Illinois Bail Reform Makes Justice System More Equitable and Fair

By: Laurie Garduque

Bail Data Analysis Pretrial and Bail September 18, 2023

The justice system in MacArthur’s home state of Illinois is set to become more just, equitable, and fair without increasing crime, thanks to the Pretrial Fairness Act. While many people and organizations worked towards this landmark reform bill for years, MacArthur’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) helped support non-partisan analysis and research and education around key parts of the bill.

The Pretrial Fairness Act makes a range of reforms to the criminal justice system in Illinois. One of the most significant changes is eliminating cash bail and redesigning the pretrial process and decision-making. Illinois is the first state in the nation to ban cash bail entirely.

The end of cash bail in Illinois, which goes into effect September 18, 2023, will reduce the discriminatory impact of the justice system in the state. In the past, cash bail left people in jail who could not afford to pay bond, while those with greater access to resources were released and able to return to their families, jobs, and homes.

Under the new system, people are released from jail unless the State’s Attorney initiates a petition for detention, based on the risk of a defendant committing another crime or fleeing prosecution. When this occurs, a hearing is held, evidence of risk to the community is presented and evaluated, and the judge determines if pretrial release will be granted. By removing the role of money and wealth from pretrial release, the Pretrial Fairness Act will promote greater equity and fairness, particularly for people with lower income and members of historically marginalized communities in Illinois.

Analyzing the Impact of Local Reforms

While support for ending cash bail had been building for a while, some important steps happened in Cook County under their MacArthur SJC grant. The Cook County’s Office of the Chief Judge issued a general order in 2017, designed to increase pretrial release without cash bail and increase the affordability of cash bail when used as a condition of release. The chief judge received collaborative support and buy-in from other system and community stakeholders to implement these changes.

And, because SJC prioritizes data transparency and analysis, the Office of the Chief Judge shared their data with another MacArthur grantee for analysis: Loyola University of Chicago’s Center for Criminal Justice.

Loyola deserves credit for its efforts to educate journalists, government officials, and the public about how bail reform impacts community safety. Their analysis of bail reform in Cook County since 2017 traced people who had been released pretrial. What they found was invaluable to the debate around bail reform in the Pretrial Fairness Act: they learned that there was no change in the rate at which defendants were charged with new crimes in the six months or year following their release, even though the number of people released during this period increased.

Data showed that bail reform in Cook County had no effect on new criminal activity or crime. This was based on analysis performed by Loyola University Chicago under a grant from MacArthur.

Loyola’s Professors Don Stemen and David Olson concluded that Cook County’s decreased use of cash bail had no impact on new criminal activity or crime. Overall crime rates in Chicago, including violent crime rates, were not any higher after the implementation of bail reform. The analysis and findings in Cook County resembled other areas where similar bail reform efforts have been undertaken, such as New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia.

The analysis also showed that releasing people while they await trial does not make communities less safe. Monetary bail, however, does impose a burden on the individuals and families who are least able to afford it. Like bail reform efforts in other communities, Cook County’s initiative demonstrated that it is possible to decrease the use of monetary bail and pretrial detention–lessening the financial, physical, and psychological harms that come with pretrial detention–without affecting criminal activity or crime rates.

Without Cook County modeling bail reform for the rest of Illinois and Loyola analyzing and sharing the results, Illinois may not have had the support to end cash bail statewide.

Implementing reforms at the local level, analyzing the results, and sharing learnings is at the heart of SJC as we try to encourage the spread of reform across the country. The Pretrial Fairness Act, a first-in-the nation law, took lessons from a local community and used it to inform smart reform decisions at the state level. This shows exactly the type of momentum the Safety and Justice Challenge was designed to push forward, and we know it will have a positive impact on people’s lives, even as there is more work to be done.

 

Report

Housing Jail Populations July 11, 2023

At The Intersection of Probation and Jail Reduction Efforts: Findings on Probation, Jail, and Transitional Housing Trends in Pima County, Arizona

Ammar Khalid, Rochisha Shukla, Arielle Jackson, and Andreea Matei

Reducing jail populations – and the collateral consequences of criminal legal system involvement – requires jurisdictions to critically examine why and how people are entering the system to begin with. Much of the research around jail reform focuses on the pretrial population; however, with rising numbers o individuals under probation supervision and jail commonly being used to detain those awaiting a hearing on a probation violation, reform efforts to understand how violations contribute to the overall jail population are essential. To learn more about the impact probation revocations have on jails and to advance promising strategies to address them, CUNY ISLG funded the Urban Institute through the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) to conduct a mixed-methods study on how people on probation end up in jail incarceration and the impact of a program aimed at improving these outcomes with transitional housing support through the Adult Probation Department (APD) in Pima County, Arizona. Using administrative data from the Pima County Jail and APD, case record reviews, and interviews with APD leadership, probation officers, judges, community-based housing providers, and people on probation, this study aimed to decipher the system-level trends in jail incarceration for probation violations and the key pathways to jail incarceration for those individuals currently on probation. It also sought to understand the impact of the transitional housing support program on short and long-term outcomes for people on probation receiving funding from APD for transitional housing.

