Alan Mills

Asked at trial how long he was likely to stay at Tamms Correctional Center, one of the men held there repeated what he had been told. “Wardens have told me I’m never leaving Tamms,” he said. Asked whether anyone had told him what he could do to change his behavior and get out, he answered, “They’ve told me because of my past I will never leave Tamms.” Another man, asked what he had been told he could do to get out, named one thing: renounce his gang. A third, asked whether anyone had said when he would be leaving, answered no.

The questions came during an eight-day bench trial before Judge G. Patrick Murphy in East St. Louis, in the class action Tamms prisoners had filed in 2000 over how Illinois sent men to its supermax and kept them there. One plaintiff told the court that he had bipolar disorder before he arrived and that he spent seven and a half years in therapy at Tamms because of the isolation. “While at Tamms I suffer from self-mutilation and other psychiatric problems,” he testified. Asked whether he had attempted suicide, he said, “That’s correct.” Asked whether he had been put in a stripped-out suicide cell, he gave the same answer. Another of the original plaintiffs did not live to testify. He killed himself at Tamms in 2004, and his legal representative took his place in the case.

Each cell was about nine feet by fifteen, of pre-cast concrete, behind a door of perforated steel mesh; through the window a man could see “a sliver of sky.” The yard was an empty concrete room, and each man went to it alone. The Department of Corrections’ own Ten-Point Plan for Tamms, announced in September 2009 and put before the court, conceded that inmates “are not informed of how long they should expect to be incarcerated at Tamms.” Of the 243 men then held there, seventy had been there at least ten years, and the average stay was 73.4 months.

On July 20, 2010, Murphy applied the three factors the Supreme Court had used to measure Ohio’s supermax—limits on human contact, indefinite duration, and the effect on a prisoner’s sentence—and found all three at Tamms. “The Court finds that Plaintiffs and the class have a due process liberty interest in avoiding confinement at Tamms,” he wrote, and he held that the procedures Illinois used to send men there and keep them there denied them due process. “Many of these inmates have never been told why they were sent to Tamms,” Alan Mills said after the ruling. He had carried the case since it was filed, and for the first six years or so, by his own account, he was its only lawyer.

One Lawyer for Thirty-Three Appellants

Murphy heard that evidence because of an appeal. He had dismissed the due process claim when he screened the complaint, and on September 6, 2005, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reinstated it. Thirty-three prisoners were named on the appeal, and one lawyer appeared for them: Alan S. Mills of Uptown People’s Law Center in Chicago.

The court heard argument on September 29, 2004. Before it ruled, the Supreme Court decided Wilkinson v. Austin, which held that assignment to Ohio’s supermax imposed an “atypical and significant hardship under any plausible baseline” and so gave prisoners a liberty interest the state could not take away without fair procedures. Judge Ripple, writing for himself and Judges Cudahy and Evans, measured Tamms against Ohio. “There are some differences between the features of the Ohio supermax at issue in Wilkinson and those of the Illinois facility at issue here,” he wrote. “It is not at all clear, however, that those differences are so qualitatively different as to require a different characterization of the facility for purposes of due process analysis under Wilkinson.” Accepting the complaint’s allegations as true, as it had to at that stage, the court held that they precluded dismissal “under the now-governing standards of Wilkinson.” It sent the case back for the district court to decide on the evidence whether the Tamms prisoners had that liberty interest and, if they did, whether Illinois’s transfer procedures gave them the process it required.

“Tamms is the highest security prison in Illinois,” the Seventh Circuit wrote, and the Department of Corrections “designed the conditions there to be harsh, so that the threat of being transferred to Tamms would deter prisoners throughout the system from disobeying prison rules.” To show what that design meant for the men inside, the court quoted the supplemental brief Mills had filed. The restrictions the prisoners alleged, Mills wrote, included “virtually complete absence of human contact,” “virtual elimination of all out of cell movements,” “severe restrictions on family visits” and “elimination of all jobs and other programming.” Confinement there, his brief concluded, meant “virtual sensory deprivation, with prisoners forced to spend most days doing literally nothing but staring at the four blank walls of their cells.”

