Does Illinois have too many prisons? The right amount of beds but in the wrong places? The proper geographic locations but ill-suited facilities?

These and many other questions eventually will surface in Springfield if the governor gets his way.

With a hat tip to Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller, who highlighted an interview with Gov. JB Pritzker by Illinois Public Media’s Brian Mackey, it’s a good time to examine a Department of Corrections facility master plan issued earlier this year.

“We ordered that study,” Pritzker told Mackey, according to a transcript posted at will.illinois.edu/21stshow. “I wanted to make sure that everybody knew how bad our facilities are in Illinois.”

CGL Companies released its final, 150-page draft on May 20 (read it yourself at tinyurl.com/IDOCstudy). It opens by noting 20% of IDOC beds are in facilities built before 1926. Another 65% “were built during the extreme prison population growth period from 1970 to 2000, and many are now experiencing significant physical plant issues.”

It doesn’t get much better from there, notably this staggering figure: “IDOC has $2.5 billion in facility deferred maintenance, the highest of any Illinois state agency.” From as little as $4 million at the Pittsfield Work Camp, opened in 1996, to $286 million at Stateville in Crest Hill, and the 30 sites in between, the underfunded facility problem represents one of many areas in which Illinois is inadequately invested in people for whom it has assumed responsibility.

“People should pay attention,” Pritzker told Mackey. “The Legislature should have hearings about this. And we should talk about: Do we need to put more money into the capital needs of those facilities?”

The governor continued with magnanimity and pragmatism:

“We have a declining population of prisoners. And we have had that for 20 years, thanks in part to Republicans who adopted that 10, 15, 20 years ago as part of their platform, too. So I think that when you consider the declining population, when you consider the conditions, we have to ask ourselves: What should we do for the next 20 years? And I’ve tried to run my entire administration with that kind of thought that everything is a decade’s long focus. …

“So thinking long term about investing in infrastructure, should that infrastructure include the infrastructure [for] our 24/7 incarcerated people, and the people who work in those facilities?”

Ignoring the problems won’t help, obviously, and some facility upgrades might help considerably in another of IDOC’s main stress points, staffing shortages, so Pritzker is correct that he and lawmakers need to get serious about addressing these challenges in the next round of budgeting.

It’s important to confront the reality of the situation we created. Otherwise, no sustainable solutions are possible.

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Media. Follow him on Twitter @sth749. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.