Investigation uncovers disturbing conditions in Illinois county jails

// This is a machine generated transcript. Please report any transcription errors to will-help@illinois.edu.

[00:00:00]
Brian Mackey: From Illinois Public Media, this is the 21st Show. I'm Brian Mackey. When something goes wrong in one of the 90 county jails in Illinois, "extraordinary or unusual occurrences" is the term of art. When that happens, the staff is supposed to report that to the Illinois Department of Corrections. For example, the Winnebago County Jail reported more than 140 fights among detainees over the past several years. In Rock Island, the county jail recorded more than 100 cases where restraints were used on people. And in Sangamon County, which is where Springfield is located, they have the second highest rate of incident of all the state's counties with a jail. Those reports also include homicides and suicides. But those are just the ones that are reported. There are many more of these events that go unreported. And even when the paperwork is in order, it's rare for the state to investigate further.

Beyond all that, a lot of jails are routinely failing inspections. For more than four years, the investigative newsroom known as the Illinois Answers Project has been looking into all of this, conducting interviews, going through tens of thousands of pages of government documents, and last week they published several stories plus a comprehensive statewide database with their findings. And we start today with two of the journalists who worked on all of this. Grace Hauck is an investigative reporter for Illinois Answers. Andrew Adams is a data and interactive journalist there. Both of you, welcome back to the 21st Show. Thank you for having us. And we'll have a link to the reporting on our website if you want to follow along — twentyfirstshow.org. You can join the conversation today as well at 800-222-9455. If you have questions about their reporting, thoughts on the conditions in jails in Illinois or what they can be doing differently, let us know about it. 800-222-9455. 800-222-9455.

All right. Andrew, let's get into the numbers. So one of the top findings from your reporting is that dozens of deaths in jails over the past few years did not show up in state data. Talk about that.

[00:02:28]
Andrew Adams: Yeah, that's one of the most shocking parts of the investigation for sure. Kind of the headline, like you said, is dozens — it's about 1 in 4 of the deaths that occurred in county jails since 2019 did not appear correctly in state data or didn't appear at all. Usually when someone dies in custody at a county jail, there's reporting processes, there are steps that need to be taken, and eventually there's a state agency that holds the data to comply with the Deaths in Custody Reporting Act. And that data set was just missing significant portions, and even the data that they did have on deaths in county jails was inaccurate. We identified one person who was on the list that they maintain who did not die. And we ended up having to go county by county, contacting every coroner to identify all of the people who died in custody, and we found that it was just significantly underreported. This came through a variety of issues. Some of it was issues in reporting, some of it was classification issues. It was unclear whether or not a death should have been counted as in custody, or someone was — you know, on paper at least — discharged from the county jail shortly before they died. It's just a really, let's say, disorganized system for accountability and keeping track.

[00:04:07]
Brian Mackey: Grace, maybe we should take a step back because I think in casual conversation sometimes people will just use "jail" and "prison" interchangeably. These are very different institutions — both in their place in the criminal justice system and how and who runs them. So can you just give us a brief walkthrough of what exactly is the purpose of a county jail within the broader justice system?

[00:04:29]
Grace Hauck: Good question, Brian, because often through this project we hear from people thinking that we're talking about prisons, and we're not. We're talking about jails. These are county-run facilities within the sheriff's office, under the county sheriff, that detain people for short sentences such as two years or less, or while awaiting trial. And so, you know, this is very different from a state-run prison system, for example, where someone may have already pled guilty or been convicted. Often we're talking about people who are pretrial — they're awaiting their day in court, or they are serving short sentences.

[00:05:11]
Brian Mackey: And, as you said, they're run by — you know, there are 102 counties in Illinois, there are 90 county jails. Some of them are — I think Cook County is often said to be the largest correctional institution, or sort of detention institution in the country — to some that are quite small, yeah.

[00:05:33]
Grace Hauck: Yeah, definitely. There are some county jails that only house, you know, a couple dozen detainees. There are some counties that accept detainees from various surrounding counties — they kind of function like the regional center — and then as you get to larger and larger counties, they typically have their own facilities. But when I first started doing some of this work looking into county jails a few years ago, there were 92 jails at the time and now we're down to about 90 in Illinois.

[00:06:07]
Brian Mackey: So more consolidation. All right, Andrew, so I mentioned this phrase "extraordinary or unusual occurrences." What does that mean and what is jail staff supposed to do when that happens?

