Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
A few years ago in the Reader, Jeffrey Felshman wrote about the extreme isolation experienced by inmates at Tamms, Illinois’s only supermax prison. In the 13 years that the facility has been open, that isolation has been well documented: Tamms, where incarcerated men are kept in solitary confinement up to 23 hours a day, has been the subject of a photo series in the Trib, a long-running campaign criticizing its conditions, a human rights lawsuit by the MacArthur Justice Center, and the odd article here and there—here, most recently, by Steve Bogira, who wrote about the dispute between Governor Pat Quinn, who’s proposed closing a roster of prisons, including Tamms, as an austerity measure, and downstate lawmakers and prison guards’ unions, who are fighting Quinn’s plan. AFSCME Council 31, which represents 302 Tamms employees, sued in August to keep the prison, and others on the chopping block, open; the issue’s currently in the courts, with a temporary restraining order prohibiting their immediate closure.
