“Our history is being lost in this city. It’s just being totally demolished,” Leila Wills, executive director of the Historical Preservation Society of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, told The TRiiBE. Wills referenced the displacement of Black families who were pushed out of their homes as the city built the Dan Ryan Expressway. 

“The location itself gives an education that even books can’t give,” she said, referring to Stateville. “What happens when we don’t have those structures is that education relies on us. And it depends on who’s in session, who’s in office, or what party is running things. These kinds of things can change through the years as opposed to a structure that will speak to the history itself rather than us having to recreate it. It’s just a lot more reliable when you have an actual location.”

However, Benard McKinley, who was formerly incarcerated at Stateville, sees things differently. 

“As an abolitionist, I don’t think anything that creates a state of psychological and physical torture should be memorialized. I don’t think no prison should be memorialized, no matter its history,” McKinley said.

Since Pritzker’s announcement on March 15, the IDOC is now proposing closing Logan and the prison its current location in Lincoln and building on a new facility on available grounds at Stateville in Crest Hill, according to a proposal submitted by IDOC to the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability (COGFA) on April 26. Here is the link to view report. 

Initially, Pritzker announced his proposed plan to spend $900 million in new funds to demolish and rebuild both facilities on March 15.

IDOC officials, in their updated report to COGFA, said it would take $116 million in funding for Logan to remain open and operational longterm, recommend that it should close.

They are also requesting $161 million from the state’s 2025 budget for Stateville and $79.5 million for Logan.

Stateville and Logan were selected based on a 2023 CGL report assessing the condition of IDOC facilities. The report found that 11 of Stateville’s buildings had “complete degradation, interoperability, and need for replacement.” Stateville opened in 1925.

Stateville will be temporarily closed and demolished as the new facility is built on its grounds, according to a written release. The new facilities design, construction and buildouts are expected to be completed over the next three to five years. 

Logan opened in the 1870s and was previously called the Illinois Asylum for Febble-Minded Children. The report found that Logan was determined to “be inefficient, ineffective, and unsuitable for any population” due to its aging coal-fired power system, molding housing unit and layout.

The conditions of aging Illinois prisons like Stateville have come under fire by incarcerated people and prisoner rights organizations like the Uptown People’s Law Center (UPLC), the John Howard Association and the Coalition to Decarcerate Illinois because of its poor drinking water, living conditions, rust, mold, plumbing issues and rodents, among other issues.

In 2022, the UPLC filed a class-action lawsuit against the Northern Reception and Classification Center (NRCC) prison because of its unsafe water and other issues. Stateville is the parent institution of NRCC, and they’re over a mile apart and share the same water supply. The NRCC houses people in the northern part of Illinois before they’re moved to other prisons more permanently.

“The water, definitely in the early morning, comes out looking a light brown because of the rust. You have to let it run, but it also has a strange smell, one of rotten eggs,” James Soto said. 

At 20, Soto was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life without parole in 1982. He served 42 years in prison before his exoneration and release in Dec. 2023. He spent his periods of incarceration between Stateville and Menard Correctional Center in Menard, Ill.

“If you taste it, it has a metallic taste or a chemical taste. You can actually see sediments floating in there from time to time. So the water was definitely not the best,” he explained. 

In 2023, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency issued drinking water violation notices to 10 Illinois prisons, including Stateville. Soto also explained that incarcerated people frequently complained about the water while he was there. Testing conducted by the EPA at Stateville found bacteria that causes Legionnaires’ disease, according to the UPLC.