Prison Population at Record High
(Chicago Tribune) — Hard time has gotten even harder in Illinois prisons. The state’s prison system is bursting at the seams with a record high of nearly 49,000 inmates, some 3,000 more than just a year ago. The surge, combined with the state’s multibillion-dollar budget crisis, has led to conditions that watchdog groups and veteran correctional officers say they haven’t seen since a population crisis in the 1980s prompted the state to build three new prisons. Confronted with putting more offenders in the same amount of space, administrators are doubling up every available cell. As many as four inmates are bunked in slightly larger cells intended for two handicapped prisoners. At the intake facility at Stateville near Joliet, incoming inmates regularly sleep on cots in a gymnasium or prison hospital.
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