A couple weeks ago reporters got a look at conditions inside the Vienna Correctional Center in Southern Illinois.
In preparation for the scrutiny, prison administrators had been busy fixing the place up-- cleaning... painting...repairing windows. The cosmetic changes were long overdue, but left untouched were the larger questions about what Illinois is achieving as it spends more than a billion dollars every year on prisons.
Illinois Public Radio's Robert Wildeboer with WBEZ takes a closer look at the Vienna prison and what its decline tells us about the prison system in Illinois.