[00:06:21]
Andrew Adams: This comes from a particular part of state regulation that if something happens that's unusual or extreme or extraordinary — and there's a particular list in state code that defines what these incidents are, stuff like you mentioned earlier, like fights, deaths, uses of force, that kind of event — jail staff are supposed to file a report with the state. The idea here is that it's an accountability measure. It's a way to keep track. It's a way for the state to have a mechanism to investigate these issues if it chooses. The issue here is what's supposed to happen after that gets into a little bit of a messy area of what do you mean by "supposed to happen," because there's nothing requiring the state to do anything. In fact, we found that vanishingly few of these events are ever investigated at all or have any follow-up whatsoever from state regulators. I think it was — and Grace can correct me if I'm misremembering the numbers — but I think it was 14 events in state fiscal year 2025, out of roughly 6,500, were investigated. So a very small fraction are ever actually followed up on. And so when you get into "supposed to," it's really a question of what should the state be doing here. Should the state be revisiting its regulations? Should the state be updating when they might be required to follow up? Are there certain things that should automatically become a follow-up call and investigation? That's certainly an area where people are in active debates over how we should be handling these types of events.

[00:08:11]
Grace Hauck: And if I can add to that, Andrew — you know, again, we're talking about 6,500 events in a given fiscal year, only 14 reviewed. I've heard a lot of frustration from jails, from the former president of the Illinois Correctional Association, asking: Why are we even required to do all this paperwork and all this reporting if the state monitoring unit — the [jail and detention] unit within the Illinois Department of Corrections — isn't even looking at them all? Often when there's a certain incident I'm looking into and I ask a jail, "Can you show me records of some sort of use of force review or supervisory review, to show me kind of what your accountability process looks like," they'll often send me a copy of this extraordinary or unusual occurrences report and say, "Yeah, look, we reported it to the state." But I'm sitting there knowing the state hasn't even looked at this — they're looking at a very, very small fraction of these — and so that just raises big questions about oversight of jails.

[00:09:08]
Brian Mackey: Yeah, and I want to come back to the state's situation and how other states do it, because I think that could be instructive for people considering what's happening here in Illinois. But Grace, the death undercount obviously is a big number in your story. What else? What are some of the other findings that jumped out from your reporting?

[00:09:26]
Grace Hauck: For me, when we started to look into all these different types of extraordinary or unusual occurrences, something that I noticed was jails writing in this term like "pepperball launcher," which at the time I was unfamiliar with. But in the past year, year and a half — and if you're in Illinois, you may have seen ICE agents holding this type of device — it's almost like a paintball gun, but it shoots a small plastic orb containing pepper spray. It can be painful if it hits you, especially at close range. It can cause bruises, welts, can make you tear up, cough, make it hard to breathe. So these are devices that, if anyone has seen them before, you typically would see for crowd control, riot control, maybe a big fight or disturbance used by federal agents. But we noticed they're also being used inside jails. And so I started to go back to all these counties to request more records — how they're being used, how often, why they're being used. And something that really struck me is Winnebago County stood out for having the most of these incidents. It is the second-largest jail in the state, so I guess that piece of it is not as shocking. But what is interesting is they're using these devices more and more frequently, and they're using them in a very specific way that is different from how other jails are using these devices. Other jails around the state might fire a pepperball if there's a big fight in a common space within a facility or outside. When we're talking about Winnebago County, they often fire these devices through the food slot of a single cell door into a cell that is just housing one person. So the nature of how they were being used is very different, and often these people — on the reports, officers indicated — having a mental illness, maybe awaiting transfer to a state psychiatric facility. Sometimes officers indicated firing these to compel someone to come forward for medication. And so when I started sharing some of these records with experts in corrections, correctional healthcare and use of force, many were shocked and called this outlier behavior and said that this is not typically how these devices are used. And so that just raised some big questions for me about whether this was an appropriate use of force, especially in Winnebago County.

[00:11:47]
Brian Mackey: I just want to pause on what you just said there and sort of make sure I heard you correctly. Like, you know, jail inmate, you know, [cell] 546, it's time for your antipsychotic medication, come forward, they refuse, and then — ping, ping — we fire some pepperball rounds into the cell.

[00:12:04]
Grace Hauck: Yes, sometimes directly striking the individual on their body. Best practice is to try to do area saturation — so strike the wall, the floor, the ceiling — but there were multiple reports of officers in Winnebago County directly firing at individuals. So it's essentially like target practice inside a cell.

