SPRINGFIELD - While restaurateurs and bar owners try to placate crabby patrons who don't like Illinois' new smoking ban, prison guards are facing much tougher customers: tens of thousands of hardened inmates who have been forced to quit cold turkey.

The Jan. 1 ban outlaws smoking at all indoor public venues in Illinois. That includes the state's 28 prisons, which, until last month, still sold cigarettes in prison commissaries and allowed inmates to smoke in cells and elsewhere.

For the state's roughly 44,000 inmates (the majority of them smokers, by many estimates), the new law means no more cigarettes anywhere, at any time, even in outdoor prison yards.

For correctional officers, it means enforcing a huge new class of contraband in a criminal population that is perpetually on edge anyway and now is going through nicotine withdrawal to boot.

"It's a delicate situation in there," said Anders Lindall, spokesman for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents Illinois prison guards.

Violence happened in other states with new bans

Union and state officials say it's too early to tell if the ban has increased violence among prisoners. But the experience of some of the 38 other states that have restricted smoking behind bars suggests that it might.

Maine, for example, saw a quadruple increase in prison assaults after its smoking ban in 2000. And a bomb threat sent to a Tennessee courthouse last year turned out to be from an inmate upset about that state's prison smoking ban.

"We haven't seen any (violence) issues. Will we see some? We might," said Derek Schnapp, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Corrections.

Officials already have seen hints of the kind of black market that arises in prisons with virtually every kind of contraband a market that is likely to be especially vibrant for something as popular and addictive as cigarettes. Before the ban started, officials noticed spikes in cigarette purchases at prison commissaries, indicating that entrepreneurial inmates were stocking up.

"You empower a new black market. You create yet another class of items that security officers have to be on the lookout for," said Lindall, the AFSCME spokesman. The union is citing the ban in its efforts to get more corrections officers hired.

The union is discouraging guards from discussing the ban publicly because of the sensitivity of the issue and continuing labor negotiations with the state.

But Rep. Mike Bost, R-Murphysboro, said guards at the maximum-security Menard Correctional Center have told him privately that tension in the prison skyrocketed right after the ban.

"The first week or so, they were throwing lit (books of) matches, screaming and yelling" from their cells, said Bost.

He is urging corrections officials to create outdoor areas for the prison guards to smoke, on the theory that it's dangerous enough having nicotine-deprived inmates without adding nicotine-deprived guards to the mixture. "They're really on edge."

Increase in irritability

Smokers ingest about 5,000 chemicals every time they inhale, including addictive antidepressants. Nicotine, especially, diminishes anxiety and tension with the opposite effect when a nicotine-addicted person is deprived of it.

"Irritability and anger tend to be the emotions that are most reliably present after people quit smoking. It's very real," said David Gilbert, a psychology professor at Southern Illinois University Carbondale who has conducted extensive research on the effects of smoking and quitting.

Nicotine and other chemicals in cigarettes increase levels of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, which create feelings of pleasure and well-being. Remove the chemical, and irritability increases.

The sharpest effects of quitting usually pass after several days, but lower levels of irritability can remain for a month or two, and possibly longer for some, said Gilbert. Of most concern, he said, are inmates who have undiagnosed depression or other mental health issues and are essentially "self-medicating" with cigarettes, which can offer Prozac-like relief for depression symptoms. These inmates could be especially dangerous when cut off from their cigarettes.

"There's probably some who may need some psychological attention," said Gilbert.

In addition to gradually tapering down how many cigarettes inmates were allowed to buy last winter, corrections officials began serving hard candy with meals, and offering nicotine patches and other therapy.

"We communicated with lots of other states that went through this," said Schnapp. "We've been talking with other prison systems for months. The bottom line is, it's the law, and we're going to abide by it."

In Missouri prisons, inmates and guards are allowed to smoke, but only in outdoor designated smoking areas. That's in keeping with the indoor smoking ban on all state property.

'A Nightmare'

One former correctional officer, Chris Mooney, speculated that "the level of anxiety has to be through the roof" behind prison walls in Illinois right now.

"Smoking among inmates is more common than it is outside. They don't have anything else to do," said Mooney, who was a prison guard in the Wisconsin state correctional system in the early 1980s and now is a political scientist at the University of Illinois at Springfield.

Mooney said rank-and-file guards probably view the ban as "a nightmare" because of potential for additional violence in an already violent prison population. "Every minute of every day, (the inmates) are insulted. This is just one more thing they're being told they can't do."