A biweekly newsletter about the future of postsecondary education in prisons. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Short on time? Here are the highlights:

• This week, we’ve been working with our local partner WBEZ to cover what the closure of Stateville Correctional Center, a 100-year-old maximum security prison outside Chicago, means for the numerous college programs there. A federal ruling earlier this month requiring Illinois prison officials to empty the facility by Sept. 30 has resulted in some incarcerated students being transferred this week despite efforts by colleges to keep their program participants together. 

• The print edition of the May/June issue of College Inside is now available. It includes two pages on how credit transfer works. Please let us know at [email protected] if you are able to share with your incarcerated students.

• ICYMI: Read about lessons in forgiveness from a sociology class at the California Institution for Women, co-published with Slate.

Abrupt transfers for Stateville prisoners begin as officials rush to comply with a federal court ruling

Jerrell Matthews has known for months that he'd be transferring from Stateville Correctional Center, a men’s maximum-security prison outside of Joliet where he’s lived for the last six years.

But he didn’t think he’d be relocating so far away. 

Matthews expected that it would be with the rest of the men graduating from Northeastern Illinois University’s prison education program this fall. Instead, he’s moving to Shawnee Correctional Center, a medium-security prison almost 330 miles away near the Kentucky border, Tiffani Blandon, a close friend of Matthews, told Open Campus. 

Transfers from Stateville to other facilities around Illinois began this week. Matthews was one of dozens of men who are being moved from the prison this week, according to family members and men incarcerated there. 

A federal ruling that came down two weeks ago ordering Illinois prison officials to empty the decrepit facility by Sept. 30 seems to have resulted in abrupt transfers from Stateville, despite what educators have said were assurances from the Illinois Department of Corrections that students and alumni from the same education programs would be allowed to move together. 

In March, Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced the state’s plan to close and rebuild Stateville, along with Logan Correctional Center, a women’s prison, due to conditions such as polluted water, vermin infestations and crumbling buildings. 

The hundred-year-old Stateville is like many other aging prisons across the country, such as Sing Sing in New York State and San Quentin in California: despite their poor physical infrastructure, they have become sought after destinations for higher education. Jennifer Lackey, founding director of the Northwestern Prison Education Program, told Open Campus that some students had even chosen to transfer to Stateville from lower-security facilities in order to take advantage of the educational opportunities there.

Stateville has had five colleges, including Northwestern, operating there, while many other facilities in Illinois have no higher education at all. More than a quarter of the 400 some men who were still at Stateville at the beginning of this week were enrolled in higher education, according to the Illinois Department of Corrections.

A thriving intellectual community

On Tuesday, Open Campus, along with our local partner WBEZ, published a story on what the impending closure means for the thriving intellectual community that has been built at Stateville over the last several years, with many incarcerated college graduates there continuing to remain engaged with their academic institutions as teaching assistants and fellows.

The closure of a prison can sometimes mean that students are scattered all over the state in the middle of their education. In a 2021 story that Open Campus published about the closure of the Washington State Reformatory outside Seattle, we found that only half of the students who had been enrolled in the college program there had been able to continue their education more than a year after they were transferred. The closure also meant that University Beyond Bars, the nonprofit operating the college program at the reformatory, had nowhere else to go. The organization has subsequently rebranded and pivoted to reentry work. 

Given the fact that they knew the Stateville closure was imminent, educators had hoped that they would be able to work with the Illinois corrections department to ensure a smoother transition, finding new homes for their programs and students. Representatives of the various college programs at Stateville told Open Campus that they had submitted lists of current students and alumni to the department in hopes that they will be able to transfer with them to new facilities. 

But a representative of at least one program says that is not happening. About 30 students and alumni – including Matthews – were on the list to be moved to Hill Correctional Center, about three hours from Chicago, in order to stay with the Prison+Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. Executive Director Arianna Salgado said Matthews and seven others were among those shipped to other facilities across the state this week. The nonprofit group, which works with Northeastern Illinois, started a petition on Wednesday asking the governor to stop the transfers.  

“We've been advocating with IDOC for a group of our students to be able to move with us to the next facility that we end up at,” Salgado said. “We got the notification on Monday that several of our students were scheduled to be transferred this Thursday...to an institution that's approximately five hours and more away from the City of Chicago.”

At the very least, Salgado said, they hoped that they could keep all of the Northeastern Illinois students who are about to graduate together. Matthews is just weeks away from completing his bachelor’s degree and will likely miss any kind of graduation celebration. 

Salgado said that the move to Hill Correctional Center, which is around three hours from Chicago, already made it difficult to offer the same kind of programming they have had at Stateville. Program administrators in multiple programs have also been looking at how they might utilize technology for both classroom instruction and other activities. Christina Rivers, a professor at DePaul University which brings campus-based students to the prisons to study with incarcerated students, said to move to any facilities more than two hours from Chicago effectively “kills off” their programming. 

The trauma of transfers

In addition to being separated from his fellow students, it will also be difficult for Matthews to see his family, said Blandon. His daughter lives in Los Angeles and has to fly to Chicago to see him. Now the family has to drive an additional five hours in hopes of visiting. 

“If you get there and it's locked down, they're turning us back around, no matter if we're from out of town or not,” Blandon said. 

While many welcome the closure of Stateville, the abrupt timing of the transfers has also caused heightened confusion and anxiety among some in the incarcerated population at Stateville – especially now that they aren’t sure if they’ll be able to stay with their programs. Darrell Fair, who earned a bachelor’s from Northeastern Illinois University and a master’s from North Park Theological Seminary, said he would have ideally liked to stay at Stateville during the rebuild. 

“You're told to pack all belongings one day and only find out your new destination the day of transfer,” he wrote in an email. “The trauma associated with these transfers [has] affected me far worse than any adverse living conditions experienced at Stateville.”

Jamie Ames said her son’s father, Daniel Perkins, who was also on the Prison+Neighborhood Arts/Education Project’s list to move to Hill as a teaching assistant, is also unexpectedly going to Shawnee. He has been receiving ongoing medical treatment from University of Illinois Chicago Hospital.  

"The most frustrating part of all of it is that they stress transparency, but there's so much lack of communication,” Ames said. 

The Illinois Department of Corrections did not respond to questions about the timing and number of transfers this week. Spokeswoman Naomi Puzzello previously said the department considers many factors while determining placement for transfers, including “programming, medical and mental health needs, staffing ratios at the receiving facility, and security of individuals in custody and staff.”

The remaining men at Stateville are preparing to move as more transfers are expected in the next few weeks. 

“These past few days, I’ve seen piles and piles of discarded family artifacts and treasured memories, some built up over decades,” Fair said. “In order to be in compliance, all personal property must fit within two small boxes. Decades of memories reduced to the confines of tiny plastic boxes.”

Related coverage:

• “What will the Stateville shutdown mean for higher education programs behind bars?”

• “When a prison closed, dozens of college dreams died with it.”

Let’s connect

Please connect if you have story ideas or just want to share your experience with prison education programs as a student or educator. You can always reach me at [email protected] or on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram. To reach me via snail mail, you can write to: Open Campus, 2460 17th Avenue #1015, Santa Cruz, CA 95062.

We know that not everyone has access to email, so if you’d like to have a print copy College Inside sent to an incarcerated friend or family member, you can sign them up here. We also publish the PDFs of our print newsletter on the Open Campus website.

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