Illinois Civil Commitment: No Trial, No Verdict, No Release Date

Illinois holds more than 500 people in a downstate prison under a civil commitment law that requires no conviction, no trial, and no set release date, a system critics say has drifted far from its original purpose.

About 170 of those people were never found guilty of anything. James Howe is one of them.

Howe spent nine years inside Big Muddy River Correctional Center in southern Illinois after prosecutors charged him with aggravated criminal sexual assault and domestic battery. They didn’t need a conviction to keep him there. Under Illinois’ Sexually Dangerous Persons Act, prosecutors petitioned to have him evaluated as a sexually dangerous person, the criminal case stopped cold, and Howe was sent to the prison for treatment instead of trial.

“That’s the weird thing about that law is that they don’t have to convict you of the crime, but yet they put you in a prison,” Howe said. “I mean that right there says it all, does it not?”

The process works like this. After a sex offense charge, prosecutors can petition a judge to have the defendant evaluated by psychologists or psychiatrists. If those evaluators decide the person is likely to pursue sexually dangerous behavior, the criminal case halts. The accused goes to Big Muddy for treatment. There’s no sentencing hearing. There’s no jury verdict. The detention is indefinite.

Illinois is one of only a handful of states in the country that operates a pre-conviction civil commitment statute of this kind. It’s a legal corner that doesn’t get much attention at the Daley Center or in Springfield debates, but it carries enormous consequences for the people caught inside it.

Mark Carich built Big Muddy’s SDP program in 1995 and left in 2012. He said the treatment program no longer does what it was designed to do: reduce the number of sexually violent crimes in Illinois. A program that once had a clear therapeutic framework has, in his telling, lost its way.

That’s a serious charge.

When the program works as intended, treatment leads to release. Patients demonstrate progress, evaluators certify that progress, and a judge can order discharge. But civil commitment cases reviewed by WTTW News show that for many men, the path to release is murky at best, nonexistent at worst. People can spend a decade or more at Big Muddy without ever being convicted of the crime that put them there.

Defense attorneys have argued for years that the SDP designation gets used as a workaround, a way to detain people when the state’s criminal case isn’t strong enough to survive a trial. Prosecutors counter that the law protects the public from people who pose a genuine danger, regardless of whether a conviction is secured.

Both arguments have merit. That’s what makes this hard.

Illinois’ civil commitment system sits at the center of a genuine tension in American law, the kind that criminal justice reformers in Chicago and across the state haven’t fully reckoned with. Civil libertarians point to due process. Public safety advocates point to victims. The American Civil Liberties Union has challenged similar statutes in other states, arguing that indefinite detention without conviction violates fundamental constitutional protections.

For Howe, the legal philosophy is less abstract. Nine years. No guilty verdict. Big Muddy River.

“They put you in a prison,” he said.

The men held under the SDP statute aren’t the only ones caught in Illinois’ civil commitment system. A separate law allows the state to continue detaining people after they’ve already completed their criminal sentences, sometimes for decades beyond their release date. Together, the two statutes hold more than 500 people at the facility.

Legislation that would reform either law hasn’t advanced in Springfield this session. Carich’s departure from the program more than a decade ago didn’t trigger an overhaul. Howe’s nine years didn’t either.

What happens next depends on whether lawmakers in Springfield decide the current system is working. So far, they haven’t moved to change it.