Hundreds Rally to Save Illinois Prison

December 03, 2008

SAVE PONTIAC! – Chanting “Where’s Rod? Save our jobs!” hundreds of Council 31 members and supporters march on the Illinois state Capitol. (Photo credit: Linc Cohen)

About 700 AFSCME Council 31 members and other supporters of Pontiac Correctional Center marched on the Capitol in Springfield Nov. 20 to demand that Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) stop a plan by the Illinois Department of Corrections to shutter the maximum-security prison.

“To see so many people there with one common purpose was great,” Danny Jarrett, president of Pontiac Correctional Center Local 494 (Council 31), told the Pontiac Daily Leader. “There was representation from other AFSCME locals from all around the state. We have a lot at stake here: Transfers from Pontiac’s population will affect the safety of officers at every correctional center.”

At the demonstration, members of Council 31 – which represents most of Pontiac’s 570 employees – delivered about 500 letters addressed to Blagojevich by Pontiac-area schoolchildren, describing how their families would be hurt by his plans to close the prison by Dec. 31.

The next day, a Livingston County judge, acting on a lawsuit brought by Council 31, temporarily blocked the layoff of Pontiac workers pending resolution of the union’s grievance that the state failed to meet its obligation to bargain with AFSCME first. In another legal victory, a Johnson County judge approved Council 31’s request for a temporary restraining order that prevents further prisoner transfers pending a Jan. 5 hearing.

Cameron Watson, a corrections officer at the high-minimum-security Jacksonville Correctional Center and president of Local 3549 (Council 31), says the push to close the 1,600-bed Pontiac Prison – which holds many of the state’s most violent offenders – makes other Illinois prisons more perilous: “By closing a maximum-security prison, they are pushing maximum inmates into medium facilities and medium inmates into facilities like mine. They are juggling all these balls to try to implement the Pontiac closure, and something is going to fall.”

More than 45,000 adult inmates are housed in Illinois prisons built for just 34,000.

Read news coverage about the demonstration to save Pontiac by following these links to the Pontiac Daily Leader, The Pantagraph and The Daily Journal. Also, watch these news videos from ABC affiliate WSIL and NBC affiliate WEEK (Peoria).