[00:12:24]
Brian Mackey: Wow. Andrew, similar question. What jumped out to you as you were going through this reporting?

[00:12:32]
Andrew Adams: There's so much. Part of it for me is the sheer scale of it. We've mentioned a couple of the big numbers. We put together a database of more than 30,000 of these extraordinary or unusual events. Spread them out evenly and that's more than a dozen a day — somewhere in Illinois, 12, 15, 17 of these extraordinary and unusual things happen — which, you know, makes me question the use of the name. It seems more usual than that. But it's just the sheer scale. So often jails — which are, you know, a place where ideally you are awaiting justice, you are waiting for your day in court, or you are serving your time after, you know, making a mistake — they're just so violent, there's so much almost chaos in these places that should be places where people can become better versions of themselves, where they can pay their debt, where they can try to have their day in court.

[00:13:40]
Brian Mackey: Yeah, exactly. Like you say, some of them don't even have a debt to pay yet, because we do have this idea of innocent until proven guilty — although it's a bit of a cliché. So, we need to take a break in a couple of minutes, but one of the other aspects of the story I want to touch on — and then maybe we can talk a little bit about other states and solutions on the other side of the break. But Grace, one of the stories notes that a majority of jails in Illinois fail inspections every year. I was looking at Sangamon County in particular — I think nine inspections since 2017, nine failures. What is happening?

[00:14:16]
Grace Hauck: Yeah. Supervision problems, understaffing and security issues are the biggest problems. Jails are supposed to do these 30-minute checks — so every half hour, kind of walk by, lay eyes on people, make sure people are doing OK. And that's something that the state jail and detention standards unit, this monitoring unit, looks out for every year when they do these annual inspections. And that's something that jails often just cannot seem to achieve. They might be missing many of these at a time — you know, there's one jail that they found went seven hours between checks. And then understaffing — there is a staffing crisis in jails and prisons that's pretty widely known, and so you just don't have enough people around monitoring detainees. There are security issues with older facilities especially — doors not closing properly, keys getting lost, that kind of thing. And then you have situations like black mold, or standing water, or leaks, or lights that don't work. And so when the state inspectors go into jails every year, they have this long checklist of hundreds of things they're looking for. And so when Andrew and I sat down and looked through all these — and Andrew built this incredible system for digitizing all of these going back to 2017 — we can see that every year jails are getting flagged again and again, often for the same problems that persist year after year. So that really became a big question for us of: The state is clearly flagging these, noticing these problems. Why are facilities not being compelled to change?

[00:15:55]
Brian Mackey: Yeah, where's the accountability? All right, we're going to talk about that after a short break. We're talking with Grace Hauck and Andrew Adams with the Illinois Answers Project — that is the independent journalism arm of the Better Government Association. We're going to continue this conversation. If you want to join us, 800-222-9455 is the number. 800-222-9455. More to come after a short break.

This is the 21st Show. I'm Brian Mackey. We're talking with two of the reporters behind a multi-year effort to document conditions in county jails across the state. Andrew Adams and Grace Hauck are with the Illinois Answers Project. Grace is an investigative reporter, Andrew is a data and interactive journalist. We will have links to their reporting on our website, twentyfirstshow.org. You can join us at 800-222-9455. 800-222-9455.

So, OK, let's talk a little about accountability. 'Cause you think of inspections, I think of like restaurant inspections, right? A business fails a restaurant inspection, people are going to vote with their feet. They're not going to go to the place that has failed numerous health inspections. Obviously, jails are not businesses. People don't have the choice to not go to the jail, not patronize the jail. So, Andrew, what sort of accountability mechanisms exist in this system, if any?

[00:17:39]
Andrew Adams: Yeah, there are a couple of different ways. I think the most powerful accountability mechanism is that — if the inspection unit at the Department of Corrections finds issues — they can refer problem jails to the attorney general for legal follow-up, for accountability, to see if there's any kind of lawsuits or legal enforcement actions that need to be taken. And if I have it right, it's been over a decade since any referrals have been made. It's just that these issues are not getting any follow-up from the official state regulatory actions. And — go ahead, Grace.

