States Claim to Invest in “Humane” New Prisons — But Prisons Were Never Humane

In 2027, the doors of the largest state-funded infrastructure project in Indiana’s history will open. Already a winner of a “green” award for design sustainability, this public facility in the state’s northeastern corner includes 18,000 square feet of classroom space.

But this is not a community center or a free public college — it is the new 4,200-bed Northwest Indiana Correctional Facility for men.

In the words of the Indiana Public Defender Council, “policy choices, not crime rates” led to this prison’s construction, which promised to replace and consolidate the region’s decaying prisons. Yet in 2025 the state announced one of these ancient prisons will now stay open to incarcerate people abducted in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids.

The push to replace or rebuild aging prisons is not confined to Republican-majority states. In neighboring Democratic Illinois, in 2024 the state debuted a plan to demolish Stateville and Logan prisons, due to their “complete degradation” and “inoperability.” By 2026, the state confirmed two “facilities” with a combined capacity of 3,000 will be built on the footprint of Stateville. A state press release touts the plan’s “rehabilitative and gender-responsive spaces with housing, education, programming, medical and mental health, dietary, and recreational areas to support the successful re-entry of individuals into their communities.”

New prison projects underway across the U.S. champion reforms that appear progressive: “trauma-informed” (New Jersey); a “wellness center” (Pennsylvania); a “model” for rehabilitation (South Dakota).

Prisons are aging. But in Illinois, where I live and teach the history of incarceration in my university classes, two realties are undeniable.

With 12,000 empty beds, truth in sentencing laws that ensure people serve their full sentences, and no parole or mechanism for release for people serving time (except the Hail Mary of a clemency petition or compassionate release for dying people), Illinois cannot build its way out of the problem of aging prisoners and prisons.

Any look at prison history reveals a pattern. From the penitentiary to today’s eco-conscious rebuilds, each reform justifies and usually expands carceral budgets, logics, and footprints: If they build it, they fill it. Every generation argues their experts’ reforms will ensure prisons are more therapeutic, safer, or scientific. But the end is always the same: “more prisons always lead to even more prisons,” as the scholar and organizer Angela Davis stated in a 1998 interview.

The Trap of “Progressive” Prison Reforms

The very prisons that today’s new construction projects aim to replace, with the promise to improve on their predecessors, were in their own time lauded as exemplars.

At Oakdale Reformatory for Women’s dedication ceremony on November 19, 1931, praise circulated freely: Illinois Gov. Louis Emmerson hailed the prison as “another milestone in the work of prison building and penal administration.” The director of prisons described Oakdale as a “a living monument to the women of Illinois,” while the Chicago Daily Tribune (now the Chicago Tribune) noted “no drab prison garb,” “no musty odor,” and heralded this “modern,” “scientific experiment in prison reform,” initiated by “Illinois club women.” In 1936, a statewide prison inquiry committee lauded Oakdale as “model prison”; the total cost of this “splendid and wonderful reformatory” at that time was just over $1 million (approximately $24 million in 2026 dollars).

Oakdale was built on the heels of the launch of “the world’s most modern prison,” as the press reported from Stateville Correctional Center’s dedication ceremony in 1924: Illinois had finally embraced the best example of prison reform. Built in part with unpaid labor from prisoners, this “last word in prisons” cost $7 million (approximately $136 million in 2026 dollars).

The shine faded fast at both Oakdale and Stateville. By 1939, media outlets questioned the cost of this “luxury” prison for women, highlighting the number of escapees from Oakdale. By 1953, prison officials were increasingly pressed to curtail their “lenient” conditions and “excessive privileges.” By 1959, overcrowding propelled prison leadership to demand more guards to ensure security. By 1973, the executive director of a prison watchdog organization, the John Howard Association, declared the prison, renamed Dwight in the 1970s, “the most severe and oppressive I have studied,” and condemned abysmal conditions — including harsh discipline, starvation, rampant racism, and sexual harm — even noting how guards restricted incarcerated people’s access to the toilet. When Dwight finally closed in 2013, those incarcerated transferred to the “crumbling” Logan prison and were met with open hostility from guards. “Every bodily function that you can fathom was plastered across walls, across windows, across our mattresses,” said Sandra Brown, who was incarcerated for years inside Dwight and then Logan, in an interview with WTTW.

In 2026, those incarcerated in Logan are surrounded by toxic water, black mold, extreme temperatures, and hostile staff.

Far from unique, dismal conditions are the norm. Almost as soon as Stateville opened, people inside began organizing: In March 1931, 1,500 prisoners rose up against the conditions, particularly overcrowding; the confrontation ended with the death of two incarcerated people. In 1945, supported by the University of Chicago, Stateville began a 29-year experiment, infecting thousands of prisoners with malaria and administering experimental drugs; official archives report only one death. The 1960s and 1970s were marked by prisoner-organized uprisings against white supremacy, Islamophobia, toxic conditions, and brutal forms of retaliation from staff. Guards at the prison unionized by 1966, and one of their key demands included another reform, a “special segregation facility for troublemakers”: solitary confinement through the special housing unit, or SHU.