The named appellants included Robert Westefer, Mark Vonperbandt, Alejandro Villazana, Armando Tinajero and Corey A. Taylor. Their due process claim attacked the way men arrived at Tamms. The court set out the Department’s procedures: a prisoner sent there on administrative detention received a hearing within ten working days—“whenever possible”—with a chance to present evidence, and an annual review after that; a prisoner sent there to serve disciplinary segregation received no hearing on the transfer until his disciplinary term ended.

Illinois defended the dismissal by pointing to time. Assignment to Tamms, the State argued, “does not affect the length of confinement because nothing in the regulations says that placement at Tamms directly affects parole eligibility, mandatory supervised release, good conduct credits or good time restoration.” The district court had dismissed on a different ground. Reading the Seventh Circuit’s earlier decision in Wagner v. Hanks, it held that the prisoners could have a liberty interest only if Tamms was significantly more restrictive than administrative detention at the most secure prison in the state. Wilkinson now governed that question, and the Seventh Circuit doubted that the differences between Tamms and the Ohio prison were great enough to require another answer. If, on the evidence, the district court did not find the same hardship at Tamms under any plausible baseline, it would have to decide what the right baseline for Illinois was.

A second group of plaintiffs alleged that the Department sent men to Tamms because they had sued it or filed grievances. In the court’s summary, they claimed that the Department “has a policy of transferring prisoners with litigation histories to Tamms as a means of retaliating for the trouble they cause the department through their litigation activities.” The district court had granted summary judgment against them after striking their evidence as a sanction for failing to amend interrogatory answers. The Seventh Circuit reversed: the prisoners had made the information known through affidavits, which Rule 26 allows, and the Department itself had been slow to produce documents. The court also reinstated four prisoners whom the district court had dismissed for failing to exhaust administrative remedies, because the record left it unclear whether any remedy had been open to them.

The retaliation claims were later tried to juries at the same time as the class case, and the juries found that four of the men never should have been placed at Tamms. “Unfortunately because the law’s so slow, they had spent an aggregate total of over thirty years confined in this complete isolation before the jury finally found that they never should have been sent there in the first place,” Mills said in 2012.

Brian Nelson’s Glass Room

Brian Nelson spent years at Tamms. He said he had never needed psychotropic medication or seen a psychiatrist before he was confined there. “When I was in Tamms, my grandfather died and I got depressed. They stripped me naked and put me in a glass room that was freezing cold with the lights on 24 hours a day,” he said in 2017. By the time he left Tamms he was taking five psychotropic medications. After his release he could not ride a bus, stay in a crowded room, or tolerate physical closeness to other people. “I am worse off now than when I was released from prison because everything was new to me,” he said. “As that wore off, the effect of solitary confinement started to kick in. I’m now in self-imposed solitary.”

Mills had seen the same thing in the scores of people from Illinois’s lock-down prisons he had worked with. “They all continue to experience signs and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which often persists for years after they are released from prison,” he wrote in 2016. He closed that review with the people still held that way: “There are human beings, much like you and me, trapped in these solitary units,” he wrote, 100,000 of them by the estimates he cited.

When Mills announced in August 2024 that he would retire as executive director, he singled out Nelson, who after his release gave a decade to helping the people still inside, until his death in 2021.

Tamms Year Ten and the State’s Own Count

In 2008, ten years after Tamms opened, a group of Chicago artists, poets and musicians who had been sending letters and poems to every man there launched a campaign they called Tamms Year Ten. Men inside could ask for a photograph of “anything in the world, real or imagined,” and artists filled the requests: a mosque in Mecca, comic-book heroes, a horse in cold weather. Mothers, sisters, children and spouses of the prisoners lobbied legislators in Springfield and marched in Chicago under the slogan “Torture is a crime, it shouldn’t be a career.” A reform bill, HB6651, sponsored by Representative Julie Hamos, drew the backing of seventy organizations and twenty-seven legislators. In 2009 Governor Pat Quinn replaced the head of the Department of Corrections, and that September the Department announced the ten-point plan it would later put before Judge Murphy.

