Under two different Illinois laws, people charged with sex offenses are subject to indefinite detention. More than 500 people are currently being held under the procedure known as civil commitment.
This story explores the law that holds people who’ve only been charged with a crime — never convicted or sentenced. WTTW News also examined the law that continues to hold people after they’ve served their sentences, sometimes for decades.
James Howe was never found guilty. But he still spent nine years inside of Big Muddy River Correctional Center.
Howe joined some 170 men in Illinois in similar situations: not convicted, but held indefinitely at the southern Illinois prison under a procedure called civil commitment.
After Howe was charged with aggravated criminal sexual assault and domestic battery, prosecutors petitioned to have him evaluated as a sexually dangerous person, or SDP. Under Illinois’ Sexually Dangerous Persons Act, people deemed SDPs are subject to one of the handful of pre-conviction civil commitment statutes in the country.
“That’s the weird thing about that law is that they don’t have to convict you of the crime, but yet they put you in a prison,” Howe said. “I mean that right there says it all, does it not?”
Instead of following through with cases to their conclusions, prosecutors can petition a judge to have the defendant evaluated by psychologists or psychiatrists to determine whether they are likely to pursue sexually dangerous behaviors. If these evaluators deem a defendant a sexually dangerous person, the criminal case halts and the accused is instead sent to the downstate prison for treatment for these behaviors.
Mark Carich, who built Big Muddy’s SDP program in 1995 and left in 2012, said the treatment program no longer fulfills its intended purpose: decreasing the number of,,,
