Illinois could finally reckon with its dramatically overcrowded prisons in 2016.
The entire system is at 146 percent of the capacity it was designed to hold, but that number doesn’t tell the whole story. Some individual prisons — such as East Moline, Illinois River and Lincoln — are above 200 percent of the rated capacity.
There are Illinois-based advocacy groups that have been raising alarms and filing lawsuits about this for years. This year, the governor appointed a commission to recommend changes intended to safely cut the prison population by 25 percent over the next decade.
Now, Illinois is getting a new entrant on the criminal justice reform scene. This week, the Washington-based U.S. Justice Action Network announced it would expand its efforts to Illinois in 2016.
To find out what that means, I spoke with the group's Jenna Moll:State of the State podcast | Episode 18
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Music: "Has Pluck" by Podington Bear. Used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-3.0 license, via WFMU's Free Music Archive.
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