Additional Downloads

Issue Brief

Costs Data Analysis Immigration May 23, 2023

Immigration Enforcement Policies and Detainer Trends in SJC Sites

UCI School of Sociology: Department of Criminology, Law and Society

The Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) was launched by the MacArthur Foundation in 2015 to assist local criminal justice systems in reducing their jail populations and advancing racial equity. To date, MacArthur has supported a total of 57 cities and counties1, which comprise a national network of local criminal justice systems committed to reducing the footprint of the justice system. While ameliorating disparities and social inequalities permeate recent justice policies, these efforts coincide with a rise in anti-Latino/a rhetoric and the evolution of anti-immigration measures. Anti- Latino/a rhetoric associated with anti-immigrant sentiment is not new; in fact, scholars have noted that historically, racial scripts of Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in the United States have included depictions of noncitizens and individuals undeserving of resources (Molina, 2014). Historically, immigration policy has fluctuated in response to labor demand and anti-immigrant sentiment (e.g., Molina, 2014; Massey, 2009). Most recently, there has been a devolution of federal immigration enforcement to localities, which has led to anti-immigration campaigns and the introduction of approximately 1,500 local anti-immigration ordinances in state and local legislatures (Koulish, 2010, p.138-139). Secure Communities, an example of immigration devolution, was a 2008-to-20212 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) initiative requiring the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to share fingerprints with DHS to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to identify undocumented immigrants. The 287 (g) agreements establish a partnership with federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to cooperate with federal agencies to remove undocumented individuals.3 Additionally, traffic violations can also be counted as crimes for the purpose of removal (Abrego, Coleman, Martinez, Menjivar, & Slack, 2017). Advocates and academics have recently documented how 287(g) agreements have increased policing in Latino/a neighborhoods and how traffic enforcement is used to investigate legal status (Coleman & Kocher, 2019). Equally concerning is the fact that the devolution of immigration enforcement to interior enforcement has spillover effects on all Latino/as (Aranda, Menjivar, & Donato, 2014).

Robust immigration enforcement by local, state, and federal authorities is currently the backdrop of criminal justice reform efforts. Immigration policies can influence how local law enforcement engages with undocumented populations, which may include Latino/a communities. Immigration enforcement and local-federal cooperation can result in an increase in arrests and detainers. A detainer is an immigration hold request that allows ICE to remove undocumented individuals from federal, state, or local custody. During the Trump Administration, the number of immigration arrests increased from a total of 30,028 in 2016 to 41,328 in 20174 and detainers increased from 85,720 in 2016 to 142,474 in 2017 (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse). Moreover, anti-immigrant policies persist despite overwhelming evidence that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans and that communities with a higher proportion of immigrants have lower crime rates (National Academy of Sciences, 2015; Ousey & Kubrin, 2018; Zatz & Rodriguez, 2015).

Issue Brief

Community Engagement Pretrial Services Racial Disparities May 23, 2023

Establishing, Implementing, and Maintaining a Language Access Program

UCI School of Sociology: Department of Criminology, Law and Society

The MacArthur Foundation launched the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) in 2015 with the goals of safely reducing jail incarceration and addressing racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system. The SJC Network currently includes fifty-seven sites. The local criminal justice systems in these localities serve racially and ethnically diverse populations comprised of subgroups with different characteristics and needs, including people who are limited English proficient (LEP). As defined by the U.S. Department of Justice (Guidance to Federal Financial Assistance Recipients Regarding Title VI Prohibition Against National Origin Discrimination Affecting Limited English Proficient Persons, 2002), a person is LEP if their primary language is anything other than English and if they have a limited ability to read, write, speak, or understand English. An estimated 25 million people in the United States are LEP (2020 American Community Survey, 5-Year Estimates). The national origin nondiscrimination provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (“Title VI”) require recipients of federal financial assistance to provide people who are LEP with meaningful access to their programs and activities (e.g., in-language communication, telephonic interpretation, and translation of vital documents).

Many organizations and agencies within local criminal justice systems receive federal financial assistance and are thus legally obligated to provide language services. When law enforcement agencies, court systems, and correctional systems provide adequate language services they strengthen access to justice for people who are LEP - e.g., providing life-saving public safety assistance, supporting victims of crime, and delivering vital medical and behavioral care to people who are incarcerated. While national guidance for improving language accessibility exists, the extent to which language services are available in local justice systems is relatively unknown.

Report

COVID Data Analysis Featured Jurisdictions March 21, 2023

The Impact of COVID-19 on Crime, Arrests, and Jail Populations

The JFA Institute

Beginning in March 2020, local and state criminal agencies became concerned that people arrested and booked into local county jails would be unduly exposed to the COVID-19 virus. To address these concerns, a variety of policies were enacted to reduce the number of persons held in jails. These polices were designed to 1) mitigate the number of people being arrested and booked into local jails and 2) reduce the length of stay (LOS) for those admitted to jail. Concurrently, public safety concerns were raised that by lowering the jail populations, crime in the community would increase. To address these concerns, the JFA Institute (JFA), through resources provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) program, began tracking and analyzing six cities and counties participating in SJC (jurisdictions) and their jail and crime data in real time to monitor the impact of these mitigation activities. In October 2020, the study was expanded to five other jurisdictions and data collected data through December 2020. This report serves as a second expansion to include data through the year 2021, though with a slightly altered set of the eleven jurisdictions."