Gov. Bruce Rauner announced last week that the Illinois Department of Corrections will be opening up a life skills facility for convicts in southern Illinois.

Rauner ordered the Illinois Department of Corrections to repurpose a juvenile facility in Murphysboro into a Life Skills and Re-entry facility, which will aim to give prisoners education, vocational and life skills training to encourage a more successful transition once they leave prison.

“After somebody has been punished for a crime, we can keep our communities safer; we can reduce crime, if we give them skills so that they’re not right back doing illegal things again,” Rauner said during a press conference. “We’ve got to stop the revolving door.”

Rauner has made criminal justice reform a key part of his administration’s work. Rauner established the Illinois State Commission on Criminal Justice and Sentencing Reform at the beginning of his term to examine the criminal justice system in Illinois. Last month he advocated an initiative to provide offenders with a state ID when they leave prison to ease aspects of transitioning to normal life.

The center will be positive both for inmates and Illinois residents, Rauner said.

This is a good facility,” he said. “Right now our facilities are not being run well for our corrections officers or for our offenders.”

The facility would be “transformational,” said John Baldwin, the department of corrections’ acting director.

“Almost half of the people who serve time in the Illinois Department of Corrections come back to us. That is fundamentally wrong,” he said at the press conference. “They have served their time, they have served their sentence, they need a viable second chance.”

Baldwin said training inmates for life after prison is the state’s duty.

But Edwin Yohnka, communications and public policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, said although life skills training is a good step, the state needs to do more to reform its criminal justice system.

“We essentially have a system that’s been broken, and it’s been broken by the fact that we over-relied on that criminal justice system to fix all of the ills of our society,” he said.

Apart from preparing offenders for life after imprisonment, Yohnka said reducing the amount of people who are incarcerated and the length of sentences would be essential to reform.

Yohnka also said judges need to have more power over sentencing to reduce the harm of mandatory minimums.

“To have some sort of decision making and judgement in determining how long someone should be incarcerated is a really important step,” he said.

Additionally, Rauner announced the state will also be closing an outdated portion of a prison in northeast Illinois. Called a “roundhouse” for its circular design, the “F House” at Stateville Correctional Center creates safety problems for both prisoners and guards, a news release said.

The building is the last remaining roundhouse prison facility in the country, Rauner said. The corrections officers employed in the “F House” will be reassigned to other positions.

“It’s a terrible place,” he said. “If you spend time in there, you’re going to have mental health issues … We should’ve closed that years ago.”

“F House” will be closed in six to eight weeks, Rauner said.

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