For quite some time, Tamms Correctional Center’s reputation far preceded it.
For quite some time, Tamms Correctional Center’s reputation far preceded it.
Dogged by human rights groups as a facility that left prisoners in solitary confinement too long and inappropriately housed seriously mentally ill patients, the state’s lone closed maximum security (CMax) facility is looking to change its image and provide more mental health services–among other things–for its hundreds of inmates.
The prison, tucked on the outskirts of the rural, agricultural southern Illinois town of Tamms, just miles from Interstate 57 and the Illinois/Missouri state line, is not the place an average inmate would want to be. But for the state’s most heinous of the heinous prisoners, Tamms is where they have to be, officials say.
By far, “it is the most secure prison we have in the state,” Illinois Department of Corrections Director Michael Randle said.
Randle, who started as head of IDOC in June, made the decade-old prison fortress the first facility he would attempt to change.
Perception was mostly the problem, Randle told a group of reporters during a recent media tour of Tamms, the first since the facility opened in 1998.
He explained that much of what had been reported about Tamms and the way its inmates were treated really wasn’t the way things were at the prison.
In a September 8 letter to Gov. Pat Quinn, Human Rights Watch, a global non-profit organization that speaks out on human rights, pointed out that the problems it found with Tamms were ones found at other CMax facilities around the country.
Still, HRW made several recommendations to Quinn, including urging the governor to “modify conditions at Tamms to mitigate the damaging effects of solitary confinement.”
Yolande Johnson, who started at Tamms when it first opened and worked her way up from a clinical services supervisor to her current position as warden, said she is “disheartened” by the critical reports about her facility.
But to help dispel the bashing, Randle acknowledged that the prison needed to have more transparency.
“I think that’s the way you start to deal with things like this,” Randle told the Defender.
Randle explained that Quinn had him to take on reforms at Tamms as part of the former Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction assistant director’s first tasks.
Quickly coming up with a 10-point plan, Randle said he found that “there is and continues to be a need for this facility” and his first report back to the governor was that the prison “should remain open.”
There had been protests and other calls for the facility to be shut down. In short, Randle’s plan is a prisoner services plan, with programs that offer such things as enhanced medical and mental health care, GED preparation and testing, religious services, a system of behavior incentives, and evaluations when entering the facility as well as considering transfers out of the facility.
A lot of what is in the plan is what the human rights groups recommended, including clearer standards and policies and more mental health care.
Hanke Gratteau, director of John Howard Association, a prison reform group, called the IDOC director’s plan “excellent first steps.” Her organization had been critical of inmate treatment at Tamms and recommended some changes at the prison before Randle started with IDOC.
She saw his plans before they were announced earlier this fall and said Randle seems to have heard what prisoner advocates were saying about Tamms.
“But we are going to continue to keep our eyes on the implementation of those plan,” Gratteau told the Defender.
There are over 45,000 convicts within the IDOC.
Tamms CMax is home to 237 of them–mostly Black men (54 percent).
“It’s not as easy as it seems to get to a place like this,” Randle said.
But a number of the state’s prisoners manage to land themselves there, confined to single-occupant cells and with very minimal physical contact with anyone other than prison workers– mostly medical staff.
The solitude, Gratteau and other critics said, only “exacerbates” mental health issues inmates may have.
Prison officials disagree.
Some Tamms inmates have killed guards or other prisoners, or committed other egregious acts at their maximum- security lockup.
They are the “problematic offenders in this department (IDOC),” Johnson said.
HRW and other organizations like Chicago-based John Howard Association reject Johnson’s assertion, saying some of the Tamms inmates have never committed a crime since being incarcerated.
With the reform, some of the prisoners will get mental health treatment and will be able to go back to their original prisons, Tamms officials said.
In fact, prison officials explained that 48 inmates had been approved to be transferred out of Tamms, back into a regular maximum-security population, and 10 have already transferred out.
But a number of inmates at Tamms will remain there indefinitely.
