Episode Details

An investigation by Illinois Answers into the use, misuse, and abuse of restraint chairs in Illinois county jails found that staff at the jail in Madison County, Illinois, restrained someone in a chair for more than 10 hours in at least 28 incidents from 2019 to 2023. Eight of those incidents exceeded 20 hours, despite the instructions from the chair's manufacturer recommending that detainees not be not be left in a chair for more than two hours. We meet the two reporters behind the investigation, Grace Hauck and Janelle O'Dea, and they discuss what they discovered about the jail's operations, what the people who suffered in restraints said about the experience, and why some extreme incidents were never reported to the state.