Sitting in his Fayette County Jail cell in Vandalia, Illinois, earlier this year, Chad Hammond rarely saw guards. He said hours would go by without correctional officers conducting wellness checks, which are required every 30 minutes under state rules.
“So if someone became injured, you would be forced to yell or bang on the walls, sometimes for hours,” Hammond wrote to the Illinois Answers Project. He’s now in prison for felony driving on a revoked license.
Nearly seven hours once went by between checks, according to a state inspector who reviewed the jail in 2025. Supervision was a concern the prior year, too — and the year before that.
Delayed wellness checks are an ongoing problem in jails across the state. And it’s not the only issue. Thousands of people pass through Illinois county jails each year, and they’re often subject to conditions that don’t meet the minimum state requirements for operating safely and caring for detained people.
“A lot of these issues are deeply entrenched and require a lot of effort and money and new thinking to improve,” said Jennifer Vollen-Katz, the executive director of the John Howard Association, a prison watchdog group. “And those are things that don’t happen quickly, easily, or often in carceral environments.”
The Jail and Detention Standards Unit (JDSU), a six-person team within the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC), annually monitors the state’s 90 county jails for compliance with standards. If an inspector deems a jail noncompliant with any one of the hundreds of items on a checklist, the JDSU issues the county a formal notice. If the jail is still noncompliant six months later, the director of IDOC has the authority to refer facilities to the attorney general to file a petition in court seeking an order requiring the facility to comply with standards.
Illinois Answers reviewed annual jail inspections from 2017 to 2025 and reached out to state agencies to learn more about how they’re compelling jails to meet standards. We found that, year after year, a majority of jails violated at least one regulation. For some jails, inspectors documented a laundry list of problems. Insufficient supervision, staffing and security were the biggest issues. But jails also violated standards for poor sanitation, healthcare and food services, among other concerns.
“Nobody’s perfect. There’s always gonna be something,” said Daniel Sheline, president of the Illinois Correctional Association from 2018 to 2025. “Some of those are very menial or trivial, but it’s something they’re still cited for.”
Last year, more than half of Illinois county jails were cited for at least one violation. Cook County Jail, the state’s largest, violated standards for supervision, security, admissions procedures, reporting, sanitation and more, the inspection found. Detained people had to wait “hours” before receiving showers upon entry. The facility also wasn’t submitting required data about restraints used on pregnant prisoners.
Despite the persistent problems, the Attorney General’s Office said it hasn’t received a referral from IDOC in over a decade. And it’s unclear if IDOC is taking any local enforcement action. In practice, jails continue to subject detained people to subpar conditions, year after year.
Neither IDOC nor the office of Governor J.B. Pritzker, which oversees the department, responded to requests for comment.
“It would benefit the safety of everybody who works and is held in the detention centers if there were more direct ways of getting results,” Vollen-Katz said.
Major lapses in supervision, staffing and security
For nearly a decade, insufficient supervision, staffing and security have been the top concerns cited by jail inspectors. State standards require jails to have “sufficient personnel” to provide “adequate 24-hour supervision,” and officers must visually observe detained people every half hour. But that’s not the reality.
Last year, 34 jails weren’t conducting timely wellness checks. Inspectors typically review a random sample of checks to assess completion rate.
In Fayette County, staff completed required checks 26% of the time, down from 27% the year before, the inspections found. The inspector also identified one seven-hour gap. “A review of the facility’s policies as well as the Standards should be implemented for all jail staff,” the inspector wrote. “Supervisors are encouraged to stress the importance of timely checks to proactively address issues and mitigate potential threats.”
Fayette County Sheriff Ronnie Stevens said he believes brief delays and technical difficulties such as Wi-Fi interruptions account for the missed checks. “Even if you’re one minute over, you’re still over. There’s no grace period,” he said.
Stevens said Fayette County Jail is in the process of acquiring new devices that will allow staff to document checks. He’s also hoping to implement a policy to require checks every 25 minutes. He was unable to explain the seven-hour gap and said he does not believe long periods of time pass between checks.
Since 2017, inspectors have documented failures to check on detained people in three-quarters of jails. Four jails have never met all of the state's supervision-related standards in any year Illinois Answers reviewed.
“There aren’t eyes on people for long periods of time. So, if somebody wants to self-harm or if they’re involved in a medical emergency, response time is going to be negatively impacted, which can lead to serious injury or death,” Vollen-Katz said. “That is unfortunately not a new issue but an ongoing one, particularly at a time when it is really difficult to fill staffing vacancies in jails and prisons.”
A spokesperson for the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, which manages the largest jail in the state, said that complete compliance with the 30-minute check requirements is a “lofty goal for any jail,” and pointed to ongoing issues attracting qualified candidates to work in the jail and high rates of staff calling off prior to their shift.