[00:18:33]
Grace Hauck: I was just going to add: Yeah, and in order to get the Illinois Department of Corrections to take that action to refer issues to the attorney general's office, that requires, you know, public attention, willpower. To get jails to really fix any issues requires funding, requires appropriations from a county board. And so the reality is that what happens — a lot of people just end up suing the county jail, right, because the conditions are horrific and continue year after year, and the state is not taking steps to fix it. Counties are slow to take steps to fix these, if at all. And so it just becomes a matter of sometimes federal complaints, sometimes county-level complaints. And especially this often results in deaths, which is why we did a story digging into that and the dozens of wrongful death suits that have happened and cost tens of millions to taxpayers across Illinois in recent years.

[00:19:34]
Brian Mackey: All right, so we mentioned this figure earlier: In fiscal year 2025, there were 6,500 reports — 14 were investigated. Nearly all of those were deaths. I gather from your stories there are other states that are doing a better job of having a system like this. And Grace, maybe you can talk about some examples of other places that are doing things differently than we are here in Illinois.

[00:20:02]
Grace Hauck: Yeah, we talked to some experts who kind of broke it down to a handful of different regulatory models essentially. The first is like us here in Illinois — there's a unit within the Department of Corrections that does the oversight. Other states rely on the Department of Health to do that, or they might have an independent commission or a sheriff's association. Those are some of the main models. Iowa has an ombudsman's office, for example, that has jurisdiction over the county jails. In Texas, their independent commission does a decent job of transparency — they have dozens of staff members working on this, and they have a nonprofit on top of that independent commission that is also doing work on county jails. When it comes to Pennsylvania, I've done some reporting on this before, but they have a much better system for public data on their own unusual occurrences — that data is all available online. So if you live in Pennsylvania, you can kind of look up your county and see what's happening. Illinois didn't have that, of course, which is why we did this project and had to do this. But if you live in Pennsylvania, this already exists for you. California also has an independent commission that has some data available, and what's really interesting there is that commission every two years has to review state standards for jails, which keeps them very current — whereas in Illinois, ours haven't been updated since 2014. So if you think about California really taking a hard look at those every two years, we haven't done that in over a decade.

[00:21:38]
Brian Mackey: Andrew, talk about the database that you built online and what people can find there. Because you actually — I mean, people can go and if you want to download a spreadsheet with nearly 29,000 rows and 32 columns, you can do that, you can try and recreate some of this work. Or people can — there's a little more user-friendly interface people can play with. Just talk about why you're doing that as part of this reporting and not just, you know, the sort of text stories.

[00:22:07]
Andrew Adams: Yeah, it was really important to us that we make this data available because, on some level, this is public information, right? We got almost all of these records through Freedom of Information Act requests because this data belongs to the public. And as Grace said, lots of states — or at least some states — make this data freely available. So if you want to hold your own sheriff accountable, if you know there are problems in your jail and you want to put someone new in the office that oversees that jail, you can go to a state website if you live in somewhere like Pennsylvania, and you can find out, "Oh, this is an issue I care about, I'm going to participate in democracy according to this information." But in Illinois, this is just not available, so we wanted to make sure that it was. Relatively easy to navigate — to make sure people can go to a page that says, "I'm from Champaign," and they can go to the Champaign page and see, "Oh, the Champaign County Jail has had this many incidents. It's an outlier in these ways, but it's pretty standard, pretty usual in these other ways." And we thought that was a public service that the state honestly has been neglecting, and we saw an opportunity. We realized we had the ability to do this. We had partnered with several really cool organizations, including the Mansueto Institute at the University of Chicago, to build out this database, to clean up this data and to make it available. And we think it's, you know, kind of our responsibility as informal custodians of these public records to make them more public.

[00:23:50]
Grace Hauck: And as important as the data is, I would also just add that we know there are limitations. We know not everything is reported — we've proven that in our own stories. And so for anyone who's interested in looking at this data, using this data, just remember: This is the floor, not the ceiling, of what's happening. There's probably more. But this is at least what we're sure of. Andrew, I don't know if you want to add to that.

[00:24:14]
Andrew Adams: Yeah, I mean, there were some pieces, there were some records that — at least for me, because I spent months in the weeds on this — there were some records that we had to take out because of data entry issues. You know, this incident didn't have a date, we couldn't verify that it was real. But we know that there are records there, that there are incidents that go unreported, that we have incomplete records for. So if anything, I hope this encourages the state to make sure that the records they do hold are accurate.

[00:24:50]
Brian Mackey: Andrew Adams and Grace Hauck with the Illinois Answers Project — thanks so much for sharing your work with us today on the 21st Show.

[00:24:57]
Andrew Adams: Thank you.

[00:24:58]
Grace Hauck: Thank you.