The State’s own numbers described who was held there. In response to the campaign, which questioned whether Illinois should have a supermax at all, the State published a snapshot of the Tamms population on the tenth anniversary of the prison’s opening. Mills worked through those figures in a 2016 review of Keramet Reiter’s book on California’s Pelican Bay. Of the prisoners at Tamms, 89.7 percent had committed a murder or a Class X felony, nearly the same share as in Illinois’s maximum-security prisons as a whole, 86.1 percent. Among the men sent there for disciplinary reasons, fewer than 10 percent were gang leaders, and 88 percent had not been convicted of any crime while in prison. Among those sent there for “administrative reasons,” usually alleged gang leadership, fewer than 7 percent had been convicted of a crime while incarcerated, and fewer than half had any record of assaulting staff or another prisoner.

Mental illness ran through the same records. Over 80 percent of the men confined at Tamms for disciplinary reasons had been diagnosed as mentally ill, Mills wrote, and over 70 percent of those held there nine years or longer had received mental health services.

Mills also worked with the prisoners’ families. The law center organized bus trips so relatives could get down to southern Illinois to visit. Family members, Mills said, “felt like they were isolated and their loved ones were lying to them about how bad it was down there,” so the center brought parents together, both to support one another and to reach legislators. “And once you got ten of them in the same room and they all said the exact same thing, it became clear that the problem was Tamms, the problem was not their loved ones,” he said.

Closing Tamms

In 2012 Quinn announced that Illinois would close Tamms and move its operating money to the Department of Children and Family Services. Mills wrote that July that the prison held 168 men in extreme solitary confinement, most of them with severe mental illness for which they got little or no treatment. AFSCME opposed the closure because of the jobs it would cost; Mills answered that a better-funded child-welfare agency would hire, and he tied the decision to what he called the cradle-to-prison pipeline, in which underfunded schools and social services feed the prisons.

The state’s budget crisis, Mills said that summer, gave the Department “good reason to do it now rather than at some time in the future,” though he added that “the budget alone is never going to drive decision-making.” Of the lawsuit’s place beside the families and the campaign, he said, “I think litigation is always most successful when it’s part of that overall strategy.”

Tamms closed on January 4, 2013. Two of the last men moved out, in December 2012, had been among the first to arrive, in March 1998, and had spent almost fifteen years in isolation. Aaron Fillmore, one of the men moved out when it shut, was sent to Lawrence Correctional Center, where, he later alleged, the isolation continued.

Davis v. Baldwin: Seventeen Years in Isolation

In June 2016 Mills and Winston & Strawn lawyers led by Kimball R. Anderson filed Davis v. Baldwin, No. 3:16-cv-600, in the Southern District of Illinois, challenging isolation in every segregation unit in the state prison system. The six named plaintiffs alleged that they had been held in extreme isolation for between six months and seventeen years. The defendant was the Department’s director, and the caption changed as directors changed—Baldwin, then Jeffreys, then Latoya Hughes—so the case is now Davis v. Hughes.

Aaron Fillmore was forty-one when the complaint was filed. He alleged that he had been held continuously in isolation—disciplinary segregation, administrative detention or investigative status—for seventeen years, since he and another prisoner were accused of injuring a guard, and that the Department kept him on indeterminate administrative detention despite an “almost spotless disciplinary record.” He described a cell “no larger than two or three steps long and one and a half to two steps wide,” with “little to no access to natural light” because “a metal box covers the one and only window”; a yard that was a “barren, single ‘dog cage’” about four steps wide and fifteen long; and two no-contact visits a month behind glass, handcuffed and shackled to the floor.

Henry Davis, forty-two and held at Lawrence, alleged that a disciplinary ticket for gang leadership was expunged on April 11, 2014, that the Department kept him in segregation for thirty-one more days anyway, and that it then moved him straight into administrative detention for six months. He described plexiglass over the cell doors that made talking “extremely difficult,” “bug-ridden” cells that were “freezing cold in the winter,” about two hours of yard a week, and distress so severe that he wanted “to run his head into the wall.”

Jerome Jones, held at Menard after a transfer from Stateville, alleged that he was taken out of general population on July 25, 2013, for “reasons unknown” and held in administrative detention for over two years on an allegation of gang membership, though he said he had formally left the gang in 2009 and had not received a disciplinary ticket since 2001. He described a toilet “on a timer and could only be flushed in 15-minute intervals” and meals served at 3:00 a.m., 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.

