Prison Politics

5/6/2008

Capitol Fax

Rich Miller

The last time that Gov. Rod Blagojevich tried to close a state prison was back in 2004, when he wanted to shutter the Vandalia facility.  That move was successfully blocked by vigorous local organizing and by Senate Republican Leader Frank Watson, who represents the Vandalia site and most of its workers.

After the move against Vandalia failed, the Blagojevich administration trained its sites on the Pontiac prison, but that proposed closure also came up empty.

Earlier this year, the governor proposed closing Stateville Prison near Joliet.  His Corrections Department publicly backed off that move yesterday and suggested that Pontiac was once again on the chopping block.  Last month, the administration said it would close Illinois' only state prison farm operation - which is in Vandalia. 

There is a common thread running through both 2004 and 2008: AFSCME's contract negotiations.

The 2004 negotiations were often bitter and rough.  The prison closures were seen as part of that hardball play, so AFSCME was forced to fight on multiple fronts. 

In the end, AFSCME came out with a pretty big win.  The prisons stayed open and the governor's top negotiators eventually backed off most of their negotiating stances which the union found objectionable.  AFSCME ended up with one of the most generous state contracts in the nation. 

Two years later, the union decided to remain neutral in the governor's race.  Despite that favorable contract, state workers were up in arms about their treatment at the hands of the administration. The union had gone out of its way in 2002 to convince several longtime Republican locals (particularly those that represented prisons) to go with a Democratic candidate for governor, but by 2006 most of those locals were so thoroughly alienated that there was no way they were going to back Blagojevich again.  The threatened prison closures, the refusal to hire workers to replace the thousands who took early retirement, the rampant political hiring and firing and the governor's perceived attitude that state workers were more of a burden than a responsibility all contributed to the decision to stay out of the 2006 race.

So, it's probably no surprise that 2008 kicked off with another contract negotiation and another threatened prison closure.  As before, contract negotiations aren't going all that well.  The union, for instance, wants to curtail mandatory overtime, but has run into a brick wall at the bargaining table. AFSCME has tried to get around the administration recalcitrance on overtime by passing a bill out of the House with almost unanimous support, but it has so far been held up in the Senate. The union is urging its members to flood Senate office with phone calls this week in an attempt to dislodge the bill from the Senate Rules Committee, but that appears to be an uphill fight at best.  The Senate Democratic leadership is still solidly in the governor's corner - as last week's recall vote proved yet again.

The big difference between '04 and '08 is that there is less money to go around now.   The current fiscal year has a gaping hole, and next fiscal year isn't looking all that great.  Granted, some of the problems are being made to appear worse than they actually are.  IDOT, for instance, has suggested some draconian steps to rein in spending, like parking trucks.  But the agency has yet to exercise its right to move around 2 percent of its total budget to patch the worst holes.  The governor's oft repeated claim that he had no choice but to slash funding for agriculture programs like 4-H was abandoned last week just before the Senate's recall vote when millions of dollars in magic money was located to to fund the programs.  Another $35 million in previously withheld grants was also released last week, despite the claimed budget crisis.

And even the administration's reversal on Stateville has a negative budgetary component.  Closing Stateville and moving inmates to the still unused facility in Thomson would have saved $31 million, compared to the $4 million that shuttering the Pontiac facility would save next year. 

The end result is still the same.  The union is placed on the defensive while it attempts to negotiate a contract.

The other thing that happened in 2004 as a result of the prison closure proposals was that angry, panicked Senate Republicans were forced into House Speaker Michael Madigan's open arms.  Madigan backstopped the SGOPs on Vandalia and Pontiac and helped make sure the prisons stayed open, despite Senate President Emil Jones' obvious glee at killing off a facility in Sen. Watson's district.  That eventually set the stage for the long, hot summer of 2007, when Madigan and the Senate GOP were joined at the hip most of the year.  Expect the same sort of result this year.