An investigation from the Chicago Sun-Times found that Illinois prisons are failing to provide adequate health care for it’s nearly 30,000 incarcerated people, despite being under a consent decree, or court-enforceable settlement agreement, to improve health care since 2019. The Illinois Department of Corrections continues to fail to provide adequate medical and dental care to incarcerated people, according to reports from an independent court-appointed monitor.

Many individual stories detailing of decades of medical neglect is a common one in Illinois prisons. It’s a full-blown crisis where the state’s critically understaffed facilities struggle to deliver proper correctional medicine to the tens of thousands of incarcerated persons in their care. In a review of 15 deaths in custody since the last report in 2024, the monitor learned three people died from asthma, deaths the monitor said were preventable.

The first medical neglect suit against IDOC began with Don Lippert. While incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center in 2010, he alleged he was denied his twice-daily insulin shots, sending him into diabetic shock. His suit has since expanded to cover all individuals in state custody who have serious medical and dental needs.

Under the consent decree, the state promised to make systemic reforms to the prison health care system. The judge overseeing the agreement assigned an independent monitor to provide updates to the court and observe whether the state is making good on its promises. The mandated reforms include: hire more qualified staff; implement an electronic medical record system; improve facilities and equipment to meet medical needs; maintain reliable and up-to-date data; and create an organizational structure that ensures inmates get the care they need.

In a special report from September, the monitor wrote: “At the six-year mark in the Consent Decree, IDOC has not achieved any of these provisions, significantly hindering compliance and improvements in care.”

The monitor’s ninth report, filed in March 2026, listed several deficiencies and echoed the findings from previous reports. They included, among other issues:

• The department only employs the equivalent of 16 full-time physicians across its 29 correctional facilities, which house more than 30,000 people.
• The department receives a budget for roughly 33 full-time physicians. Even though the monitor says staffing is “dangerously low” and advises IDOC to “increase budgeted physician staffing,” the department claims it’s in compliance with the consent decree’s staffing requirements without giving evidence as to how.
• High turnover also plagues IDOC. Over the last six years, 49 physicians have resigned, the monitor reported.
• About 60% of nursing staff positions are vacant, and about a quarter of the facilities don’t have a medical director to oversee care.
• The department has not implemented a policy for analyzing staff workload and tracking filled and vacant positions. IDOC has also not supplied the monitor with clinical performance reviews for physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, dentists, dental hygienists and dental assistants. Nor have prison officials shared disciplinary records for those professionals.
• The vast majority of patient records are on paper and have not been digitized, which the monitor described as “inefficient, unreliable, and inadequate.” A lack of electronic medical records makes it difficult to ensure continuity of care or to track patient’s medical conditions, the monitor says.

“People are sentenced to prison. They’re not sentenced to die from preventable diseases,” said Alyssa Meurer, a lawyer with the Uptown People’s Law Center and a member of the legal team for the class-action lawsuit that triggered the consent decree.

People in American prisons also have a constitutional right to adequate medical care. And not providing it to them is considered cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment, the basis for the class-action lawsuit against IDOC.

You can read more about the Chicago Sun-Times’ investigation in “Ignored, misdiagnosed, left to die — Illinois prisoners’ health in hands of new provider with shoddy track record” from the Sun-Times website.