In 2016, the signature of Stateville’s scientific design, a panopticon built to philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s specifications known as the cell block F House, finally closed. With “cockroaches, mold, leaks, [and] bad plumbing,” the John Howard Association reported that F House was “perfectly engineered to induce extreme aggravation, anxiety and stress among inmates and staff.” Yet without any renovations, F House reopened in 2020 to quarantine people with COVID-19. Official reports list the COVID deaths of 12 people at the prison, yet journalists and prisoners mark the count at least at 30. Notably — like most prisons before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic — Stateville was a breeding ground for drug-resistant tuberculosis, Legionella, HIV, pneumonia, and countless other pathogens.

One death accelerated the end of this “model prison” after a century in operation. On June 19, 2024, Michael Broadway asphyxiated in the 100+ degree temperature inside his cell. The guards who finally arrived administered Narcan, assuming Broadway overdosed, but the heat had inflamed his chronic asthma. Eighteen years into his 75-year sentence, his neighbors and friends, witnesses to this execution, carried his body out when the stretcher that finally arrived was broken.

Resisting Carceral Infrastructures

In words often attributed to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., “budgets are moral documents,” whether federal, state, or local. In Illinois and across the U.S., state prisons are generally funded through two streams: the operating budget, which pays the bills to run the state (including the department of corrections); and the capital budget, which is where the longer-term vision unfolds, or expenditures which exceed the annual operating budget. In most states, the capital budget, the plan for the infrastructure of tomorrow, is financed by bonds.

A capital budget often feels like a done deal by design, but communities can challenge these appropriations, which legislators must reauthorize yearly. Prison build plans across the U.S. should propel everyone’s scrutiny. What futures are we building?

Yet beyond prison construction, lethal carceral infrastructures continue to expand: From 2002 to 2022, almost every state in the U.S. expanded or built new jails, at a total cost of more than $42 billion — a “jail-building boom.” By 2025, Wyoming was the only state without a large-scale police training center, known to activists as a “Cop City,” to “develop and share violent policing tactics” for “urban warfare.” In 2026, ICE spent billions trying to snap up warehouses across the U.S. to imprison migrants, and still promises $50,000 signing bonuses, and some student loan forgiveness, for new recruits.

The glossy language of reform, generally accompanied by a vague promise of greater public safety, contributes to the normalization of these carceral infrastructures, often benignly referred to as “facilities.” The framing is seductive: Only a grinch could oppose the new “modern and innovative” Dane County, Wisconsin, jail that incorporates “color theory,” or the proposed $7 million “oasis” waiting room at Cook County Jail in Chicago, where 18 incarcerated people died in 2023, despite a record low population.

Yet increasingly, communities recognize the hollowness of these carceral reform initiatives. And we organize accordingly.

Consider communities’ resistances to the most recent wave of ICE raids even as the federal government attempts to promote the myth that ICE is scrubbing rapists, pedophiles, and traffickers from our streets. Across the U.S., everyday people have formed watch groups and brigades to actively push back on ICE and document the reality: A masked armed militia snatching up a 5-year-old boy; mothers who pick up their kids from school; Asian American fathers in their underwear. Our evidence and resistance are undeniable: This carceral infrastructure makes our communities deeply unsafe.

From webinars sharing tactics from those on the front lines of fights against prison and jail building projects, to the circulation of bilingual toolkits like Community Justice Exchange’s “If They Build It: Organizing Lessons & Strategies Against Carceral Infrastructure,”communities continue to mobilize and proliferate resources to challenge these projects and to demand that we fund the affirming public resources in our communities — new schools, child care and after school programs, mental health supports — that actually change people’s lives and make us safer.

Even when a campaign or an action to challenge one of these carceral projects does not result in success, we build power for the next campaign and grow our analysis and our communities. In 2017, in the wake of the world’s largest wave of public school closures, young organizers in Chicago led a powerful campaign arguing that the $95 million earmarked for a new police training institution, a Cop Academy, would make everyone, particularly Black and Brown communities, more unsafe. While Chicago’s version of Cop City was built, political education from this #NoCopAcademy movement pulled more than 85 organizations across Chicago to sign on and agree that contracting the power and scope of policing is a common, achievable, and critical community priority.

From Illinois’s No New Prisons and the Massachusetts Prison Moratorium to the wins to end ICE warehouses and to FLOCK Out, grassroots campaigns across the country continue to challenge carceral infrastructure projects and respond, with a powerful affirmative, to the question posed by Angela Davis almost 25 years ago: Are Prisons Obsolete?