The complaint described how men got there. A prisoner charged with a major offense received “an extremely limited ‘hearing,’ with minimal process” before an adjustment committee often made up of Department employees with many other duties. Staff testimony was credited over the prisoner’s; a prisoner could be denied the chance to present his own evidence and was routinely denied the chance to question the witnesses against him. Prisoners “can be, and frequently are, convicted of offenses based only on the disputed word of a single correctional officer following a ‘hearing’ in the hallway outside the prisoner’s cell.”

On March 10, 2017, Magistrate Judge Stephen C. Williams refused to dismiss the case. Allegations of cells behind solid steel doors with only a chuck hole and a small window, of outside windows covered by metal boxes, no-contact visits, a yard that was a barren concrete slab, smaller meal portions, vermin and harsh temperatures “certainly establish the denial of the ‘minimal civilized measure of life’s necessities,’” he wrote, invoking the Eighth Amendment standard for conditions of confinement. The prisoners also alleged that they got no advance notice or chance to be heard before they were placed in isolation, no explanation once they were there, and “sham” hearings, and Williams let their due process claim go forward as well.

A Class of Every Prisoner in Illinois

During discovery, in April 2018, Williams ordered the Department to complete an email production of about 85,000 documents by May 11 and denied its request to redact gang-intelligence information. That summer and fall the plaintiffs’ expert Craig Haney, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who holds a Ph.D. and a law degree from Stanford, toured Stateville, Pontiac, Dixon, Menard, Lawrence and Logan correctional centers and interviewed prisoners in private. His December 2020 report concluded: “All IDOC prisoners subjected to solitary confinement/restrictive housing are at significant risk of serious psychological harm as a result of the conditions, practices, and policies to which they are subjected.”

On June 14, 2021, Magistrate Judge Mark A. Beatty, who had taken over the case, certified a class of “all prisoners who are now or will be incarcerated in adult correctional facilities by the Illinois Department of Corrections and thus who are at risk of being subjected to extreme isolation or who are currently subjected to extreme isolation”—over 28,000 people.

The Department fought certification on four grounds. It argued that the case duplicated Rasho v. Walker, an existing class action over mental-health treatment, because roughly 80 percent of the men in segregation were mentally ill. Prisoners held fewer than thirty days, the Department said, had no legitimate claim, so the court would have to sort the class one prisoner at a time. Cell size, temperature and cleanliness varied from prison to prison and within prisons, and conditions claims, in the Department’s view, were too particular to resolve for a class. The court answered that Rasho covered mentally ill prisoners and their treatment, while Davis challenged restrictive-housing policy for everyone, and that the plaintiffs had alleged statewide written policies and systemwide practices producing the same baseline conditions in every segregation unit—extreme isolation, limited phone calls and visits, double-celling and staff abuse—whatever the differences in cleanliness from one unit to the next.

The order recited the Department’s own data. In 2018 about 9,100 prisoners were admitted to segregation, and about 1,600 were in segregation on an average day. Over a four-year period, 19,966 prisoners spent thirty days or longer there and 2,446 spent a year or longer; 78 had been held in solitary confinement for at least ten years. The court said the expert reports before it painted a “disturbing, and quite frankly distressing,” picture, and it noted that prisoners consistently complained that the Department’s disciplinary hearings were “bogus.”

Those reports, Beatty wrote, were “uncontested and unrebutted”; the Department had offered no expert of its own. The order set out the evidence behind the prisoners’ complaints about their hearings: men found guilty on confidential information they were never allowed to see, hearings held in the hallway outside a cell, hearings that were not recorded. Eldon Vail, a corrections expert for the class, called the restrictive-housing units he saw “generally deplorable” and “stark and horrific.” Haney said the conditions represented “nothing short of a system-wide crisis.” Prisoners showed him cuts, bite marks and scars from self-mutilation, and one man at Menard told him, “I keep trying to kill myself and they keep putting me back in my same seg cell.” Two-thirds of the prisoners Vail interviewed said they had been the victim of physical abuse or had witnessed it, including every one he spoke with at Menard.

