Illinois county jails restrain people in chairs more than 1,000 times a year

A nine-month investigation by the Illinois Answers Project found that Illinois county jails restrain people in chairs more than 1,000 times a year .

In some cases, inmates were restrained for hours or days on end and suffered serious injuries.

Grace Hauck, Embedded Investigative Reporter with Illinois Answers, says the story came on their radar after their partners Shaw Media came to them with a story about a man from McHenry County, Illinois named Vernon Brooks who claimed he was unjustly arrested, sent to the county jail and was strapped to a restraint chair.

"A restraint chair is a chair with straps and its supposed to be used in emergency situations only when someone is a danger to themselves, others are property or for transport," said Hauck on Total Information AM. "But (Brooks) said he was put in this chair for no good reason and it was used excessively that was pretty traumatic for him."

According to Hauck, Brooks says he has suffered nerve damage from the incident after being restrained in a chair for hours and while they were looking into Brooks accounts, they realized there hasn't been a statewide look of how excessive is the use of restrain chairs across the whole state of Illinois.

"We wanted to know how much is it used in Illinois and we set about collecting thousands of pages of documents and put together a database and found out statewide between 2019-2023, they were used at least 5,500 times," said Hauck. "Some people were held for hours and days on end."

Hauck says an alarming thing they found through the work they did on the story was that the supposed safety precautions and checks, such as frequently checking to make sure someone was ok, and recording video when using the chair, that came when using the restraining chairs, those were not enforced, if at all.

"Sometimes the use of the chair was not even documented and in half of the cases we found no evidence the incident was actually reported to the state unit that monitors jails," said Hauck.

Hauck says there are mentions regarding the use of restraint chairs in the Illinois County Jail Standards, but ultimately the policies and guidelines when it comes to the use of the chair is up to each county jail themselves, which all have their own policies.

"The state standards do say that these chair should be used as a last resort only that they should be documented and that someone should receive immediate medical attention and appropriate treatment if they are put in the chair," said Hauck. "But what we found, that is not always happening. Some times, it is a gut reaction and a blunt interest instrument used when someone is acting up."

To click the read investigation of the use of restraining chairs in Illinois by Hauck and the Illinois Answers Project, you can click here and here to read both parts of the investigation by them.