About this Portfolio This portfolio of prints was led by Jimmy Soto from Build Communities, Not Prisons and Sarah Ross from Liberation Lab at Walls Turned Sideways. In the summer of 2025, fifteen artists came together over six workshops to discuss ideas of community safety, learn more about the state’s plans to build two new prisons, and to produce designs that focused on the themes of the No New Prisons campaign. The majority of participating artists were formerly incarcerated, collectively spending hundreds of years locked up. Between their personal experiences of life behind bars and research provided by No New Prisons campaign members, the artists generated compelling designs intended to ask questions and emphatically say, we need money and resources in our communities, not prisons.
“Illinois’ antiquated prison system is in process of scientific reconstruction,” reads the first line of a New York Times article, published September 7, 1933, written just eight years after Illinois opened Stateville prison in Crest Hill, IL, the third prison in the state at that time.
Like many articles on prison reform in the century to come, the state promised a range of reforms, from segregated facilities, mental health services, access to trades, education, and more. One hundred years since the opening of Stateville, the story is the same. In March 2024 Governor Pritzker and the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) announced plans to close and rebuild Stateville prison and Logan prison, a mixed-security women’s prison in Lincoln, IL, at a starting price tag of $900 million. They promise these new state-of-the-art prisons will “incorporate modern design principles,” “employ evidence-based therapeutic practices,” “expand opportunities for vocational training and re-entry,” support “rehabilitation,” “restoration,” and “reduce recidivism.” If the past one hundred years have taught us anything, it’s that we cannot fall for these false promises again; doing so will cost billions of dollars and countless lives.
The closure announcement came with excitement. It followed decades of concerns about widespread abuse and inhumane conditions raised by incarcerated people and their loved ones, as well as dozens of lawsuits challenging this routine violence. It also followed a master facilities report commissioned by IDOC that identified Stateville and Logan as approaching an “inoperable” rating due to years of deferred maintenance and crumbling infrastructure, validating independent monitoring reports by John Howard Association that consistently documented these very conditions for years.
That excitement was tempered, though, by the rebuild announcement and the lack of action to address conditions in which incarcerated people are living, particularly in Stateville and Logan. Since the announcement, multiple federal lawsuits have been filed by incarcerated women at Logan alleging sexual assaults by guards and retaliation for speaking out. Tragically, Michael Broadway, a beloved Northwestern University student incarcerated at Stateville died on June 19, 2024 due to excessive heat and lack of medical attention. Michael’s death was just one factor that prompted a federal court order forcing the closure of Stateville in September 2024— much earlier than IDOC’s planned timeline —and the abrupt transfer of most people incarcerated at Stateville to other prisons throughout the state. Again and again, Illinois demonstrates that incarceration is inhumane.
The closures are a logical step in the right direction. Illinois already operates over 50 adult facilities, including four work camps, four transition centers, two life skills reentry centers, and two treatment centers, all clocking in at an IDOC annual operating budget that exceeds $2 billion. Further, the prison population in IL has dropped significantly in the last decade, making the need for more prisons obsolete. There are over 12,000 empty beds throughout IDOC prisons (a 30.13% vacancy rate) and a staff vacancy rate of 29%. Illinois has too many prisons.
And yet, the Governor has doubled down by allocating a massive expenditure that will exceed $1 billion for two new prisons. Echoing correctional reformers from the early 1900s, JB Pritzker promises that these new prisons will be gender-informed, trauma-responsive, and program-centric. This is a familiar, debunked vision. We know that prisons in Illinois, and indeed across the country, have not and will never deliver healing, restoration, or public safety because they are institutions built on punishment and permanent dispossession. The idea that a holistic IDOC prison will help rehabilitate rings hollow. Who among us would send our loved ones to prison to get care, education or other needed resources? Further, at the federal level, the Trump administration has pumped even more public dollars— 45 billion to be exact —into building new prisons to lock up immigrants. In this way, the era of “mass incarceration”, a term that references the racist practices of targeting poor people of color for incarceration, is expanding.
This moment demands bold leadership and presents a real opportunity to truly transform justice and safety in Illinois. Rather than rely on the same tired strategy of building more prisons and promising that this time, these prisons will be different, we demand that public funds be allocated towards resources that create actual safety and support thriving communities. The prints contained in this portfolio present several such opportunities. They say we deserve better. They inspire us to think creatively and critically, and they challenge us to imagine and build something different.
The No New Prisons Illinois Campaign is accepting that challenge. We are demanding: the closure of Logan Prison; to not rebuild Stateville and Logan Prisons; legislation that decarcerates and releases as many incarcerated people as possible; humane living conditions for people who remain incarcerated; reducing the harm of transfer processes when people are moved out of closed prisons; and investment in non-carceral community-based supports. Learn more at bit.ly/NoNewPrisonsIL and follow us on Instagram at nonewprisons.il.
– Chez Rumpf for No New Prisons and Sarah Ross for Walls Turned Sideways with support from Jimmy Soto and Mira Simonton-Chao.
Thank you to —
Aaron Hughes who led workshops and taught participating artists the fine art of screen printing.
Liz Born from Hoofprint who burned the majority of our screens.
Melita Morales, Nick Haselrid, Devyn Coar, Kourney Walker, Dayana Guzman, Christianne Spivey and everyone who participated in screen printing the designs.
No New Prisons organizers, Chez Rumpf and Erica Bentley, who came to the workshops to share campaign updates and more.
All the participating artists who created compelling designs to make this portfolio: Broderick Hollins, Da Shuang Wu, David Lozano, Javier Reyes, Jimmy Soto, Joe Sorrentino, Maurice Hughes, Michelle Clopton, Mira Simonton Chao, Pablo Mendoza, Ryshie Robinson, Samhita Sonti, Sarah Ross, Sharah Hutson and Trejon D’angelo Williams.