“Illinois’ prison system locks up too many people, for too long, in horrific conditions,” Mills said when the class was certified. He added: “The UN states that over 15 days of solitary is torture, yet sometimes people in Illinois spend decades there. And everyone who spends more than a couple of weeks ends up traumatized.”

Four Experts and None for the Department

The Department, now under director Latoya Hughes, moved for summary judgment in October 2023. On March 28, 2025, Beatty denied the motion. The class had four retained experts, among them two corrections experts, Vail and Dan Pacholke, and the psychologist Haney. “It is important to note and emphasize that these expert opinions are completely uncontested,” Beatty wrote. The Department had said nothing about an expert of its own until September 2023, on its disclosure deadline and seven years after the suit was filed, when it asked for ninety more days for an expert it had not yet been approved to retain; the court said no.

The evidence described cells that left a man little room to move, though he was confined in them nearly around the clock, and recreation areas that were, almost without exception, “concrete-floored, fenced-in cages with nothing inside of them,” many of them single-person cages the prisoners called “dog runs.” Haney found the harms “extremely serious and sometimes irreversible,” including “loss of psychological stability, impaired mental functioning, self-mutilation, and even death.” He described a prisoner in a restraint cage and a suicide smock who was “nearly incoherent,” and another who had set himself on fire. The class’s experts agreed that the Department had known for years before the suit that restrictive housing harmed people and did not improve their behavior, and that it had made “no real effort at reform.”

On due process, Beatty measured the evidence against the standard the Seventh Circuit had stated in the Tamms case itself: a prisoner must be given an “opportunity to present his views,” and if the prison holds a hearing, “enough time to ‘prepare adequately’” for it. The class had evidence that men were placed in administrative detention without being told why, and that the reasons given for keeping them there were boilerplate; at times “the same one-line justification was recycled over and over for years.” Detention was sometimes continued even after the discipline behind it had been expunged. Henry Davis’s own records were among those the court cited, and the Department could not confirm that an investigative report had ever been served on him.

Beatty turned aside the Department’s other arguments. It had waived any argument that Rasho precluded the case, and the claims were not the same in any event. He refused to hold that a prisoner had to spend at least three months a year in restrictive housing before he could complain of the process that put him there: “the Seventh Circuit has never drawn a bright line rule like Defendant asks this Court to do.” The case would go to trial on both counts, the Eighth Amendment claim and the due process claim.

Counsel at the Parole Revocation Hearing

The question at the center of Westefer—what process Illinois owes a person before it isolates him, or before it sends him back to prison—ran through the other class actions Mills brought for Illinois prisoners and parolees. In parole cases he pressed the same demand for hearings. He and lawyers from the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center, including Sheila A. Bedi and Alexa Van Brunt, represented a class of young people on juvenile parole in M.H. v. Finley in the Northern District of Illinois. In January 2015 the parties settled on terms that required Illinois to provide attorneys, at the State’s expense, to juveniles accused of violating their parole.

In October 2013 the same lawyers, joined by Vanessa del Valle, also sued the Prisoner Review Board and the Department on behalf of adults facing parole revocation. The suit, Morales v. Monreal, alleged that Illinois revoked parole without providing counsel or adequate hearings, in proceedings that the plaintiffs said rubber-stamped parole agents’ recommendations. “The parole revocation process in Illinois has robbed parolees of their right to due process,” Mills said.

The settlement, filed in October 2016 before Judge Amy J. St. Eve, covered every adult on parole or mandatory supervised release facing revocation, other than members of the juvenile class. It adopted the case-by-case test of Gagnon v. Scarpelli for appointed counsel: a parolee who asked for a lawyer, could not afford one, and had either a timely and colorable claim that he had not committed the violation or substantial reasons that justified or mitigated it and were complex to present, qualified for appointed counsel. The Prisoner Review Board had to secure a lawyer for every qualified parolee, through paid contracts with private counsel, public defenders’ offices, pro bono counsel or supervised law students. Judge St. Eve approved the final agreement on January 25, 2017.

