for closing the Vandalia prison - located in the district of one of his most vocal legislative critics - and a juvenile prison in St. Charles. His announcement launches another round in the highly competitive, and often political, competition for the jobs and tax revenue that accompany state prisons. The communities losing prisons under the governor's proposal are putting together a coalition of local officials, state lawmakers and union leaders in hopes of changing Blagojevich's mind. Some lawmakers and prison experts are getting fed up. They argue that decisions about opening and closing prisons - costly decisions that can affect crime rates and inmates' lives for years - should not depend on which town lobbies the hardest or where a governor needs to pick up votes. "I don't see that this process has any integrity," said Jim Thomas, a criminal justice professor at Northern Illinois University. One idea floated by Sen. Steve Rauschenberger, R-Elgin, is to set up a commission, much like the federal panel that reviews military bases, to study the state's prison needs and the best ways of meeting them. The commission would make recommendations on which prisons to close and when to build new ones. Lawmakers could accept or reject the recommendations with some confidence that they were based on solid evidence. "It takes the politics out of it," said Rauschenberger, who is a candidate for U.S. Senate. "This would raise everybody's level of understanding and assurance." Blagojevich rejects the idea. "I'm very much for more accountability, not less, and I don't feel it would be responsible of me to shift my responsibility as governor to avoid making the hard decisions by having a commission," he said. For years, the state needed new prisons to house the growing number of inmates. Those prisons came to be considered prizes for small towns where factories had shut down and family farms were disappearing. Towns engaged in bidding wars to present the state with the most attractive package of land and infrastructure improvements. City leaders in Grayville even hired a lobbyist with connections to Ryan. Now federal prosecutors say that lobbyist, Arthur Swanson, knew Ryan had already chosen Grayville when he took the town's $50,000 fee. Swanson is now under indictment. The huge growth in the prison population - currently 53 percent more than the prisons were designed to hold - began slowing at roughly the same time the state's tax revenues bottomed out about four years ago. The state no longer needed new prisons as badly and couldn't afford its old ones. Sen. Denny Jacobs, D-East Moline, endorses Rausche-nberger's concept of an expert panel to make recommendations on future prisons. Jacobs, whose district includes the vacant Thomson prison, says a series of "fiascoes" proves the current system isn't working. In recent years: 4Edgar ordered the Thomson prison built, but Ryan and now Blagojevich decided the state could not afford to staff it and let it sit empty. 4Ryan awarded a prison to Hopkins Park, but Blagojevich halted construction. 4Ryan decided to close a prison in Vienna but gave in to an intense lobbying campaign and instead shut down the Sheridan prison. Then Blago-jevich, following through on a campaign promise, reopened Sheridan as a center for drug-addicted inmates. Vandalia, a minimum-security prison that opened in 1921 and houses 1,044 inmates, lies in the district of Senate Minority Leader Frank Watson, R-Greenville. Blagojevich said he did not realize that when he decided to recommend closing the prison, but it still led to speculation that he was using the prison for leverage in his legislative battles with Watson. Corrections Department spokesman Sergio Molina said his agency recommended closing Vandalia because the old prison needs costly improvements - $25 million over the next four years. The prison's annual cost of housing each inmate, $23,647, is the second-lowest of the four prisons in Vandalia's security class. Likewise, the St. Charles facility has been targeted because it will need $13 million in improvements over the next few years, he said. The residents will be scattered to other facilities, he said, and a youth center in Joliet will become the main processing center for new juvenile inmates. The average cost per inmate at St. Charles is $52,462, second-lowest among the eight youth centers. James Coldren, president of the prison watchdog John Howard Association, agreed that "political muscle" should be removed from the prison decision process. But he also says Blagojevich has a reasonable argument against giving up control. "He's the caretaker of the public's money," Coldren said. "If prisons are built and everything goes haywire, who gets the blame?"