By Kim Geiger
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — Just nine months on the job, Gov. Bruce Rauner is already on his fourth director of the Illinois Department of Corrections, illustrating the challenge of running one of the more troubled and troublesome agencies in state government.
First, there was Salvador “Tony” Godinez. He was Gov. Pat Quinn’s prisons chief and planned to retire at the end of last year, but Rauner asked him to stick around for nearly two months during the transition.
Then came Donald Stolworthy, a Virginian and former State Department official who oversaw the construction of prisons in Iraq. He lasted less than three months.
Gladyse Taylor was next, named acting director while the governor looked for a permanent replacement. It was a familiar situation for Taylor, a longtime Illinois prisons administrator whom Quinn also had once tapped as a fill-in to run the department.
While Taylor was at the helm, Rauner’s team called over to Iowa, where John Baldwin had set up a consulting business after retiring as that state’s prisons director. The governor asked for help finding someone to fill the role here, and Baldwin suggested a couple of names. Rauner ended up offering the job to Baldwin, whose final years in Iowa had been marked by controversy, including his handling of a multimillion-dollar prison software contract.
Now Baldwin is running the prisons agency, which is often a source of scandals and blunders and is routinely criticized for staffing and funding deficiencies. Overseeing the 48,000-inmate prison system designed to hold 32,000 is a $150,000-a-year job that comes with lots of risk and little job security.
“You pair a hugely overcrowded system with understaffing and it becomes incredibly difficult to manage,” said Jennifer Vollen-Katz, executive director at the John Howard Association, a prison watchdog group. “I think there are a lot of people in corrections who have taken a look at the Illinois corrections system and said, ‘No, thank you.’ ”
Past governors also have had trouble keeping prisons chiefs. Quinn, for example, faced calls for Godinez’s firing after he hired an alleged former gang member to an $111,000-per-year investigator job. Quinn’s first recruit, Michael Randle, resigned after his early release program freed some inmates who went on to commit new crimes. It nearly cost Quinn the primary and general election in 2010.
And just seven weeks into his first term, Gov. Rod Blagojevich had to replace his first corrections director, Ernesto Velasco, who resigned after Chicago Tribune reports of controversial beating incidents involving guards at the Cook County Jail, where Velasco had been director.
Stepping in for Velasco was Donald Snyder, who had run the prison system for Gov. George Ryan. Snyder later admitted pocketing kickbacks from contractors and was sentenced to two years in prison.
Rauner’s strategy for taking on trouble spots in government has been to look outside the state, under the theory that fresh eyes and new ideas are needed.
Baldwin comes to Illinois after a decades-long career in Iowa, where he helped create the state’s corrections department as a stand-alone agency and eventually rose to become its director. Baldwin’s supporters say he pioneered a data-driven approach to prison management and budgeting, and has worked to make Iowa’s prisons more effective at reducing recidivism and understanding the needs of mentally ill inmates.
His decisions also sparked a number of controversies. Iowa auditors questioned his handling of a software contract, which potentially deprived the state of royalty fees. Baldwin and the state ombudsman spent years locked in a legal battle over the department’s handling of inmate disciplinary actions. And as he readied for retirement in January, Iowa lawmakers said Baldwin left them with more questions than answers about a prison construction project that went over budget and wasn’t finished on time.
Baldwin also got mixed reviews on his dealings with inmate advocates.
“John is very forward-looking,” said Nancy Hale, executive director at the Iowa chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “John got the ball rolling years and years ago to really address the needs of the offenders to make sure that their lives are improved, especially regarding mental health, so they don’t come back.”
Jean Basinger, president of the Iowa Citizens for the Rehabilitation of Errants, said she found Baldwin to be uncooperative and rigid in his management style.
“He was not transparent about what was going on in the prisons and not forthcoming about giving us information,” Basinger said. “We did not find him very open about working with us on the changes that we felt would be helpful.”
Baldwin acknowledged his detractors in an interview with the Tribune, but waved away their critiques as a hazard of the job.
“After 42 years, I’m sure you could find a couple things,” Baldwin said.
Among them is a December 2011 auditor’s report that raised questions about Baldwin’s decision to quietly alter a software contract to free the company from paying royalty fees to the state.
