Thankfully, there are currently zero known cases inside the McLean County jail according to Sheriff Jon Sandage who spoke at the McLean County Justice Committee Tuesday, January 5th, 2020. Doubts were raised after evidence emerged that there were additional cases at the jail that were never reported to the public. Sandage said the average inmate population for December 2020 is around 222, and that there are currently 40 inmates who have been sentenced and are awaiting transfer to the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC). Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, IDOC has had serious outbreaks in their facilities & has been very reluctant to take in new inmates.
“In late November we had two positive cases,” Sandage said. “They were isolated to one cell block with no exposure to the rest of the facility. So, we did not test the rest of the facility. Since that time we have had zero; and, we currently have zero cases of COVID in the jail. Some of these numbers you’re hearing from people that are putting it out there that there is an outbreak-this & that-that’s incorrect.”
How could the numbers be incorrect, Jon? They’re your numbers. It literally says in the responses to my FOIA requests that he’s the one responding. The information on the number of cases came from his department. His whole response was a straw-man fallacy. I never once claimed there was an outbreak at the jail; I never even used the word “outbreak”. I stated there had been an increase in cases in the past month, and because of the Sheriff’s choice to not announce any information regarding this, we could not be certain there were zero current cases.
The entire question of transparency & accountability was ignored by the entire Justice Committee. Unfortunately, not a single member asked him publicly why he withheld that information in November or whether he would be willing to announce future cases when they occur.
Instead, Sheriff Sandage went on a tirade about how well his staff does, how he needs to defend them, and they’re being viciously attacked because journalists ask simple transparency questions. His response is a red herring. No one commented that the staff was doing a poor job in preventing spread of COVID-19. I personally think the jail has done an excellent job at preventing the spread of COVID-19. Prior to the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, the jail had an influenza outbreak, and their experience from that prepared them for the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve never disagreed with the results; my objection has always been the means in which these results come about, i.e., solitary confinement for all inmates and limited access to loved ones in the outside world via telecommunications contracts that profit off of human misery. Solitary confinement is extremely damaging to a person’s mental health, and contributes nothing toward actual rehabilitation of criminals.1
It’s sad that the simplest of questions are regarded as personal attacks. District 7 Board Member Sharon Chung had to remind the Sheriff that asking questions is literally her job as an elected official, and questions are not the same thing as attacks. Despite everything we’ve been through in the past year, simply requesting transparency & accountability from law enforcement is seen as an assault on the foundations of society. Conservatives have such a fetish for authority that any questioning is deemed dangerous, instead of the bedrock of a representative democracy.
