By Morgan Norris
Medill Reports
Henry Broomfield spent 26 years inside Stateville Correctional Center, where, according to the John Howard Association, inmates lived with hazardous water and falling ceilings. Now free, he and others are turning to art to rebuild their lives, even as the state invests $900 million in new prisons the community says it doesn’t want.
TRANSCRIPT:
HENRY BROOMFIELD: This a poem I wrote while I was in prison.
AUDIO: Now, this may offend,
But how can this offend
When this is my skin
In the world that I live in?
The new word?
It’s “(N-word)”
I mean, “fella.”
A word for less you settle.
BROOMFIELD: What happens is now that I’m here on the outside, I get sometimes tired in the daytime.
NARRATION: Meet Henry Broomfield. He’s only been free for three months.
BROOMFIELD: Uh, December ‘25.
NARRATION: And next week is his birthday. (Editor’s note: Broomfield’s birthday was on March 14)
BROOMFIELD: Yeah, he allowed me to come Saturday, ’cause I haven’t seen you since I was a teenager.
NARRATION: The first time he’ll see his sister in 28 years.
BROOMFIELD: We talk a lot because we all we got left now. When I was born, she didn’t have no kids, so I was like her son.
NARRATION: His mother and both of his brothers died while he was in prison. He still thinks about the day he says everything went wrong.
BROOMFIELD: A guy that I was close with, “Such and such robbed me,” and he put the gun in my baby’s mouth. So then, that’s when the decision was made. So, I made a bad decision at 17 years old, and paid for it — teens, 20s, 30s, 40s. And I’m being judged.
NARRATION: Then there was Stateville Correctional Center.
BROOMFIELD: They roaches is like inmates. A lot of them guys had cancer, stomach cancer, because of that water. I knew it was bad. Like, whenever I come from playing basketball and I drink some water, my stomach hurt. Come on, now, that ain’t— I mean, that ain’t normal.
NARRATION: It’s not normal, which is why Illinois lawmakers allocated $900 million to rebuild Stateville and Logan Correctional Centers under a plan called RISE IDOC. But the community doesn’t want it.
SARAH ROSS: We think that public safety means having that money in our neighborhoods. That’s actually what safety is, not building prisons for people who aren’t even born yet.
FAYLITA HICKS: It’s a money– making machine. They just want to put more bodies in. All of the legislative work that we’ve been doing, and our grassroots organizations and at the state level and at the city level, to get people out of the prisons is making it hard for them to make money.
NARRATION: According to the John Howard Association, Illinois prisons had a 29% staff vacancy rate in 2024. Ninety-six percent of people who go to prison will eventually come home.
JENNIFER VOLLEN-KATZ: We are certainly not interested in expanding the carceral footprint in Illinois. However, we’re very realistic about the fact that people who are currently incarcerated are living in conditions that are inhumane, unsafe, and frankly unacceptable.
SEN. LAKESIA COLLINS: When I think about $900 million, I’m thinking about the communities that could use that funding. I can totally understand those who are opposed to it, but I also know that the current conditions that folks who are incarcerated with right now have to change right now.
NARRATION: While the city continues to make investments, the damage done from current correctional facilities makes it harder to re-enter society.
BROOMFIELD: A lot of people was like, “Actually,” they’re like, “Do you know where the Bean at?” I’m like, “What the hell is the Bean?”
When I left, and I got on the bus, they didn’t cuff me up. But I was in the chair, I was in the seat like this. And after about an hour I realized, what the hell I’m doing? ‘Cause I’m so used to being cuffed up. Been 26 years of going from prison to prison cuffed up. So now that I’m in a car, and I’m like I’m cuffed up. I’m like, man, what the hell I’m doing? Man, let me get loose. It didn’t get real to me until I got right outside of Chicago and I seen them buildings. I was like, OK. It’s real. I’m here.
NARRATION: On Chicago’s West Side, a handful of organizations are filling the gaps the state cannot.
BRIAN BEALS: Do anybody have any else, any else they want to say about the exercise we just did?
BROOMFIELD: I like the different perspectives.
BEALS: We write all original stories about our lives. Now that we’re out, those stories are transitioning into stories of reentry. While we were in, they were stories of prison culture and confinement.
BROOMFIELD: Art was everything. I don’t know how I would have got through 26 and a half years without God and art.
NARRATION: Beals and Broomfield served time together, and now they’re free together. So even though walls are being built, they’ll continue turning them sideways, day in and day out, one day at a time.
BROOMFIELD: When we was on the inside, we all bonded and became brothers. But at first, I was feeling like I’m in this big old city. I don’t even know nobody. That camaraderie that we built in there, we still have it out here.
BEALS: I think, I just want to say thank you. It’s reciprocal. The brotherhood — I get as much as I give.
NARRATION: Morgan Norris—
BEALS: Most of the time.
NARRATION: —Medill Reports.
BEALS: And that’s it, and I’m out.
Morgan Norris is a broadcast specialization graduate student at Medill.