A couple weeks ago reporters got a look at conditions inside the Vienna state prison in Southern Illinois. In preparation for the scrutiny, prison administrators had been busy fixing the place up, cleaning, painting, and repairing windows. The cosmetic changes were long overdue, but left untouched were the larger questions about what Illinois is achieving as it spends more than a billion dollars every year on prisons. Illinois Public Radio’s Robert Wildeboer has the first of two stories this week looking at the Vienna prison and what its decline tells us about the prison system in Illinois.