Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.
Stateville imprisons the worst of the worst offenders in Illinois. Brown’s chicken murderer James Degorski, and years ago, Richard Speck. The point of the prison is punishment, and the facility is supposed to be decrepit and filthy. The average sentence for anyone housed there is IIRC 40 years to life.