Susan Lucci has spent much of her life helping people find their voice, and standing up for those whose voices are not often heard. She is now dedicating her abundant energy to speaking for inmates at Stateville Correctional Center, particularly those who are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole, an issue with which she was largely unaware until a few years ago.
Lucci was invited earlier this year to visit Stateville, an archaic maximum-security men’s prison in Crest Hill, by a woman who leads an educational program at the prison. It was a transformational experience. She now meets with inmates once a week to collect their stories as the basis for creating policy change.
“[Stateville] is like the Roman ruins,” Lucci says. “The bathroom in the visitors center is like the gas station bathroom that you immediately leave because it’s so bad — but multiply that by 100. In the reception room, there is one little window but no air circulation. The air conditioning is unreliable. The water fountain oozes rust and hasn’t been used in years.
“There is a 34-foot wall around the facility — not to protect us from the men inside but to protect us from knowing how ugly it is and how we are treating these humans. It’s shocking to me that [in Illinois] we are a sanctuary for folks coming from Venezuela and for women seeking reproductive justice, but we treat our own people this way,” she said.
Governor J.B. Pritzker announced in March a plan to demolish Stateville — and Logan Correctional Center, a women’s prison in downstate Lincoln — and construct a new facility for both on the grounds of Stateville, at a cost of nearly $900 million. The announcement follows a state-commissioned report that determined that Stateville is in a deplorable state of disrepair.
In 1978, Illinois ended discretionary parole and replaced it with a mandatory supervised release system for inmates who complete their entire prison sentences. Lucci believes that the revocation of parole eliminates a powerful tool for incentivizing rehabilitation.
“I can’t imagine what it must be like to be stuck in a place that is so hateful with no hope of getting out. We don’t believe in second chances and think that these guys are exactly who they were at 18 or 22 and are not redeemable. But I’m not who I was even three years ago, much less who I was at 18 or 22 or 25,” she said.
Lucci is committed to doing whatever she can to move our criminal system from a punitive to a restorative model. To that end, she is using her indefatigable community-building skills to bring together activists committed to prison reform so they can provide a unified voice with lawmakers. These “justice allies,” as she refers to them, are promoting two Illinois parole-eligibility bills, one directed at elder inmates and the other relating to inmates who have served more than 20 consecutive years in prison.
In January, Lucci was involved in the fifth restorative justice conference at the Oak Park Public Library, which attracted more than 300 people. The conference focused on providing resources for the recently incarcerated to counter recidivism.
“What if we could get people to really care about this issue, the ordinary people who pay taxes for a system that is not really helping humans — not the inmates or the correctional officers who are impacted by the trauma around them?” she asked.
Lucci’s penchant for righting wrongs began when she was young and confronted a boy who was bullying her brother. As the oldest child, she was expected to stick up for her younger siblings. Her family’s mantra — to whom much is given, much is expected — steered her toward consistent volunteering in her community and, eventually, to law school.
“We were expected to engage in our community, and doing for others was in our blood. My mother was head of every PTO when we were kids. Wherever she volunteered, she was humble and did whatever was needed, including cleaning toilets, even as she got older,” she recalled.
After leaving her legal career following the birth of her second child, Lucci found herself craving meaningful conversation, so she started hosting groups of women in her home. Using a circle model for eliciting deep dialogue, she facilitated conversations that allowed women and teenagers to share their experiences and imagine new possibilities in a safe and nurturing environment. She estimates that she has led 1,000 circles since 2009.
“It’s neat to see how you can affect culture by having people sit in circles. The group wisdom is so much greater than any one of us. The circle can become a transformational space,” said Lucci, who has facilitated student/teacher mindfulness circles at Christ the King Jesuit College Prep High School in the Austin community and has served as a mentor for hundreds of students writing college essays. In 2006, she launched “Kindly Wizards,” a service-learning program for middle-school students in River Forest School District 90 that is still going strong.
Her mark can be found on a wide array of local organizations, including the PADS homeless shelter program (now known as Housing Forward), the River Forest Park District and the One Earth Film Festival. As an ambassador for the Interfaith Youth Core (now Interfaith America), she organized Hunger Banquets at Dominican and Concordia universities to bring awareness around food insecurity. She also is very active in progressive politics.
The consistent thread of Lucci’s life is creating community to tackle difficult problems. While she used to juggle a dozen balls at a time, she admits that, as she gets older, she is trying to be more impactful by focusing on fewer issues, such as her work on prison reform, which has become all-consuming.
“Being an activist is the best way to make friends. Among activists, there is an amazing culture of care,” she said.
Editors note: One of the parole-eligibility bills mentioned above is relating to inmates who have served more than 20 consecutive years in prison. The story has been updated to reflect this change.