The agreement also set deadlines. Within five calendar days after the warrant was served, a parolee had to receive written notice of the alleged violation, in “simple, clear and concise language,” along with a notice of his rights. A preliminary hearing had to be held within ten business days, or within twenty for a parolee outside Cook County who asked to be screened for a lawyer. The final revocation hearing had to come within ninety calendar days of service, absent a continuance the parolee requested or another listed exception, and the Board was to make reasonable efforts to hold it within sixty. After the preliminary hearing the parolee was owed a written decision within one business day, with the probable-cause finding and the reasons for it; after the final hearing, a written explanation of the evidence relied on and the reasons for revocation.

The parties named David Muhammad as monitor. He could observe a sample of revocation proceedings, interview the agencies’ employees and review records; he owed the parties a progress letter within six months and full reports at twelve months and every six months after, measured against a standard of substantial compliance, for the agreement’s twenty-four-month term.

Holmes v. Baldwin: Interpreters at the Disciplinary Hearing

In May 2011 Mills, with lawyers from Equip for Equality, the National Association of the Deaf and Winston & Strawn, sued in the Northern District of Illinois on behalf of deaf and hard of hearing prisoners, in the case later captioned Holmes v. Baldwin. The Department, they alleged, refused to provide American Sign Language interpreters, hearing aids and other forms of communication, leaving the prisoners without meaningful access to health care, religious services, disciplinary proceedings, grievances and other programs. In October 2015 Judge Marvin E. Aspen ruled that the evidence was sufficient to take to trial claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, along with constitutional claims for free exercise of religion, due process and cruel and unusual punishment.

The parties settled in 2018 on behalf of all current and future deaf or hard of hearing prisoners who needed interpreters or other aids to communicate. The Department had to screen hearing at intake and at periodic physicals, screen any prisoner who asked within thirty days, and send those who screened positive for a full audiological evaluation; provide hearing aids as audiologists recommended and replace batteries within forty-eight hours; supply American Sign Language interpreters for medical and mental-health encounters, disciplinary hearings, educational programs and transfer meetings, and for religious services when ASL was the prisoner’s primary language; install a videophone in each prison housing ASL users within six months and at least two TTY devices per facility, with three times the ordinary phone time; and install visual or tactile alerts for visits, meals, emergencies and warning shots within 180 days. The court kept supervision itself, with class counsel’s help: the Department reported on compliance every 120 days, and the court held a hearing on the same schedule. The prisoners’ lawyers went back to court to enforce the agreement. On August 3, 2022, the court found that for the first two years after the agreement was entered the Department had done virtually nothing and had not made a reasonable effort; some prisoners had waited as long as two years for an audiologist’s evaluation, and real efforts began only in the third year, after the class moved for sanctions.

Lippert v. Jeffreys: Contempt Over an Unfinished Plan

Don Lippert was at Stateville Correctional Center in 2010 when, he alleged, staff denied him the twice-daily insulin shots he needed and he went into diabetic shock. His suit, filed in the Northern District of Illinois that July, became a class action for every Illinois prisoner with serious medical or dental needs, litigated by Uptown People’s Law Center with the ACLU of Illinois and Dentons. Mills described care so inadequate that serious illnesses went untreated, people lived in pain for months with easily treatable conditions, and some suffered permanent damage, lost legs to amputation or died.

The parties settled in 2019 with a consent decree, amended in June 2022, before Judge Jorge L. Alonso. It requires a board-certified chief of health services and facility physicians trained in internal medicine, family medicine or emergency medicine; a health care unit administrator at every prison; an electronic medical records system, with a vendor chosen within 120 days and the system running within thirty-six months of the contract; medical evaluations within seven business days of intake; sick call run by registered nurses in private, with no cap on the number of complaints; chronic-care programs for diabetes, asthma, COPD, hepatitis C, HIV, hypertension and hyperlipidemia; dental screening and cleanings every two years; registered nurses around the clock in maximum-security infirmaries; and mortality reviews with corrective-action plans. An independent monitor, with up to three consultants and up to ten facility tour days a year, reports to the court and grades each provision as substantial, partial or non-compliance.

