Bill Heirens, infamous as Chicago’s “Lipstick Killer,” is the longest-serving inmate in the Illinois prison system. He’s been behind bars since the age of 17, when he confessed to three gruesome murders that dominated the news headlines throughout the summer of ’46.
Meanwhile, the graying prison population has placed new demands on an already burdened prison health system, forcing medical workers to provide care that sometimes doesn’t meet IDOC’s own standards. Health care costs are rising, largely because of the complexity of treating older prisoners with a constellation of diseases. And taxpayers foot the bill for unionized corrections officers to guard inmates who would have trouble making it beyond the infirmary doors without a wheelchair or stretcher.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Heirens lives with a dozen other aging inmates in the infirmary at Dixon, 102 miles west of Chicago. Two columns and a grove of trees grace the entrance to Dixon’s sprawling 462-acre campus, which looks more like a boarding school than a prison. To reach the geriatric ward, I pass through a series of security checkpoints. In the outer lobby, a female correctional officer studies my driver’s license and looks through my bag. She waves her hand, ushering me through the metal detector, where another guard, a large man, stands and watches. A few seconds later, an administrator and I are buzzed into a small corridor flanked by two heavy metal doors. A man behind thick bulletproof glass takes my ID, photocopies it, and hands it back. Another guard escorts me inside the fence to the medical complex.
It’s surprisingly quiet for a prison ward that houses 82 inmates. Three- and four-man cells line the hall. In one room, an inmate in thin blue pajama pants and a white T-shirt sits at the edge of his bed, watching television and coughing violently. A cellmate—a gaunt old man wearing a navy blue stocking cap and a large hearing aid—stands at the door, leaning on his metal cane and watching the occasional traffic in the hall. A third cellmate with oily gray hair lies in his bed, peering at a word search book through thick-rimmed glasses. The fourth lies idle in bed, his blanket covering his entire body, including his head. Two men hobble down the hall, which is illuminated only by the light streaming through the glass windows of the cells. One grasps a metal handrail. The other uses a cane.
“We’re working with outdated equipment. We’re working with old methods. We don’t have the latest technology,” she told me. Bandaging tape is in short supply. “They’ll be like, ‘Be careful, because this is all we’ve got for the next two weeks,” she says.
For inmates who don’t need nursing-home care, the savings would be even greater, says prison reform activist Bill Ryan. “If you released just ten reformed, elderly people from the system, we’d save the state $700,000. How many teachers can you hire for $700,000, or a million dollars, even? . . . I think we’ve got an overall sense of values that are upside down.”
In 1995 the Clinton administration developed a financial incentive for states to increase mandatory minimum sentences and eliminate “good time” credit for certain violent offenses. With victims’ rights groups protesting that inmates were getting off easy—and getting out early—the legislature took another run at sentencing policy.
