Nearly six weeks after Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn halted an early prisoner release program that set free hundreds of potentially violent inmates, his administration is still struggling to identify which criminals -- or even how many -- got out.* * *MGT Push, which got its name from accelerating inmate awards of good-conduct credit, or "meritorious good time," continues to cause problems for Quinn, who is up against state Comptroller Dan Hynes in the Feb. 2 Democratic primary for governor.
Hynes has made the botched program the center of his attacks on the incumbent. Quinn has been seemingly inconsistent in his explanations of the program and what he knew about it.
* * *MGT Push involved awarding up to six months of good-conduct credit to prisoners as soon as they entered the gates and before they had time to show they deserved any good-behavior time off.
Corrections also dropped a 61-day minimum stay for all inmates, meaning scores of prisoners spent a total of less than three weeks behind bars, including county jail time. They served, on average, 26 days in the state pen, from as few as seven to 60, just below the old minimum.
On the updated list, at least 230 released early were convicted of violent crimes or those that involved weapons.
The only good thing about this debacle is that crime is a front-burner issue in a major 2010 political race. If Quinn loses the governorship over it, that should throw a bucket of cold water on let-em-all-out movements nationwide.
This program released a particularly awful criminal. A man savagely beat a woman on a Chicago street (she was in a coma and had serious injuries from which it took months to recover). He received a scant three years in jail. Quinn's policy let him go after a short stint. Why do people think that such a policy is anywhere close to acceptable? Governor Quinn basically told the victim that she was irrelevant.