by Grace Hauck, Illinois Answers Project
February 8, 2025
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – An Illinois Answers Project investigation into the use of restraint chairs in county jails raised questions about how Champaign County documents, tracks and reports use of the devices. Now, the facility has updated its record-keeping practices and is submitting required reports to a state oversight unit for the first time.
The development comes as part of an ongoing Illinois Answers probe that found Illinois jails strap people down to chairs on average more than a thousand times a year, often in violation of state and county policies and for longer than manufacturers recommend. The United Nations Committee Against Torture has urged U.S. officials to abolish use of the devices.
To better understand how this issue is playing out in Champaign County, Illinois Answers was in frequent contact with the jail superintendent over the course of eight months to identify and obtain the relevant records to provide insight into the use of restraint chairs in the county.
The records showed jail staff generally complied with best practices for restraint as laid out in state and county guidelines, but they also revealed gaps in the way the jail documented, tracked and reported restraint chair incidents.
Champaign County Jail on Jan. 15, 2025. (Grace Hauck/The Illinois Answers Project)
When first asked by Illinois Answers in 2023, the Champaign County Sheriff’s Department could not say how often jail staff restrain people in chairs. The jail—which relies heavily on handwritten and paper records—didn’t have any way to easily search for or track restraint chair use. It also hadn’t been reporting restraint chair incidents to the state for years, despite state requirements.
Nearly every other jail in the state was able to provide similar records to Illinois Answers in a shorter time period, such as within weeks or a few months. Some Illinois jails use digital document storage systems that allow staff to search by keywords or particular incident types. At least one facility uses a log specifically dedicated to documenting every time staff use a chair.
Now, Champaign County Jail is keeping track of restraint chair use, improving incident documentation, and submitting the required reports to the state, and the sergeant previously in charge of giving final sign-off on reports is no longer in that role.
“What this is is fine-tuning a process that nobody has really thought about,” said Jail Superintendent Karee Voges, adding that the investigation “enlightened me to a few things that we can tweak.”
A restraint chair made by Safety Restraint Chair Inc. sits inside Champaign County Jail on Jan. 15, 2025. (Grace Hauck/The Illinois Answers Project)
74 restraint chair incidents in five years
Records provided by the county show jail staff restrained someone in a chair at least 74 times from 2019 to 2023, typically in response to a detainee who was hitting their head against a wall or biting or cutting themselves.
Officers often initially attempted less restrictive methods—such as using handcuffs, leg shackles, a belly strap, a foam safety helmet or a gown designed to prevent suicide—before deciding to restrain someone in a chair. That’s best practice according to county policy and state standards, which say staff may only use a chair as a last resort after considering alternative methods.
But not all county jails regularly attempt those less restrictive measures. Many, Illinois Answers found, restrain people in chairs immediately upon arrival at a facility, or as the initial response to someone punching or kicking a cell door.
In Champaign, most of the incidents lasted two hours or less, in keeping with the recommendations of the chair manufacturer, Safety Restraint Chair Inc. “This time limit was established to allow for the detainee to calm down, and if needed it allows for the correctional staff to seek medical or psychological help for the detainee,” the company website states.
Eighteen incidents exceeded that timeframe, with the longest lasting nearly four hours. Those durations are “not uncommon,” said Daniel Sheline, president of the Illinois Correctional Association. He said he has seen incidents in which staff are unable to safely release someone within two hours but are able to within four.
In a handful of cases, it wasn’t immediately clear how long people were restrained because staff did not document when they were released in incident reports or observation logs. That’s a problem, Voges said.
“I don’t feel that … every single report followed what I would like to see as far as documentation,” she said. “I still want to see, always, every report, the times in and the times out.”
Based on the known durations, Champaign County restrained people for lengths that are typical among Illinois jails. Illinois Answers obtained information on duration for a majority of the 5,500 incidents statewide over the five-year period and found that people were restrained for two hours or less at least 1,800 times and for longer than two hours at least 1,300 times.
Some jails, such as in Peoria and Madison counties, strapped people down to chairs for days on end, with the exception of brief breaks. One, in Coles County, even shocked people who were restrained using what’s known as a “stun cuff.”
In Champaign, several people were restrained repeatedly. One man was restrained 14 times over the five years. One woman was restrained 12 times in a single year. Another man was restrained 10 times in a year, and he is currently in custody at a treatment facility for people with severe mental illness.
While those incidents are notable, repeated restraint happened in other jails, too. In one county, jail staff restrained a man more than 40 times in a little over a year. Experts in corrections and mental health told Illinois Answers that kind of ongoing restraint may indicate staff use the chair as punishment or in lieu of treatment.
Voges said the people restrained repeatedly in Champaign were mentally ill or had severe behavioral disorders, and they continued to try to harm themselves. Several had spent time at a state psychiatric facility or had undergone evaluations to determine if they were fit to stand trial, she said.
Records show hour-long gaps between required checks
As in many jails statewide, staff at Champaign County Jail did not always write down when—or if—they checked on restrained detainees within the mandatory intervals. The county’s policy requires staff members to conduct direct face-to-face observation at least twice every 30 minutes to assess the inmate’s physical well-being and behavior.
Experts say it’s important to keep people who are restrained under near-constant observation for their own safety, and to limit duration to the shortest period possible. The county’s policy adds: “Restraints shall be checked to verify correct application and to ensure they do not compromise circulation.”
Champaign County Jail was able to locate and provide handwritten observation logs for 60 of the 74 known incidents. Of those, the majority show the jail failed to document at least one regular 15-minute check. Illinois Answers identified gaps lasting up to 66 minutes.
