Rooting for the Cubs, Even Behind Bars

As most of us sat around our TVs on comfy couches and reclining chairs, crunching on potato chips and fingers during the nail-bitingly tense game, others sat on steel stools, more than likely wearing flip-flops and orange jumpsuits. And for a few brief moments Wednesday night, they forgot where they were.

Well, at least for some inmates.

Jails don’t often go out of their way to give inmates special privileges. That's not the point of jail. But Wednesday was different. Game 7 was 108 years in the making, and some criminals got a reprieve for a few hours.

If you were lucky enough to be locked up in the Kendall County jail, you got to see the whole thing, even the inning after the rain delay.

Kendall County Corrections Division Cmdr. Sabrina Jennings said final lockdown for inmates is at 11 p.m.

“That’s when all the inmates are to be in their cells. The doors are secured and the TVs and phones are turned off,” she said.

When there are events like the Stanley Cup, the World Series or the Super Bowl, the rules change a bit. The TVs are left on, and the inmates can stay in the day room to watch.

“To lock up 120-some inmates when they’re all watching the same thing, to lock them up before the end of something could not have a very nice ending,” she said.

Thursday the jail was quiet and happy.

“Everyone’s thrilled. Except for those few Cleveland fans in back,” Jennings said, assuming there are some.

But still, inmates need to be on good behavior to get that privilege, and if some are acting up, they lose it.

“The inmates basically know that. They know we’re allowing them to stay out of their cells, we’re keeping the TVs on, we’re keeping the phones on. And they know if they act up, they will lose those privileges and they will be locked down,” she said.

And if there’s just one person causing trouble, it doesn’t affect the whole block. In fact, if corrections officers can’t determine who it is, the street code of silence goes out the window pretty fast. At least when it comes to watching the World Series.

“When you have something like this going on, the other inmates are the first person to tell you it was so-and-so,” she said.

Although she wasn’t in the jail at the time, she’s guessing the reaction from the inmates when the Cubs won was the same as when they won the National League pennant.

“You could hear all the inmates cheering when they went to the World Series,” she said.

It’s lights out at 10 p.m. for inmates at the Will County Jail, but in most pods the inmates can still see the TV from their cells. Warden Brad Josephson said he’s 99.9 percent sure the officers in charge of each pod left the TV on. It depends on their mood and how the housing unit is acting.

“Without calling and asking every single deputy that worked our housing units, I guarantee the game was on,” he said.

The older pods have TVs located on the lower level, so inmates on the top level may not have been able to see the game, but they could hear it.

“The deputies understand it’s a big game. They’re fans themselves,” he said. “And even if the inmates weren’t able to see it, I’ll bet you a million dollars the officers had the volume on so high that everyone could hear it.”

Inmates at the DuPage County Jail weren’t as lucky. According to Sgt. Bob Harris, they were locked down, and the TVs were shut off at 10:30 p.m., just as the game was tied and it looked like there would be an extra inning. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.

“Generally, we don’t make allowances for the inmates,” Harris said. “We keep them to a strict schedule.”

But as far as he knows, there wasn’t any grumbling from the inmates. Perhaps they knew it wouldn’t do any good.

The same holds true for Lake County. While the inmates got to watch the game, once 10 p.m. rolled around, it was bedtime.

Lake County Deputy Police Chief Ted Uchiek is sure there were some inmates upset about it, but that’s just the way it goes.

“There’s some grumblings, but we have to run a facility that’s safe and secure and have a standard operating procedure,” Uchiek said.

However, the jail does play movies for the inmates on Friday and Saturday nights, so there’s that. Maybe not enough consolation for those die-hard Cubs fans, though.

“I’m sure there are some Cubs fans in jail, and some people might say Cubs fans should be in jail,” Uchiek said with a laugh. He’s a Pittsburgh Pirates fan, since that’s where he’s originally from, but even that couldn’t stop him from getting in on the excitement.

“Since Pittsburgh wasn’t in there, yeah, we got swept up in it,” he said.

Over at the Cook County Jail, inmates had to be locked up in their cells at normal hours.

“The only possibility is that the TVs might have been left on,” a Cook County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman said but wasn’t sure if that happened.

Each security level locks up at different times, so how much of the game they got to watch before it was lights out is dependent on their security classification.

“It’s such a large facility it’s impossible to break down and say ‘In this tier, this happened, in this tier, this happened,’” she said.

In prisons within the Illinois Department of Corrections, whether people were able to finish the game was simply a matter of if they wanted to.

“The men and women in IDOC custody have television sets in their cells and could watch the World Series on their own, if they chose,” said Illinois Department of Corrections spokesperson Nicole Wilson.

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