The Blagojevich administration and Department of Corrections might be trying to paint the transfer of 100 inmates from Pontiac Correctional Center as a matter of routine reclassification, but few people are buying it.

Certainly, the union representing prison staff isn't buying it.

Stephen Yokich, an attorney for the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees called the transfers "consistent with the implementation of the plan to close the prison."

Pontiac Mayor Scott McCoy was caught by surprise - as were the mayors in the communities where the inmates have been or will be transferred.

Even the judge who ruled against the union's request for an order to block the transfers did so reluctantly.

Circuit Judge Stephen Pacey said, "Even though I don't agree with what the executive branch is doing or the (2002) appellate court opinion, I cannot make up or change the law."

Fifty inmates from the Pontiac facility's medium security unit were transferred to East Moline Correctional Center last week and another 50 are headed to the Taylorville Correctional Center.

Both are minimum-security prisons and both are well over capacity.

That's not just the union claiming they are overcrowded. The Department of Corrections own Web site says that the average daily population of the East Moline prison is 1,102, although its rated capacity is 688. And the Taylorville prison, with a capacity of 600, has an average daily population of 1,172.

Yet, in the face of this crowding, in the face of the bipartisan Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability's unanimous recommendation against closing Pontiac prison and in the face of an independent study citing the need for more prison space, Gov. Rod Blagojevich is moving forward with these transfers and - apparently - with his intended closing of Pontiac prison.

Under that plan, about half the inmates in the 1,600-bed Pontiac facility will go to the all-but-empty Thomson Correctional Center, near the Quad Cities, and the rest will go to other state prisons.

But the report from an independent study - finally made public through legislative pressure a year after its completion - concluded that the state will need 2,735 more prison beds by the end of 2016.

As AFSCME spokesman Anders Lindall said, "You don't fix a dangerously overcrowded system by closing a prison."

If the governor thinks transferring a few prisoners here and a few prisoners there will enable him to shut down Pontiac prison without much notice, he is sorely mistaken.

And, he is mistaken if he thinks he can achieve his ultimate goal of closing Pontiac prison by moving inmates 50 or 100 at a time.

Pontiac prison employees still have not been formally notified that the institution is closing, despite the govenor's announced intent to do so in May.

We would like to think he is reconsidering his decision. We would like to think that the money provided by the Legislature to keep the prison open - and the obvious need for more, not less, prison space - would change his mind.

But the recent prison transfers tell a different story.