Voges said she believes staff made the required checks but did not write them down. “It should have been done. Now, I can’t say that [it was] for sure,” she said.
Logs provided by other county jails reveal their staffs also failed to document checks on people within the required intervals. Some restrained people for extended periods, with no breaks to walk or use the restroom.
Presented with an example of a log showing a nearly hour-long gap, Voges was unable to decipher an officer’s description of what was happening in that timeframe. “That right there is enough for me to say that there needs to be better explanation,” she said.
Voges said that, the more she read over the reports, the more she identified aspects of the documentation process to improve. Some of the observation logs don’t list dates or case numbers. And, when officers change shifts while someone is still restrained, there needs to be a supplemental report listing the time someone was taken out of the chair, she said.
So Voges met with her lieutenants in December and January to review documentation policies and procedures, and her operations lieutenant sent out an email alerting officers that they are required to complete those supplement reports.
Voges said she also noticed some reports had been approved with errors. An officer who used to oversee final report approval began transitioning out of that role and training a replacement in January, she said. “It doesn’t hurt for us to bring in somebody new with fresh eyes,” she said.
‘We’re still very much paper’
Illinois Answers requested records from Champaign County in 2023, and the county denied the request on the grounds that staff would have to search through 6,000 individual booking files and more than 1,000 pages of emails to identify the relevant documents and redact sensitive information.
So Illinois Answers and Voges developed a different approach in mid-2024. Voges, who has been with the department for more than two decades and has served as jail superintendent since 2014, showed Illinois Answers the use of force reports saved as individual PDFs in folders grouped by year on her desktop.
She then spent hours scrolling through the folders to determine which incident reports involved a restraint chair and sent the relevant reports to staff in the records department more than a mile away to pull the corresponding observation logs.
In the meantime, the jail was undergoing renovations, and the records division was moving buildings. That meant staff had to search through thousands of pages of paper personnel files packed into hundreds of boxes.
“Honestly, this is one of my issues is just the jail does not have the ability to have easy access to a lot of things,” Voges said.
A lot of smaller jails don’t have a special system to manage all reports, Voges said. The jail’s current system, from Tyler Technologies, tracks some statistics, such as daily population totals and detainee demographic information, she said. But, beyond that, it’s hard to pull any other data on trends.
Most reports are typed directly into individual PDF files, and others—such as detainee interviews—are handwritten. “We’re still very much paper, Excel-driven or putting them into certain drives that we keep for years and years,” she said.
Champaign County Sheriff’s Office on Jan. 15, 2025. (Grace Hauck/The Illinois Answers Project)
She said the sheriff’s department patrol division in 2023 switched to a new system for writing reports, also from Tyler Technologies, that is “time-saving” and “more efficient.” The patrol division receives the majority of public records requests, especially for records like bodycam videos and arrest reports, she said.
“I don’t think writing reports is a bad thing. … It was never really thought of on the corrections side as how important it might be until a situation like this,” she said, referencing Illinois Answers’ investigation.
The system that the patrol division uses allows staff to digitally track trends in what kind of force officers are using and who is using force, Voges said. But the jail’s version is a handwritten log that one staff member periodically types up and reprints.
“A handwritten list sounds a little outdated to me, but it may not be unusual if we did a poll of every county in Illinois,” Sheline said. “But it does seem like an old, antiquated way of keeping track of something.”
Jail staff recently added a column to that handwritten log for officers to check a box whenever staff restrain someone in a chair, allowing staff to track restraint incidents over time. “It probably just was never thought of,” Voges said. “It’s already been changed.”
It “would be nice” to have an electronic system for tracking use of force in the jail, too, Voges said. In late January, she spoke with the sheriff’s department’s chief deputy to see if the corrections division may be able to update their current software.
“Is it wrong that we had a system like this? No, it’s just an old-school system. But at some point you have to come to the age of technology,” Voges said, adding, “Something needs to get done.”
County failed to report restraint chair use to state
In the process of obtaining records, Illinois Answers revealed that Champaign County failed to report restraint chair incidents to the Jail and Detention Standards Unit within the Illinois Department of Corrections.
Under Illinois County Jail Standards, which set minimum rules for how to run a jail and treat detainees, jails are required to report an array of incidents—such as fires, fights, escapes and more—as “extraordinary or unusual occurrences,” including the use of restraint chairs.
IDOC confirmed to Illinois Answers that the reports are required for the use of restraint chairs. That’s been the case since at least 2014, according to the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, the bipartisan legislative committee responsible for oversight of administrative rules proposed or adopted by state agencies.
Voges said she’s been filling out “extraordinary or unusual occurrences” forms for at least the past 10 years. But she said she was unaware the reports were required for restraint chairs, so she had not submitted any.
“I just did status quo, what I was told,” Voges said.
She’s not alone. Illinois Answers found that, of the more than 5,500 known restraint chair incidents in county jails from 2019 to 2023, approximately half were never reported to the state. During that time, state inspectors completing annual inspection reports checked a box indicating jails were properly submitting these reports, even when they were not.
Spurred by questions from Illinois Answers, Voges scheduled a meeting with the jail’s assigned inspector in late 2023 to review reporting requirements, and the county has been reporting all new incidents, she said.
“I don’t necessarily think that our use of the restraint chair in any way, shape or form has been bad,” Voges said. “I would tell every single person that’s in this field the importance of tracking and the importance of documenting that.”
Fact checking by Abby Wilson.
This article first appeared on Illinois Answers Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
The post Champaign County Jail Begins Tracking and Reporting Use of Restraint Chairs to the State for the First Time appeared first on Capitol News Illinois.