Founded in 1901, JHA is Illinois’ only non-partisan prison watchdog. Our mission is to achieve a fair, humane, and effective criminal justice system which we do by monitoring correctional facilities, practices and policies. Our work promotes adult and juvenile prison reform, leading to successful re-integration and enhanced community safety.

Through our longstanding Prison Monitoring Project and Juvenile Justice Project, JHA staff and trained volunteers regularly visit and monitor all facilities in the Illinois Department of Corrections and the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice. During these visits, monitors are able to observe the challenges faced by both inmates and correctional staff and ensure that practices and policies are implemented in a way that promotes public safety.

Following each prison visit, JHA issues a written report that focuses on critical matters such as out of cell time, program access, conditions of confinement, access to and provision of medical and mental health care, disciplinary practices and impacts, and the dynamics and culture inside the facility. These reports are reviewed with the agencies that run Illinois’ prisons prior to publication and widely disseminated to everyone from lawyers to legislators, wardens to reformers, members of the Governor’s office to members of the public at large. They provide essential transparency and meaningful oversight to an otherwise overlooked system and drive safe and cost-effective criminal justice reform. Our reports, statements, and legislative testimony are based on our monitoring work and lay the foundation for JHA’s advocacy efforts; which include everything from recommendations provided to prison administrators during a monitoring visit to changes to law through the legislative process.

PILI Fellows can expect to work with JHA program staff in a variety of ways, including participating in monitoring visits to adult and juvenile prisons, collecting information during the visit, analyzing publicly available and privately generated data related to our prison system, researching criminal justice policy and best practices, and  writing policy reports which will be influential in legislation, internal correctional policy changes, and executive branch decision making about corrections in Illinois.

This agency is approved to host Graduate Fellows.