Inspectors also regularly expressed concerns about understaffing. Last year, 21 jails had insufficient personnel. Of those, at least nine only had one officer on duty at various times, inspections found. That happened “most” of the time in Jasper County and “numerous” times in Lawrence County. The same was true during overnight shifts in Montgomery and Warren counties and on weekends in Putnam County. At other jails, the sheriff and radio operators supervised detained people. That’s a problem, inspectors noted, because those officers “are not primarily assigned to correctional duties during the shift” and can’t provide the necessary amount of oversight.
Last year, 22 jails violated standards related to security. In some, backup personnel weren’t notified and available when they needed to be. In Menard County, sliding doors to individual cells “were inoperable and always left open.”
Jails failed to address problems year after year
Jail inspectors have continuously cited facilities for the same unaddressed problems.
“There’s almost no compliance mechanisms available, so that when problems are found, the ability to ensure that the system has to address them just doesn’t exist in Illinois,” Vollen-Katz said. “We rely on litigation or policy change — both of which are really imperfect ways of ensuring the transparency of a system that has custody of human beings.”
In 2025, inspectors found violations at 52 jails, including 45 that had the same category of violations as the year before. At least 12 jails were cited for violating the same regulations every single year since 2017. The most common long-running violations were related to supervision and security.
In 2024, for example, an inspector flagged Crawford County for more than a dozen violations, including failing to ensure people were locked in their cells at night. The issue persisted into last year. “The facility continues to be non-compliant as individual cell doors have not been repaired,” the inspector wrote.
Asked about the doors, Crawford County Sheriff William Rutan said they’ve since been repaired. “It took us years to find someone that could find the parts we needed for the repairs,” he said.
On the other side of the state, in Carroll County, an inspector flagged the jail in 2023 for water damage, graffiti and plumbing issues. The inspector also wrote that exposed cords “could create a safety risk.” The inspector flagged the same problems again in 2024 and 2025, noting plans for a renovation project.
“If it’s a deficiency from the year before and they come back, I would think it would be addressed,” said Sheline, the former correctional association president.
Leaks, broken sinks, cold water, no beds
Violations of state standards often go beyond concerns about staffing and supervision. Numerous jails last year weren’t properly housing people or maintaining sanitary environments.
People were sleeping on mattresses on the floor at Madison County Jail. The facility was holding dozens of people awaiting transfer to prison and another five who were awaiting transfer to the Illinois Department of Human Services. Similarly, in St. Clair County, people were sleeping on portable plastic beds while holding dozens of people waiting for federal transfers and eight people waiting to be transferred to state prisons.
Jason Wanick, 55, was detained in Madison County from late 2024 to early 2025 on a warrant for failing to appear on a meth possession charge. He recalled “mold in the showers,” tattered blankets, small food portions and “multiple detainees sleeping on the dayroom floor, due to overcrowding.”
In Fayette County, multiple sinks and toilets weren’t functioning and didn’t have hot water. The jail also didn’t have enough sinks, showers and toilets for the number of people each dorm could hold. The inspector recommended “extensive maintenance” and urged the facility to consider suspending its contracts with the U.S. Marshals and Bureau of Prisons or reducing the number of people it held on their behalf until the issues were repaired. Hammond recalled the conditions as “deplorable,” describing issues with “black mold, rust,” and “small food portions.”
Pike County had no hot water in some sinks. An inspector urged Kankakee County to consider “eliminating mold, mildew and standing water in washrooms in housing units.” There were leaks from the ceiling and toilets in Hancock County and lighting problems in bathrooms and cells.
Hot and cold water faucets weren’t working in Warren County. One man detained there for a few weeks in 2023 later filed a federal civil rights complaint, describing “loose concrete blocks with nasty mold, feces piles” and water shut off for hours. “It’s inhumane torture,” he wrote.
Some jails couldn’t provide evidence that the county health department had inspected the kitchen. When an inspector visited Perry County Jail in 2024, she found the kitchen hadn’t been inspected in almost a decade. An inspector urged Montgomery County to schedule an inspection of its kitchen, too. The prior year, the facility had black mold on the ceiling and women sleeping on floors due to overcrowding.
Meanwhile, staff at Edgar and Lawrence County jails hadn’t completed annual mental health training. “We had the classes scheduled for the following week after our inspection because that was when they were available and everything was passed,” Edgar County Jail Administrator Ryan Murphy told Illinois Answers.
Jail staff used commissary fund for their own purchases
Inspectors also assess whether jails are fairly charging people for the purchases they make through the commissary system, or what is essentially a store within the jail.
State standards say staff can’t profit from the commissary system, and prices should match those in local community stores. Any profits are supposed to be used “for education, recreation or other purposes within the jail for the benefit of detainees.” Jails are also supposed to maintain accurate accounting for all purchases and undergo an annual audit.
But inspectors found some jails were overcharging detained people compared to prices at local stores. That was the case in Macoupin County last year. In Pike County, there hadn’t been an audit of the commissary fund in “several years.”