The contract dates to 2000, when the corrections department hired Iowa-based Advanced Technologies Group to create an inmate banking system and a management system, according to the report. As part of the contract, the state agreed to sign over its rights to the program in exchange for 50 percent of any licensing fees the company might receive if it sold the system to other correctional institutions.
Shortly after, ATG began leasing the program to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The company paid $3.6 million to the state between 2002 and 2007, the department told auditors. But those payments were only for sales that took place before 2003.
When auditors started asking questions about the arrangement during a review of the state’s procurement policies, Baldwin told them that the fee-share was no longer in place.
A month later, Baldwin produced a copy of the amendment to the contract with an effective date of July 2003 in which he had signed away the state’s rights to the fee-share. Baldwin told the auditor that the contract was changed because the programming language originally used for the software had become outdated.
The auditors questioned that argument. “Updating programming language typically does not result in cancellation of copyright laws,” the auditor’s office wrote in its report. The auditors found that there was “no documentation to demonstrate signing the amendment canceling (Iowa’s) rights to licensing fees was beneficial to (the state).”
The report also noted that Baldwin had signed the contract as director of the department, even though he was assistant director at the time, and that he was the only person within the department who had knowledge of the change.
Baldwin told the Tribune that changing the contract was proper because “our little bitty banking system became irrelevant, like any software program,” and was no longer generating any royalty revenue.
“We were their first customer of any relevance,” Baldwin said of ATG. “The feds responded pretty early and kind of usurped it. And now Iowa is a very, very small player in their repertoire.”
The federal prison system remains an ATG customer, according to the company’s website, and ATG since has sold its software to other states, including California. A spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said it purchased ATG’s programs as “off-the-shelf” solutions “that met our needs and we used implementations of those programs in the federal prison system as our reference point.”
ATG did not respond to repeated interview requests.
The auditor’s report lists a number of unresolved questions about the contract arrangement, including whether it was necessary to amend the contract and why Baldwin and ATG were the only parties able to recall what had happened.
More recently, the Iowa ombudsman’s office complained in a report that Baldwin was uncooperative in its probe of a disciplinary action at a state prison.
“It seems like every time we had an inquiry and I’d say, ‘Let’s follow up with Director Baldwin, it just always felt that he put a little of a wall up,” Iowa Ombudsman Ruth Cooperrider said.
Cooperrider’s investigation focused on an inmate who was disciplined for allegedly chest-bumping a prison guard during an argument. Iowa rules require that inmates who are punished for their behavior get a hearing before an impartial administrative law judge. In this case, the judge issued a penalty that included 180 days of solitary confinement after the prison warden requested the punishment by email.
The ombudsman’s office wanted to take sworn testimony from the administrative law judge as part of its investigation, but Baldwin refused to make her available, according to the report. The matter went to the Iowa Supreme Court, which ruled that the judge and the warden had engaged in “improper conduct” and said the judge was required to give the ombudsman’s office sworn testimony.
Baldwin responded to the ombudsman’s final report with a rebuttal that called it “factually inaccurate and based on opinion.”
“I’m sorry, chest-bumping a correctional officer three times, in my mind, is an assault,” Baldwin told the Tribune. “And it should not be tolerated in any prison system.”
On the eve of his retirement, Baldwin was the face of a prison construction project that took longer than planned and ran at least $34 million over budget, according to several published reports.
Baldwin faced questioning from a panel of lawmakers, who found his response to their questions about the prison project inadequate. The lawmakers had sent Baldwin written questions about the project but received single-word answers in response.
Baldwin told the Tribune he dealt with 30 construction projects over the years and had a strong record of staying within budget and on schedule. He said the problems were caused by an engineering error that left the complex with improper heating and cooling systems.
“As the director of the department of corrections, anything good that happens is my responsibility, anything bad that happens is my responsibility,” Baldwin said. “And because it was on my watch, I am responsible for that mistake happening.”
Baldwin, 65, wasn’t planning to come out of retirement when he got the call from Rauner’s team a few months ago. He accepted an invitation to meet with the governor’s staff, thinking it would be nice to take a trip to Chicago.
Baldwin said Rauner pitched the job to him on the spot, saying he wanted the Iowa native to “put us on a path so we can be like we used to be, a top tier corrections system.”
Rauner “appealed to everything that I believe about corrections,” Baldwin recalled. “And I thought, you know, why not?”