Former Chicago Ald. Ed Burke, the longest-serving alderman in city history, was booked into prison on Monday and subsequently began serving a two-year sentence on corruption charges.
Burke, 80, was expected to report to the minimum security camp at the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Indiana, but those plans appeared to change at the last minute.
The former alderman was instead lodged at a federal minimum security camp in Thomson, Illinois, a village of around 500 residents in the far northeast corner of the state. A village in Carroll County, Thomson is 48 miles northwest of Moline.
Federal Correctional Institution Thomson, a low-security federal prison, houses 1,901 inmates, according to the Bureau of Prisons website. An additional 133 inmates are lodged at the minimum security satellite camp, where Burke was booked.
The former state correctional facility was bought by the federal government in 2012 - a purchase intended to alleviate overcrowding in the federal system and promote economic growth in the region. At one point, the facility had been considered as a possible transfer point for prisoners coming from Guantanamo Bay. That idea was dropped after vocal public opposition.
Thomson prison was built in 2001. But budget troubles kept it from fully opening and its 1,600 cells housed fewer than 200 inmates before the facility was closed in preparation for a sale in 2009. The last inmates were moved out the following year, but the prison sat vacant for two more years before the acquisition was completed.
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In late 2023, the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs published a report compiling the stories of more than 120 people who were incarcerated in a high-security section called the Special Management Unit. The federal Bureau of Prisons closed the unit earlier that year after officials found “significant concerns with respect to institutional culture.” Roughly 350 people were immediately sent to prisons across the country, where many of them report still being held in solitary confinement, according to the Lawyers’ Committee.
The Bureau of Prisons announced the decision to permanently convert the facility to a low-security institution in October 2023.
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