At the Jerome Combs Detention Center in Kankakee, staff used profits to purchase concealed carry cards for retired officers and pay for correctional officers’ physicals, vaccines and drug screenings, the inspector found.
Through a public-records request, Illinois Answers obtained a copy of the commissary audit performed by a local accounting firm that shows the jail spent $46 on concealed-carry cards and issued payments of $68, $275 and $440 to a local clinic for the physicals, vaccines and drug screenings.
The firm alerted Kankakee County to the discrepancies, and the state inspector flagged the issue in an inspection. The county then reimbursed the commissary account and created a formal review process for all bills paid from the account.
Asked if the incident resulted in any disciplinary or criminal investigations or reviews of previous audits, Kankakee County said “the clerical errors were fixed and reimbursed to the correct account when the Sheriff’s Office learned of the mistake.” The county also notified the state monitoring unit about the actions the jail took to rectify the issue.
Inspection inconsistencies
Last year, three of the JDSU’s five inspectors handled more than 90% of jail inspections. They varied widely in their approaches. The inspector assigned to Southern Illinois found that 79% of the jails they inspected violated standards. Another who was assigned to Northern Illinois found only one-third of those jails noncompliant, according to an Illinois Answers analysis of inspections.
Inspectors also approached their definitions of “compliance” differently. One inspector flagged 56% of jails they inspected as noncompliant in one section of the report despite identifying issues elsewhere in the report suggesting as many as 70% were noncompliant, Illinois Answers found. Another inspector, who reviewed dozens of jails, had no discrepancies in her paperwork.
Sometimes inspectors documented concerns about jails, even if they officially marked them as compliant. In Iroquois County, the inspector left a note urging officials to “minimize the risk of medication errors within the jail.” In Coles County, the jail wasn’t issuing undergarments upon intake, didn’t have enough showers or toilets and had areas of peeling paint and graffiti. But it still got a passing grade.
What does jail oversight look like in other states?
Forms of jail oversight vary widely nationwide. Some states don’t have any official jail oversight. But a majority of states, including Illinois, have a formal statewide model, according to Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at The University of Texas at Austin.
“Each local jail system has its own fiefdom, and so you need to have some way for the state to oversee that to ensure the protection of people who are held in these facilities,” Deitch said. “But there’s also something very complicated about the state trying to impose rules and standards on independently elected officials of local jails which are funded and operated at the local level.”
In general, there are four models of statewide regulatory bodies that assess jail compliance with minimum standards, Deitch said. The most common one, which Illinois utilizes, features a special branch within the department of corrections. Other states utilize independent commissions, sheriffs’ associations and health departments. A fifth model allows an ombudsman or inspectorate to holistically review jail conditions rather than assess compliance with standards. But those entities aren’t regulatory bodies that could sanction jails.
Nationwide, minimum state standards are often deliberately vague to protect jails and account for differences in local facilities, Deitch said. Repeat inspection violations are common, and regulatory agencies have a limited arsenal of sanctions, which may include fining jails, revoking licensing, barring facilities from obtaining insurance or ultimately closing a facility.
“The reality is that there are very few sanctions that actually make a difference,” Deitch said. The natural consequence, she said, is liability: If someone sues a jail, violations are “good evidence of deliberate indifference.”
Recently, lawmakers in Louisiana tasked Deitch and her lab with proposing new jail standards and oversight there. Deitch said she hopes the resulting report serves as an early version of a model standard, with lessons and best practices that are broadly applicable.
“It's not like there’s one model that I think is great and everyone should do exactly what this other place is doing,” Deitch said. “If I were starting from scratch, I would create an independent entity — an independent commission of some kind.”
Texas is one of seven states with an independent commission, which consists of nine members appointed by the governor to staggered six-year terms. The commission includes two sheriffs, a county judge, a county commissioner, a medical professional and four members of the public. The commission also employs nearly 30 staff members.
The commission holds public quarterly meetings that often feature lengthy public comment. If a jail is noncompliant, state code allows the commission to require local officials to appear at the meetings to “present evidence of corrective action taken and completion date.” The commission also maintains a website that lists noncompliant jails.
The public shaming is “very effective,” said Krishnaveni Gundu, co-founder and executive director of the Texas Jail Project, a four-person nonprofit focused on advocacy, storytelling and policy change around county jails.
Gundu described her organization as the “de facto” oversight body for the state jail commission. Among many other initiatives, the group builds community, encourages people to attend the commission’s quarterly public meetings and even streams them online. Gundu also serves on one of the commission’s two advisory committees.
She stressed the importance of empowering people to share their own experiences with jails and building a movement for change over time.
“We’ve done a great job of channeling that into systemic change,” Gundu said.
Meredith Newman contributed data reporting. This story was made possible by a grant from The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.
