Union chief: Dixon prison down more than 200 workers amid frequent staff assaults, low morale

DIXON – Serious staffing shortages, a lack of equipment and inaction on the part of the Illinois Department of Corrections are endangering the lives of inmates and correctional officers at the Dixon Correctional Center, its union chief says.

“I’ve been doing this 16 years now. Staffing levels have never been like this,” Eric McCubbin, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 817, wrote in an email to Shaw Local News Network. “Employee morale is at an all-time low. It’s a dangerous combination.

“With all the staff missing and the extra hours being worked, the place is always on edge. I’m going to work with an uncomfortable feeling every day because you have to ask yourself, ‘Is today the day something happens to you or the day something really bad happens to one of your co-workers?’ ”

McCubbin said the prison at 2600 N. Brinton Ave. is short 204 employees – both security and nonsecurity staff – and the number of assaults has risen dramatically in the past three months.

Using information culled from IDOC documents, McCubbin laid out his concerns.

IDOC spokeswoman Naomi Puzzello responded to many of his assertions, also in an email. She confirmed McCubbins’ numbers and provided further details, including the two classifications IDOC uses for assaults.

A basic assault is “defined as causing a person, substance or object to come into contact with a staff member, contractual employee, official visitor, visitor, volunteer or any other individual in custody in an offensive, provocative or injurious manner.”

A serious assault “includes causing a person, substance or object (e.g., broom handle, knife, chair, stool, pipe, tools, scalding liquid and/or chemical, etc.) to come into contact with, and resulting in serious bodily injury to, a staff member, contractual employee, official visitor, visitor or volunteer, and any sexual assaults.”

What follows are the descriptions of the assaults by McCubbin and the IDOC response:

“‘Is today the day something happens to you or the day something really bad happens to one of your co-workers?’”

—  Eric McCubbin, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 817.

Staff assaults

McCubbin: In the six-month period from January to June, there were 54 assaults on staff, 32 of which required some treatment either at the prison medical ward or at KSB Hospital; 38 of those, or 70%, occurred in the three-month period from April to June.

Puzzello: Only 14 of the 54 were considered serious staff assaults, with seven from April to June. Seven of those required outside hospital visits. Six of the seven were from April to June.

McCubbin: In that same six-month period, there were 43 inmate-on-inmate assaults, 24 of which required some type of care at the prison or the hospital; 29, or 67%, occurred from April to June.

Puzzello: Only one was a serious assault; none required outside hospital treatment.

McCubbin: 75 homemade weapons were found; 55 of those, or 73%, were found from April to June.

Puzzello: Twelve of the 75 were found in other areas in the prison and not in anyone’s possession.

McCubbin: There were 129 drug-related incidents involving inmates, which included pills, synthetic drugs, marijuana and fentanyl; 57% of those happened from April to June.

Puzzello: Of that number, 115 involved pills. The 14 that didn’t involve pills involved synthetic THC. In nine incidents, the substance was found in an individual’s possession.

Official figures

Puzzello provided figures on staff assaults from January to June dating back to 2017 that show a decrease in assaults on staff.

She said there were 65 assaults over the same six-month period in 2021, 76 in 2020, 72 in 2019, 87 in 2018 and 75 in 2017, all higher than the 54 seen this year.

She did not indicate how many were deemed serious assaults.

That trend is basically the same for assaults occurring between April and June: 38 this year, 41 in 2021, 31 in 2020, 45 in 2019, 37 in 2018 and 35 in 2017.

One correlating factor for the decline in the number of incidents has been the systematic installation of cuffing ports in cell doors, a process that began several years ago when officers identified their absence and only now is being completed.

Severity of injuries

Assaults might be down, “but the severity [of the injuries] is worse than they’ve ever been,” McCubbin said.

He cited several of the more significant assaults on staff that occurred over the past year, including:

• An officer who was punched in the face repeatedly while trying to address a medical issue for an inmate, and subsequently has been off work for months.

• An officer who was attacked while they monitored the commissary; they were repeatedly kicked and punched in the head and missed months of work.

• A counselor hit in the face with a metal cane while talking with other staff members, and who has since been off work for months.

• An officer handing out toilet paper who was choked into unconsciousness and dragged back into a cell before being rescued by other staff; also is off work for months.

• An officer punched in the face and knocked unconscious while handing out mail who was off work for weeks.

• An officer punched in the face repeatedly while escorting an inmate to use the phone.

One of the most recent staff assaults happened July 20, sending a staffer to the KSB emergency department, McCubbin said. It was the first of four staff assaults that occurred that day alone.

“There are countless other staff assaults that have taken place,” he said in a phone interview. “Many staff have been assaulted more than once.”

Dixon prison’s unique features

The Dixon Correctional Center is the state’s largest medium-security facility and IDOC’s primary psychiatric correctional facility.

It houses a large number of mentally ill and developmentally disabled inmates who are prescribed mood-altering medications, some of which are hoarded and traded to other inmates, and some of the weapons that were found might have been made for purposes of self-harm.

It also houses older inmates with special needs and inmates with disabilities, as well as general population inmates. Separate areas exist for the different populations.

