What to think about prison closures?

So is this what we’ve come to, our state’s significant industry is building prison facilities for the federal government to operate?

It seems like a bizarre way to have an economy. Yet it seems to be the direction we’re headed in.

REMEMBER THE NEW maximum-security prison near Thompson, Ill., in the northwestern part of the state. Illinois built it, but never opened it because the funds to pay for its operation were never on hand.

It may never have become the place to hold the people now being held at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo, Cuba on suspicion of terrorism – which would have made so much sense that of course the ideologues didn’t like the idea.

But the federal government is considering using the facility for other purposes within the federal Bureau of Prisons.

Perhaps that is why Gov. Pat Quinn turned to the United States of America when he has another prison facility to sell. It’s not like he has a used car to deal. There aren’t many people or organizations with the potential to buy such a facility.

SO NOW WE can speculate as to whether the Tamms Correctional Center at the far southernmost county of Illinois (only a dozen miles north of Cairo, which is the state’s southernmost tip) will go from being a state facility to a federal one.

For all I know, we’ll get wisecracks about how former governors George Ryan or Rod Blagojevich could wind up getting transferred from their current federal prison facilities to one that they once (theoretically) oversaw.

Quinn literally (according to various news reports inspired by the Associated Press) sent the federal government a letter telling them of Tamms’ isolation from the rest of Illinois (which is something all of Southern Illinois has in common) that would make any federal facility operated there all the more secure.

But I’m not sure just how seriously the U.S. government will take the offer – even if the president himself considers himself an Illinois native.

BECAUSE THE FEDERAL government already had a high-security prison facility located in Southern Illinois – about an hour’s drive to the north in the city of Marion (which at just over 17,000 people might seem like a small suburb, but by Southern Illinois standards is a major urban area that includes the federal courthouse for that part of the state that thinks of itself as Little Egypt).

Back in the days before anyone used the phrase “super-max” to describe a high-security prison kept on “lockdown” mode at all times (instead of just to deal with a potential crisis), the federal correctional center at Marion WAS super-max.

It was the prison opened by the federal government in 1963 to replace Alcatraz when that infamous facility became too old and decrepit to be trusted to house dangerous inmates!

But with the opening of a closed maximum-security (the real term that describes such facilities, not super-max) prison in Florence, Colo., Marion became a medium-security prison. The point being that Southern Illinois’ days of housing such dangerous inmates are over.

UNLESS SOMEBODY BELIEVES that the Marion facility is about to overflow and needs a nearby building to take on the extra hard-cases who need to be kept away from other people, it is uncertain how a Tamms facility would fit into the Bureau of Prisons.

It would appear to be a federal redundancy.

Then again, no one has ever accused the federal government of being run in the most efficient manner possible. So maybe somebody at that level would think such a facility would be worth owning.

So this could be the ultimate reason for supporters of this plan to back Barack Obama for re-election come Nov. 6. Somehow, I suspect that a “President Romney” would be used by the Republican ideologues to “punish” Illinois for having ever created a political person out of Obama.

MY GUESS WOULD be that this long-shot of a plan would be no-shot if Obama himself isn’t around somewhere to nudge it through.

And if that were to happen, we in Illinois would literally be stuck with a modern (and vacant) prison facility to have to watch over – with no real use since Quinn included it (along with the women’s maximum-security prison at Dwight) among facilities to be closed by the state in a cost-cutting move.

As for where all those women are going to be transferred to, that is a commentary for another day.

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When do religious displays cross line?

I comprehend the fact that some people receive such a satisfying sensation from their religious beliefs that they feel the need to engage in public expressions of their faith. It is when those people persist in trying to drive those beliefs down the throats of everybody around them that I have a problem.

Which is why a pair of stories cropping up this week in Southern Illinois managed to capture my attention.

FOR IT SEEMS that the datelines “MARION, Ill. –“ and “ALTO PASS, Ill. –“ will be turning up in the news in coming months.