“This is all about safety,” Randle said of how long inmates may be housed at Tamms. “Because these prisoners are here, the other 27 prisons are a lot safer.”
Regardless of the how long they stay, though, prison officials said inmates will all have access to mental health and other services under Randle’s plan.
“The more services the better,” Wendy C. Blank, Ph.D., chief of mental health services at Tamms, told the Defender. On a case-by-case basis, “access to services is imperative,” she said.
Already, the prison has “enhanced” its services to meet today’s human needs, according to the warden.
The rare media tour revealed that Tamms, with its shellacked floors and neatly painted, gray walls, is not a place prisoners want to end up.
For as many as 23 hours a day, the male convicts at the prison are in a three-wall cell––only arms lengths wide and short paces long––with a metal sink and toilet combo and other cement accommodations: two cement slabs create a bed with “storage” in between them; a short cement slab near the bed serves as a desk, and higher up on the wall, another small cement slab serves as the TV stand or more storage.
Unlike at other prisons where inmates come out of their cells to dine, at Tamms their food is passed through a narrow opening in the cell door and inmates eat right in their lockup.
Even the most basic things are used as best-behavior incentives. While all inmates shower at least once a month, those who behave and follow the rules could get up to five showers a week, the warden explained. Behavior even determines if inmates are guard-escorted to the shower or allowed to take the short walk to it unescorted.
The plan put in place at Tamms, including the behavior perks, is designed “to encourage offenders to earn their way out” of the prison, Randle explained.
The perks are a plus to critics, too.
“We think these positive behavior enforcements are very important,” Gratteau said.
And for the most part, the prisoners reporters were allowed to talk to said things are on the upswing.
Henry Brisbon had been sentenced to 3,000 years for murder, rape, armed robbery and other charges associated with his 1973 killing rampage in south Chicagoland. The killings took place along Interstate 57 so Brisbon was dubbed the I-57 killer. At the time of his conviction, there was no death penalty. But after being in Statesville prison in Joliet for only a few years, Brisbon killed a fellow inmate. By that 1978 crime, the state instituted executions and Brisbon was sentenced to die.
But when the moratorium was put on the state’s death penalty, Brisbon was taken off of death row.
The wide-eyed, graying Brisbon was one of four inmates the media questioned during the tour.
His green jumpsuit with yellow embellishments distinguished him as one of Tamms’ worst. It’s very unlikely Brisbon will ever leave Tamms, prison officials said, but he wants a connection to the outside.
“Yes, we need to be able to communicate with our families,” said Brisbon, who reportedly stabbed John Wayne Gacy while the two were at Statesville.
One of the things Randle is considering for the prison is a telephone system. The phone privileges would be another positive behavior incentive.
Telephone access was another recommendation made by human rights groups.
Brisbon objects to some of the stipulations of the proposed phone privileges, including that calls can only be made to immediate family members, but he is OK with most other aspects of Randle’s plan.
While one felon, due to be released from IDOC within the next 18 months, called the prison “depressing and humiliating,” another said the place is exactly where he needs to be.
The prisoners explained that the solitude sustains them.
“(I) can’t have a cellie,” convicted killer and burglar Steven Wuebbels said. “One of us is gonna die. … I have bad anger issues and nobody can fix that.”
But for all of the prisoners’ and watchdogs’ complaints about how inmates are treated, Cynthia Bryant, the president of Local 2578, which represents Tamms’ guards, said correctional officers, at one point, endured having feces and other things thrown at them by prisoners.
She acknowledged some issues in the past, especially since it was common for correctional officers to work 16-hour days multiple times a week. Even now, she told the Defender, working doubles happens “quite often.”
It’s an issue the union is fighting to get changed. But hiring more officers has been out of the question because the state cries broke, she said.
Still, Bryant, who has been at Tamms since it opened, “disagrees whole-heartedly” with the bad rap the prison got over the years.
“Everybody has painted this dark cloud over Tamms…but (inmates) can sleep better here” than at any other facility, she said.
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