February: 5 inmates sentenced in Coles County to be released from prison

There are five inmates sentenced in Coles County set to be released from prison in February, according to the Illinois Department of Corrections.

Jonte A. Powell, who served the longest sentence among them, spent more than three years incarcerated for an offense recorded as ‘drug induced homicide’.

Data from the Illinois Department of Corrections shows the state spends about $52,843 a year per incarcerated person. A separate study by the Prison Policy Initiative estimates that about 53,000 people from Illinois are behind bars and shows that the state recorded an incarceration rate of 433 inmates per 100,000 people in 2023, a level higher than almost every democratic nation in the world.

Another study by the Prison Policy Initiative highlighted that the number of unconvicted individuals was more than two times higher than that of convicted individuals, possibly one of the leading causes of prison population growth in the state.

Most prison inmates are released on some condition of supervised monitoring upon reentering civilian life. This monitoring can last from one year to the rest of someone’s life.

Information in this article was obtained from the Illinois Department of Corrections. The source data can be found here.