Jason Stephens kept telling Illinois prison staff that his sickle cell disease was going untreated, and that he would keep hurting himself until someone helped. In July 2024 he set a fire in his cell at the Joliet Treatment Center. Surveillance video shows guards left him locked in the smoke for about 30 minutes, according to the Marshall Project, WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times, which investigated the prison. An ambulance then sat for nearly 28 minutes waiting on paperwork. Stephens, 38, died two weeks later.
On Tuesday, Illinois lawmakers held a hearing on what that investigation found: more than 70 fires at the prison in three years, a dozen of them self-immolations, and two deaths.
Sickle cell disease in the United States mostly affects Black people, and Black people are 52% of the Illinois prison population (June 2024 figures from the Department of Corrections) against about 14% of the state. A prison that cannot treat the disease, and has no working fire alarm, is a danger that lands first on Black men and women in its custody.
Latoya Hughes, the department’s director, told legislators that 47% of people in Illinois prisons have a mental illness and that prisons were never built to provide long-term treatment. She called access to psychiatrists at Joliet “phenomenal.” Amanda Antholt, a disability rights lawyer for people held there, said the opposite: patients rarely get individual therapy and are punished harshly instead. “Jason Stephens died because he was so desperate to get the help that he needed,” she told the committee.
Sheena McClain, a Joliet officer and president of her AFSCME local, said staff work without adequate protection and still have no written fire safety plan. State fire marshal inspections have found the alarms broken for a fourth straight year, WBEZ reported last month. The department did not answer questions about the alarms, and the governor’s office said it is working with the fire marshal “with great urgency” but declined to say more, citing pending litigation.
The state has made some changes since the investigation: more fire training, fire-retardant mattresses, full oxygen tanks for staff. Hughes said the department is hiring a fire safety employee and a new chief of mental health. The Department of Corrections also fired four guards connected to the 2024 fire.
State Rep. Kelly Cassidy told the department: “‘We’re trying’ is no longer going to be enough.” State Sen. Rachel Ventura has filed a resolution asking for an independent fire safety review of the prison, and lawmakers are also weighing a bipartisan bill to create an independent ombudsman who would investigate complaints about conditions and treatment in the state’s prisons.
They are right. Illinois had a dead man, a video and an investigation before it hired a fire safety employee, and it still cannot say the alarms work. A department that has to be shown its own prison on fire should not be the only one allowed to inspect it. The review and the ombudsman bill are where legislators can prove they heard Tuesday’s testimony.
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