How one Illinois prison is handling cases of serious mental illness
Allen Cunningham for the Chicago Sun-Times
When the Joliet Treatment Center opened in 2017, the hope was that it would be a different kind of prison. The Illinois Department of Corrections, or IDOC, had settled a lawsuit over inadequate mental health care for people in state prisons. As part of that settlement, IDOC committed to building new treatment units including the one in Joliet.
For the first few years, things went well at the prison. But around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, conditions started to deteriorate. That made the men there desperate to be heard and one way to do that was to set things on fire. In the past three years, there’ve been more than 70 fires at the Joliet Treatment Center.
A journalist has been investigating why in a recent report on the Joliet Treatment Center in collaboration between The Marshall Project, WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times and she join the program today.
Note: This conversation contains content some listeners may find disturbing.
GUEST
Shannon Heffernan
Staff Writer, The Marshall Project
