Save the Hardin County Work Camp!

In yet another act of budget gamesmanship, Governor Rauner announced that he will seek to close the Hardin County Work Camp in southern Illinois. As the small facility is fully funded even in Rauner’s proposed spending bill for the Illinois Department of Corrections, the closure has nothing to do with cost-savings, but is clearly a political threat.

The Work Camp is a minimum-security satellite of the Shawnee Correctional Center in Cave-In-Rock that houses 200 inmates and employs 66 staff. The facility provides extensive community services to neighboring counties as well as educational and skills training to qualifying inmates. It gives inmates the tools to re-enter their communities as well as the opportunity to make reparations by performing meaningful work that benefits the public.

The Work Camp offers Adult Basic Education and GED classes as well as a Construction Occupations vocational education program that trains inmates in hard-to-get skills by building homes for charities like Habitat for Humanity and Lutheran Social Services. Inmates want to serve out their sentences at the unfenced facility because it allows them to fill their time productively and earn money.

Its work crews average 6,500 community service hours a month serving Hardin, Saline and Gallatin counties. They recently cleaned more than 116 miles of roadway and collected 1,810 bags of trash as part of Operation Pride. They’ve installed numerous bike racks along the Ohio River Scenic Byway and filled more than 1,400 sandbags for flood preparation. They operate a Garden Project that grows more than 6,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables helping feed the inmates at Hardin and Shawnee, and still donate over half the produce to local food pantries, senior groups and schools.

All these factors were weighed by the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability (COGFA), the bipartisan legislative panel that must review any facility closure of this size. COGFA voted to preserve the work camp. All legislators need to hear the message that closing the Hardin County Work Camp is bad public policy and harmful to the surrounding communities. Use the AFSCME legislative hotline at 888-912-5959 to call your lawmakers today!