The former is what passes for one of Southern Illinois’ major cities (population is only just over 17,000, but it is the location of the correctional center where some of the nation’s most violent federal inmates are kept), whille the latter is significant because of the two interstate highways that intersect near the town.

That intersection is the location of a 111-foot tall Christian cross that can be seen for miles around and is even used as a landmark by aviation students in the area to help them keep their bearings. As one who has driven on Interstate 70 and then turned onto Interstate 57 to get to Southern Illinois (including Marion), I am aware that the cross is not ignorable.

The cross has been in place for decades, and has become something of a local landmark. It even attracts a certain type of tourist (the kind of person who likes to go to obscure places in search of bizarre objects). But because of its age, it is deteriorating physically, which is why local groups are trying to raise money to help pay for renovations to keep it structurally sound.

IT SEEMS THAT the Friends of the Cross group has come up with about $400,000 (about half the total they think they need), and somehow managed to get $20,000 of that in the form of a grant from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.

That fact has the Chicago-area’s most outspoken atheist activist, Rob Sherman, all upset. The man who once showed up at 3 a.m. at the old City News Bureau of Chicago offices to play me a tape recording of then-President Ronald Reagan making (to him) a stupid wisecrack in favor of religion in government went ahead this week and filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for central Illinois (based in Springfield).

He wants the group to be forced to give the state back its money – claiming this is a clear-cut case of a violation of the separation of “church and state.” Although I know that state agency has provided money for many off-beat projects with dubious local economic value. I wonder how many of the minor league baseball stadiums built in recent years with partial state funds from that agency are truly providing the benefits that were boasted about by their local proponents?

What makes a giant cross any more absurd? It is so large and gaudy that it can’t be taken too seriously as a “holy site.”

I’M NOT SURE how the federal court is going to rule, although I’m pretty sure if he had filed his lawsuit with the Southern Illinois district court in Benton, Ill., Sherman would have been laughed out of town.

Because I’m sure a lot of people are going to view this as a case of a local tourist attraction (about the only one that Alto Pass, Ill., has), and not a place that specifically peddles religion.

Some groups have used the sight for large-scale religious rallies. But there are just as many people who view the cross as an eccentricity along the lines of the world’s largest ball of twine (a distinction claimed by both Darwin, Minn., and Cawker City, Kan.).

Personally, I remember it as something I saw just before stopping in nearby Mount Vernon to reload by car with gasoline.

WHICH MEANS I wonder if Sherman is merely continuing his record of being a non-religious Don Quixote. Put a windmill blade on this cross, and the analogy would be perfect.

Which means I don’t view this activity as being offensive, which is something I can’t say about Marion, Ill., where some local officials seem determined to erect a monument on the grounds of the town square depicting the Ten Commandments – thereby giving them a sense of recognition by local officials.

A local resident wants Marion officials to put the religious monument there, and is willing to arrange for someone to purchase the plot of land that would be needed for the monument. That move would make the portion of the town square private property, which would allow its new owner to erect whatever he wants there.

The Southern Illinois newspaper reported this week that attorneys for the city are urging them to reject the idea, because of all the legal grief it will create. The American Civil Liberties Union already has threatened its own lawsuit if the monument is approved.

YET MARION MAYOR Bob Butler seems to want to figure out a way to place the monument on the grounds. “I am confident that one way or another, the Ten Commandments will be put in place,” Butler told the Southern Illinoisan.

Excuse me for thinking that this is just an attempt by someone who wants to try to impose his religious beliefs on everyone around him, and is trying to get a council worked up over the issue to where they will think it is some noble cause to erect such a monument.

Not that I really care much about the Ten Commandments – which largely are noble goals we all ought to try to live our lives by, regardless of our religious faiths.

It’s just that I can’t help but wonder why the people who are most trying to push for this monument are so eager. It makes me suspect that maybe their own lives aren’t in perfect accord with those commandments, and they’d rather have the masses look at everybody else’s conduct other than their own.

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