The decree required the Department to build an implementation plan on a staffing analysis. It did not finish one. On August 5, 2022, Judge Alonso found the defendants “in contempt for their failure to complete an implementation plan,” as the consent decree required, and for failing to comply with his orders about it, and he ordered the monitor to return a redlined plan by August 26. The court’s monitor had reported that the Department had made virtually none of the required improvements, and that its care of elderly prisoners was so bad that it amounted to elder abuse under Illinois law. “IDOC clearly wants to continue their misconduct with impunity, hidden behind prison walls,” Mills said. “If this was a private nursing home, the way these elders have been treated would trigger a state investigation, and the home would immediately be shut down.”

In reports through early 2026, the monitor counted sixteen full-time-equivalent physicians across twenty-nine prisons holding over 30,000 people, nursing vacancies near 60 percent, and medical records still mostly on paper. The decree is expected to run until May 2029. Speaking of mental-health care in Illinois prisons in 2018, Mills said that so long as punishment set the baseline, no one held there would actually get better.

From the Baltimore City Jail to Uptown

Mills traces the work to high school in Baltimore, where his mother was involved in prison-rights activism. He was taking photographs for his yearbook, and she needed pictures of the Baltimore City Jail. “So she dragged me inside to take some pictures and that’s when I sort of said, oh, well, gee, this is horrible,” he recalled in 2025. “Maybe I should do something about that.”

He graduated from Brown University magna cum laude and from Northwestern University School of Law cum laude. He went to law school wanting to do something in civil rights and something community-based, ended up living in Uptown “kind of by accident,” and, bored after his first year, knocked on the door of Uptown People’s Law Center to ask whether it needed help. He came to the center as an intern while still in law school and stayed forty-five years. He became its legal director in 1992 and, after the death of Belinda Belcher, its executive director, a post he held for a decade, and he built the center’s prisoners’ rights practice into the largest docket of such cases in Illinois. He taught courses on prisons and prisoners’ rights at DePaul University’s law school and at Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law.

The prison work began, Mills has said, in 1981, when a former Uptown resident held in the old Joliet prison contacted the center. He and another prisoner “had been gassed, essentially, and plywood was placed in front of their cells and they passed out,” Mills recalled, and the two came close to dying. The center found the man a lawyer, and the case grew into a challenge over the prisoners’ access to the courts, the kind of case that, Mills said, puts a lawyer in contact with “all the jailhouse lawyers.” For most of his years at the center, he said in 2012, he had been its only lawyer.

The center grew under him from four staff to twenty-one. “When we were at 50,000 people, it meant that there was literally not a bed anywhere in the state,” he said in 2024 of the years when Illinois’s prisons were fullest; “we were housing people in a number of spots that were never intended for human habitation.” The prison population had since fallen to about 30,000.

In August 2024 he announced that he would step down as executive director. “While I am retiring from the Executive Director position, I am not stepping away from the struggle,” he wrote. He planned more travel and hiking with his wife, a recently retired Chicago public-school teacher. He is now of counsel at Kaplan & Grady LLC, a Chicago litigation firm whose civil-rights lawyers represent people whose rights were violated in prisons and jails, and he is among the lawyers for the class in Davis.

Three Weeks in East St. Louis

Davis went to trial in October 2025 in the federal courthouse in East St. Louis, fifteen years after Judge Murphy ruled on Tamms in the same city. Beatty had set aside three weeks and cleared October 27, 28 and 29 in case the trial ran long. Over three weeks people in custody testified about their experiences, the judge toured several Department prisons, and the class presented two experts.

Before trial Beatty had settled on visits to Menard, Pinckneyville and Lawrence, the prison where Henry Davis had been held and where Aaron Fillmore was sent when Tamms closed. The visits were set for the middle of the class’s case, after the men in custody had testified and before the experts took the stand, and no testimony was to be taken during them.

The class then awaited the court’s ruling. In mid-September 2026 the court said that it had not yet issued its decision in the bench trial.

Twenty years after the Seventh Circuit decided Westefer, the due process question at its center—what process Illinois owes before it isolates a prisoner—was before a federal judge again, joined now to an Eighth Amendment claim about the isolation itself and brought on behalf of every person held in the state’s adult prisons.