How do I use this website?

This website is the companion to an archive of materials relating to civil commitment consisting mostly of correspondence with people detained in civil commitment facilities. On this website, we have guides to that archive and supplementary material about civil commitment.

This website at a glance

What is an archive?

An archive is the documented collection of memory and history for families, communities, organizations, institutions, and/or states. Every archive is unique in its documentation and description as well as the purpose for such documentation, a process that is determined by the creator(s) and archivist. For more information on archives and how they are created and maintained, click here.

How is this archive organized? How do I search it?

  • As it stands, this archive contains 90 documents, which are referred to as individual “items” and can be viewed by clicking on the browse items tab. These items are a variety of documents. Most items on the site are letters received from incarcerated residents in civil commitment in Illinois. Letters can include personal experiences with the institution, additional materials and articles about civil commitment, description and/or documentation of formal complaints made inside, general discussion of life experiences, and art. The archive also includes other types of documents as items - state documents which additionally help us understand the facility, forms filled out by residents, newsletters, and articles about the institution.

  • The Civil Commitment working group has developed a set of tags applied to these items which describe their contents. A word map of these tags can be viewed by clicking on the “browse by tag” link on the browse items page. This is one way you can browse through the items by theme.

  • Collections offer another way to browse through the archive’s items, available on the browse collections page. These collections group items by type. There are currently three groups of items - letters from residents of the civil commitment facility at Rushville, residents of the civil commitment facility at Big Muddy, and documents which describe the rules and regulations of the facilities.

  • A search feature is available to help users explore items. Users can search for items which include a certain keyword. Searches will return items which feature that keyword in the title or description. Note that the text of the items themselves (for example, the actual text of a letter) cannot be searched, only the description of that item which was written by an archive volunteer. Users can restrict their search specifically to title and/or description and can also restrict their search to specific collections or tags.

  • Exhibits are a third way to browse through items. Exhibits work similarly to collections, but are further organized. For example, the Rushville in the Words of Those Confined There exhibit organizes letters received from residents of the Rushville facility by date.

Data Biography

The information contained in this archive has a biography. It has been collected by members of the Civil Commitment Working Group, a mostly Chicago-based abolitionist collective that had previous ties to Black and Pink, a national organization advocating for abolition alongside LGBTQIA incarcerated people. The data in this archive comes primarily from those confined at Rushville. Individuals there have generously contributed letters and copies of institutional documents to this archive, and 204 of their responses to a survey about Rushville have been compiled into a report by members of the Civil Commitment Working Group.

The working group is currently making progress on connecting with individuals at Big Muddy River prison, the other site of civil commitment in Illinois. The majority of documents housed in the archive are created by people who are directly impacted by civil commitment, though there are other documents authored by state institutions and people employed by the state.

The data in this archive also has metadata, which describes the different documents included in this collection. Metadata is a useful way to learn more about document authors, the origin of documents, and when they were created. When clicking on documents in the archive, you will be taken to the object’s metadata, which will provide you with context on the document and its journey into the collection.