AP Examples of the shrinking services cited by the lawyers include an end to mental health groups and unstructured out-of-cell time at Pontiac. Isolated in solitary confinement as the pandemic swept through Illinois prisons, inmates diagnosed with mental illness are beyond the breaking point, setting fire to their cells and harming themselves after more than a year without adequate mental health care. Lawyers for about 12,000 mentally ill inmates have asked a federal judge to order the Illinois Department of Corrections to end the facilitywide lockdowns put in place in March 2020 after COVID-19 spread across the globe. Penal institutions have been hit especially hard by the virus, with jails and prisons seeing high rates of infection among staff and detainees.