Republican State Senator Terry Bryant is not happy with the Senate on Thursday confirming Latoya Hughes as Director of the Illinois Department of Corrections.
Bryant defined the department’s operation under Hughes’ leadership as chaotic and full of cover-ups from multiple drug exposure incidents and hospitalizations to a refusal to work with lawmakers and union leaders to fix the problems.
“I have over 200 incident reports from the Department of Corrections. Their own documents, internal documents, that show fentanyl, cocaine, heroin, oxycontin, oxycodone,” Bryant said. “Anyone’s going to say to you that you’re going see that stuff all the time in corrections, but I’m telling you that in the 20 years that I worked there and the 12 years since I retired, no one has seen the amount of drugs, the amount of cell phone usage, and the amount of shanks that are being found in the Department of Corrections. The buck has to stop somewhere.”
Bryant says the confirmation is “a slap in the face to every correctional officer who has been sent to the hospital after being exposed to drugs inside our prisons, to every staff member who has pleaded for safer working conditions and to every family that has lost faith in the leadership of the department.”
Bryant says in recent months she has toured multiple prisons where staff and inmates described dangerous conditions and a lack of basic safety protocols.
