Illinois Prisoners Stage Hunger Strikes Over DOC Failure to Implement New Sentence Reduction Law
Two Illinois prisoners staged hunger strikes in June 2024 to protest the state’s foot-dragging in granting sentence credits provided a year earlier under a new law. With promises from Robinson Correctional Facility officials to expedite review of their cases, Bernard “Benny” Lopez ended a 24-hour hunger strike on June 10, 2024. Lester May’s seven-day strike ended on June 18, 2024.
In July 2023, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) signed House Bill 3026, changing the way the state Department of Corrections (DOC) calculates earned sentence credits. First, time spent awaiting trial in a county jail must be credited toward the 60 days that a prisoner must serve before becoming eligible for sentence credits. Second, DOC must retroactively recalculate a prisoner’s sentence based on program credits earned prior to July 1, 2021, at the rate set then.
This means prisoners who worked a correctional industry job or participated in substance abuse programs, education, life skills courses or reentry planning prior to July 1, 2021, are now entitled to one day off their sentences for each day they participated in such activities instead of the half-day credit that was previously allowed. According to state Sen. Robert Peters (D-Chicago), the bill’s sponsor, the law also retroactively grants prisoners a half-day credit for every day they participate in self-improvement programs, volunteer work and some work assignments that they had not previously received credit for.
DOC has struggled to implement these statutory amendments. Records relied on to recalculate a prisoner’s sentence go back only to 2010, when DOC switched over to a new digital information system; however, many of the prisoners who should benefit from HB 3026 have been incarcerated since the 1990s, and those programming records are not in the database. Moreover, the law has not been implemented consistently from prison to prison, and DOC has not been transparent in the methods used for recalculations, leaving prisoners to guess at how their new release dates were determined.
The law states that DOC should award credits based on affidavits or other documentation from prisoners to make up for missing records, but it is unclear how or when DOC might review such records. Spokesperson Naomi Puzzello acknowledged that record-keeping within a prisoner’s “master file is limited in scope.” She suggested that prisoners who dispute DOC recalculations should talk to their correctional counselor or file a grievance—steps that most prisoners recognize as time consuming and largely unavailing.
Candace Chambliss, legal director of the Illinois Prison Project, said her organization identified numerous prisoners who should be eligible for immediate release under the new law, but only a handful have gone home. “When this bill was passed, we thought that this should be a faster route to get people out,” Chambliss said. “We thought we would be in a position of having to do reentry for many of our clients. And unfortunately, that is not the case because the law has not been fairly applied.”
Puzzello disputed this, saying that DOC is not aware of concerns related to consistency of implementation across facilities. Meanwhile, Sen. Peters empathized with prisoner frustrations but asked for patience as DOC goes through “a period of implementation and refinement to address operational challenges.” The senator, of course, is not sitting inside prison wondering if or when DOC will get around to properly recalculating his release date.
Court intervention may be needed to prod DOC to fully implement HB 3026, which could take years. Meanwhile, prisoners who have already served decades with extensive records of programming and positive behaviors—those therefore least likely to reoffend—continue to sit in prison. And taxpayers continue to foot the bill.
Source: Open Campus Media
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