The fire alarms at the Joliet Treatment Center, an Illinois prison built to treat serious mental illness, are still broken. It is the fourth year in a row the Office of the State Fire Marshal has found them that way, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Marshall Project reported Friday, three months after an investigation tied the prison to two deaths and more than 70 fires.
The Illinois Department of Corrections did not respond to questions about why. A spokesperson for the governor’s office said the department is working with the fire marshal to make changes “with great urgency”, and declined to say more, citing pending litigation.
The prison holds about 200 people and opened in its current form in 2017. The investigation by the Marshall Project, WBEZ and the Sun-Times found that cellblocks lacked sprinklers, that alarms were disconnected or inoperable, and that officials had given fire inspectors no written evacuation plan. At least 12 of the fires were men setting themselves alight.
Jason Stephens, 38, set a fire in his cell in July 2024 and was left in the smoke for about 30 minutes. Guards then held the ambulance at the prison gate for nearly 28 minutes. He died two weeks later of complications from inhalation injuries. Latrell Edwards died in February 2025, two months after a cell fire in November 2024.
Illinois locks up Black people at far higher rates than white people. The Council on Criminal Justice put the Black-white imprisonment disparity in the state at 7.7 to 1 in 2020, down from 13.2 to 1 in 2000. The reporting on Joliet does not give the race of the men held there or of the two who died, so the prison’s own racial makeup is not established here. What the record does show is that the state sends a population this overrepresented with Black men into a system that did not keep its fire alarms working for a unit housing people in mental health crisis.
One incarcerated man told the reporters why people set fires: “We try to talk and write to them, but they don’t respect that. But when we act like animals and set things on fire and ourselves on fire, they listen.”
Some things have changed since July. The prison has added fire safety training, fire-retardant mattresses and full oxygen tanks for staff. The department fired four guards over the 2024 fire that led to Stephens’s death. But workers still have no written fire safety plan.
Sheena McClain, president of the union AFSCME Council 31, which represents guards, said: “Everybody’s risking their lives when we have these fires. So it is very important that they get a safety plan so we can all learn what to do.”
After the July reporting, state Sen. Robert Peters, a Chicago Democrat, said “people’s lives are on the line.” Sen. Terri Bryant, a Republican from Murphysboro who worked in corrections for 20 years, said “the highest levels of administration are so incompetent.” Rep. Kevin Olickal, a Chicago Democrat, called for independent oversight of state prisons.
Lawmakers have scheduled two hearings for Nov. 10, on mental health care in prisons, conditions at Joliet and prison oversight.
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