McHenry County Blog

Update of June 15, 2012.

There is now a way to find people in the McHenry County Jail.  Look here for the link.

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A friend of McHenry County Blog was trying to find out if someone was incarcerated in the McHenry County Jail.

There was nothing on the internet, as there is for the Illinois Department of Corrections.

If someone is in state prison, you look for the “inmate locator” portion of the web site, type in a last name and everyone behind bars with that name pops up.

It must be a pretty popular question, because it’s the top Google item for IDOC and there’s even a separate listing.

But, there’s nothing like that for McHenry County.

I looked at other big counties and here’s what I found.

Lake County has a “prisoner locator” place.

Kane County has one.

DuPage County makes it easy to local those in jail.

Same with Cook County.

Winnebago County even has one and it’s smaller than McHenry County.

But not McHenry County, even though we are the sixth largest county in Illinois.  No county outside of the Chicago metropolitan area is larger.

I decided to look south of I-80.

The first county I checked was Sangamon, where Springfield sits. It has no easy way to find out who is in jail. The last census showed it smaller than McHenry.

Next I tried Madison County, near St. Louis. Nothing there, but Madison has about 50,000 fewer people now than McHenry. It used to be larger, but McHenry County has really grown.

Onto its neighbor, St. Clair County. Couldn’t find anything there either.  St. Clair has about as many people as Madison.

Couldn’t find any way to find an inmate in the Peoria County Jail, but that county is now much smaller than McHenry.

So, it looks as if bigger counties have prison locator functions that can be accessed through the internet, but smaller ones don’t.

I thought McHenry County was considered one of the bigger counties now, so I filed this Freedom of Information request:

“Most of the large counties in Illinois have an Inmate Search function.  Under the Freedom of Information Act, I request any documents that exist concerning McHenry County’s developing such a service to the public.”

Here is the reply I received from the Sheriff’s Department:

“The McHenry County Sheriff’s Corrections Division does not have any documents concerning the development of this service.”

The following information about Illinois Stimulus Package projects comes from Oklahoma U.S. Senator Tom Colburn’s office:

• Illinois county to spend $173,824 weatherization grant on eight pickup trucks. Having received $400,000 for a federal weatherization program, Madison County in Illinois will be spending nearly half of it on eight new Ford F-150’s. One member of the county board, Bill Meyer, raised concerns about how fast the county is being forced to spend the money, noting that
  

  “it looks like this is being crammed down our throat.”

  Fellow council member Bruce Malone responded that they have little choice:
  

  “They are saying,
  

  ‘Get out and spend it.’” (61)

  (61) Schmidt, Sanford, “Panel calls for spending stimulus funds on weatherization,” The Telegraph, June 8, 2009.

• Road signs costing $300 each are being placed at construction sites to alert motorists that the project is being paid for by stimulus money. Signs are popping up all across American. In Illinois alone, the signs are expected to cost $150,000, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT). According to an IDOT spokesman,

  
  

  “It’s difficult for us to determine how many signs there will be.”(65)

  (65) Erickson, Kurt, “Stimulus money paying for signs announcing funded projects,”

  Bloomington Pantagraph, May 12, 2009.

• Parking lot that no one wants. In Macomb, Illinois, $643,945 was spent on a Prairieview public housing parking lot that no one wants. Many of the residents that the parking lot was supposed to benefit have protested it. Explaining his concern, a local resident said,
  

  “The kids love the grass. We’ve got enough pavement here.”(72)

  (72) Steelman, Lainie, “Parking under protest at Prairieview,” Macomb Journal, June 10, 2009.

• Illinois will spend $350,000 to build a four-person bunkhouse at Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge. (75)

  The median price for a home in Marion, Illinois, the site of the park, is currently $71,000. (76)

  (75) Crab Orchard refuge gets federal stimulus money.” The Southern, April 27, 2009.

  (76) Zillow.com, search for “Marion, Illinois,” accessed June 12, 2009.

• Rather than help welfare recipients obtain jobs and escape poverty, $1 million will be used to study whether 300 people in Chicago are healthier when living in “green” public housing facilities. The study will evaluate whether building green housing is healthier for people and will focus on 300 residents at a Chicago public housing facility. Researchers expect to find that residents living in these more energy-efficient facilities will have much lower healthcare costs. This study will create interviewing jobs.(80)

  (80) Sachs, Peter, “UIC gets $1M grant to study ‘green’ housing,” Chi-Town Daily News, May 08, 2009.

If you would like to learn more, here is Senator Colburn’s publication.

Other Midwestern examples can be found here.

I wonder if the four-person Crab Orchard bunk house will turn out to be a vacation getaway for the political class, as some state DNR facilities were for Illinois politicians. Goose and duck hunting were the draw for the relatively luxurious state-owned facilities.

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Thanks for Respuublica for pointing the way to this story.

In their biography of former Governor “Dan Walker, the Glory and the Tragedy,” Taylor Pensoneau and Bob Ellis, write of the role of Pat Quinn in the 1972 primary election campaign.

Quinn first appears in a couple of sentences about the primary election on page 139 of the biography:

“Populous Madison County obviously posed special problems for the Walker campaign in regard to organizing and other tasks.

“Consequently, several weeks before the primary, a 23-year old Chicagoan who had become a top troubleshooter for the campaign, Patrick Quinn, was dispatched to Madison.

“Almost overnight, the tireless Quinn pulled off a headquarters opening and galvanized scores of impressionable college students to go to bat for Walker.”

Tomorrow – What Quinn Did in College?

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The photo of Patrick Quinn was taken right after he was sworn in as Governor of Illinois, replacing impeached Governor Rod Blagojevich.