When film star James Stewart went on location in 1948 at Stateville prison’s notorious roundhouse while portraying a Chicago newspaper reporter whose work freed a wrongly convicted killer in “Call Northside 777,” the lockup had been standing nearly a quarter of a century, the Associated Press reports. Now, 76 years and hundreds of millions of dollars of neglected repairs later, the Illinois prison home of infamous killers Leopold and Loeb and Richard Speck, and the site of John Wayne Gacy’s execution, is shutting down. The Illinois Department of Corrections has begun transferring inmates from the facility in the Chicago suburb of Crest Hill, a contentious decision bolstered by a federal court order. Last spring, Gov. JB Pritzker’s administration announced a $900 million plan to replace Stateville, which opened in 1925, with a state-of-the-art facility on adjacent, state-owned land. The campus also could see a new women’s prison. Supplanting the deteriorated Logan Correctional Center in central Illinois is part of the proposal. Completion could be three to five years away. There has been no disclosure of a design plan; no timeline for demolition, groundbreaking or even deciding what will happen to prison staff.
Nonetheless, Corrections officials’ decision to shutter the facility this month was made long before the court decision made it inevitable. Ruling in a decade-old lawsuit challenging the health and safety of Stateville’s environment, U.S. District Judge Andrea Wood ordered most of the prison’s 430 inmates to be evacuated by Sept. 30. “The primary reason for the facility’s closure during the rebuild is to address serious safety and security concerns posed to those who work and live in Stateville,” acting Corrections Director Latoya Hughes told a legislative review panel. “This is not just a matter of preference but a necessary step to ensure safety, efficiency and the fulfillment of our rehabilitative mission.” Employees and service providers, such as institutions that supply a variety of educational courses and social programs to inmates, want Stateville to stay open while its replacement is constructed to avoid disruption to services or destruction of a tightly knit and highly experienced staff. The ramshackle F-House, a circular unit with cells around the perimeter and a guard tower in the middle, was closed in 2016, the last of the nation’s roundhouse prison housing units.
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