In addition, the internal architecture of the prison itself, which until it was converted to a prison in 1983 was a state school for the developmentally disabled, is not up to modern safety standards.

According to its website, it is designed to house 1,853 prisoners; as of Friday, the population was 1,410.

Staffing levels and overtime

Puzzello pegged the number of job openings at the prison at 236, almost three dozen more than McCubbin’s figures, which were from about three weeks earlier in the month.

In her email sent Tuesday, Puzzello said 193 security staff positions and 43 nonsecurity positions are vacant.

In light of that, to address the basic operations at the facility, IDOC has used both voluntary and mandatory overtime, McCubbin said.

“This has become the norm for a majority of the security staff at Dixon, with many being forced to work 16-hour days, multiple days a week,” he said. “As you can imagine, many of these staff do little other than work and are missing out on time with family or friends.”

McCubbin has one officer who’s been paid more than $20,000 in overtime in the first six months of this year, he said.

Puzello said Dixon correctional officers worked 47,311.25 hours of overtime hours from January to June. That’s 5,914 eight-hour shifts of overtime.

She was asked but did not specify how many hours were mandatory or how often staff is being required to put in mandatory overtime.

“[The] Dixon Correctional Center, among other IDOC facilities, is short-staffed,” she said in her email. “Hiring security staff remains a priority for the department. In the meantime, both mandatory and voluntary overtime are utilized.”

That means that for the foreseeable future, staff will continue to do double- and triple-duty to cover for lost workers, which adds to the unsafe conditions and low morale, McCubbin said.

This situation exists “because they cut corners, and because we don’t have staff to do it the right way,” he said. “We still have to get it done.”

Lockdown status

In addition, the staff shortage is causing the prison to go on lockdown status with greater frequency, McCubbin said.

“This results in individuals in custody having limited to no movement and ramps up tension within the facility,” he said.

There have been 14 incident-based lockdown days since January, Puzzello said.

However, that doesn’t include lockdown days called because of a lack of staff, McCubbin said, estimating that the prison has seen about 30 lockdown days all told this year.

In fact, for fiscal 2022, from July 2021 to this past May, with one month still to be accounted for in the year, the Dixon Correctional Center had the third-highest number of incident-based lockdowns days – 79 – behind the much larger Pontiac and Menard prisons.

That’s according to IDOC’s operations and management report for the year.

Pontiac, with 101 lockdown days, holds about 2,300 inmates. Menard, with 74 lockdown days, holds about 3,860 inmates.

Dixon had 12 administrative-based lockdown days, which is behind three other prisons, according to the report.

There also have been multiple incidents in which Dixon inmates have refused to leave the yard; two such refusals “required the activation of a statewide tactical response that resulted in use of force to regain control,” McCubbin said.

Tactical response

Dixon also had the third-highest number of tactical response team activations for cell extraction – 50 – behind Pontiac, with 505 responses, and Stateville in Joliet, with 114, according to the report.

Stateville holds about 4,100 inmates.

“While staff are reporting to work knowing they will most likely have to work a 16-hour shift, they also know they are increasingly likely to be assaulted,” McCubbin said. “This may be something such as having feces, blood and urine thrown on them or being physically attacked.”

He blames inattention by the prison’s administration and corrections department for the prison’s current state.

COVID-19 is not to blame – staffing levels have been a problem “for years” before the pandemic, McCubbin said.

Safety measures, cuffing ports

Repeated reports of these conditions, and the low morale they are engendering, have been ignored by prison management and by IDOC, McCubbin said.

“IDOC could have prevented many of these incidents by providing proper equipment, developing safer procedures and staffing the facility at safe levels,” he said.

As an example, McCubbin cited “a lack of cuffing ports on many of the doors in the maximum security unit.”

Those are the slots in a door that allow staff to handcuff an inmate before entering a cell.

There’s also supposed to be a 2-to-1 ratio when opening cell doors, which can’t always be met because there aren’t enough officers, McCubbin said.

In addition, “after several staff were overcome by drugs during searches, it was discovered that the gloves being provided were not rated to prevent the absorption of drugs such as fentanyl,” he said. There was “a clear, written disclaimer” on the box.

“The Local identified several areas of safety concerns several years ago,” McCubbin said.

In response to some of those concerns, Puzzello said the work to replace cell doors with those with cuffing ports is almost complete.

In the A wing, 29 of 52 cells still are without ports because the prison is waiting on materials, she said, and in the B wing, only three of the 51 cells still are without ports.

The 55 doors in the C wing and 54 in the D wing all have been replaced, she said.

“The department works with both the union and administrative staff to try to identity issues relative to staff assaults and remedy these issues as soon as possible,” Puzzello said.

Staff’s ‘mental exhaustion’

The situation at the Dixon prison “has been kept quiet and went unaddressed for too long,” McCubbin said.

“The staff here are tired. Tired from the long hours of work, the mental exhaustion and the physical attacks they face on a daily basis. Tired of no one within IDOC responding to or addressing their concerns despite repeatedly bringing them up,” he said. “These folks put their lives on the line daily in order to keep the facility, their co-workers and the public safe.

“It’s beyond time for IDOC to take steps to ensure they can safely perform their duties and return home unharmed to their families at the end of the shift.”