CHICAGO — The number of people incarcerated at Cook County Jail has dropped to a near-all-time low since the statewide abolition of cash bail took effect in September.
But despite the success in the Chicago area, the state has still failed to comply with key transparency and accountability portions of the Pretrial Fairness Act intended to ensure judges apply the bond reform law fairly across Illinois.
The bond reform law set a July 2022 deadline for the state’s pretrial services office to begin collecting and publishing data from all 102 Illinois counties that would paint a clear picture of who is being jailed, why they are being detained before trial and the outcomes of their cases.
The data would use metrics such as demographics, jail populations, case outcomes and the types of charges where prosecutors request detention to reveal how bond abolition affects pretrial detention. That deadline was set long before the state eliminated cash bail in September so watchdogs could compare outcomes from before and after the reforms, advocates said.
But state officials still have not launched the required data dashboards. In a report released at the July 2022 deadline, the board stated the data collection would be delayed by at least a year.
Advocates say this information is essential for the long-term success of the bond reform law.
“The movement to eliminate money bond and reduce pretrial jailing was a movement for racial and economic justice,” said Sharlyn Grace, senior policy advisor for the Cook County Public Defender’s Office. “If there is no information available about who is being impacted, then we aren’t able to evaluate the impact of the law.”
Officials have been tracking pretrial detention petitions in 71 counties since September, said Cara LeFevour Smith, director of the Office of Statewide Pretrial Services. The statewide case management system needed to collect all the data is expected to be ready by the end of January, Smith said.
Aggregating and analyzing pretrial data from all 102 counties is a mammoth task, Smith said.
Circuit courts use at least 17 different case management technologies that need to feed into the new state system, and most counties have never analyzed pretrial outcomes, Smith said.
The vast majority of Illinois courts still use paper-based records, which is a serious hurdle to streamlining the data into a single system, Smith said. That makes it especially difficult to plug each county into a statewide system, she said.
“None of us have ever done this before. So I think this is going very well. Illinois has never had this data before,” Smith said. “You can’t just flip a switch and have data populating a dashboard immediately. We have to understand the problem that we’re trying to fix.”
Eventually, the public data should include information on all arrests and charges for felony and misdemeanor offenses, outcomes of pretrial detention hearing, demographics of people detained in jail and under house arrest, the rates of people rearrested and charged with new crimes while awaiting trial, and the number of missed court dates for people awaiting trial.
The pretrial services office released a first batch of limited data in early December. The report did not include most metrics required by law, such as information on criminal charges, reoffense rates and demographic information.
“It’s not the Mercedes-Benz we were hoping for. But we now have more pretrial data than we’ve ever had before,” Smith said.
Why Does This Information Matter?
Defense attorneys need to know rearrest rates and how often defendants fail to appear in court without a cash bail system, Grace said.
Without that as well as information on the charges where prosecutors will typically seek to detain someone, it is very difficult to prepare an effective defense, Grace said.
The data also would allow defense attorneys to “prevent disparate types of pretrial detention,” so judges in different counties apply the law fairly and equally, said Lis Pollock, the public defender for Champaign County.
“We need to know who’s being detained and where,” Pollock said.
That data can also help defense attorneys figure out “which types of cases pretty much never have bond violations,” Pollock said.
For the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, the data will allow prosecutors to see when judges are approving pretrial detention requests for which types of cases, said data chief Matt Saniie.
In Chicago, prosecutors most frequently ask a judge to jail someone charged with domestic violence; judges approve about half of those requests, Saniie said. Without a statewide system, it’s impossible to know how other judges and prosecutors are dealing with similar cases, he said.
It is also important for prosecutors to have information on case outcomes so they can track whether “individuals who don’t get detained are reoffending or revictimizing, and what we can do to mitigate that. Or if that is not a problem that shows up,” Saniie said.
Tracking reoffense rates can also reveal where some counties may be unnecessarily jailing people when there is little risk to community safety, Saniie said.
Eliminating cash bond won broad support in Cook County, but it was fiercely opposed elsewhere in the state. A lawsuit from 58 Illinois counties stopped bond reform from taking effect until September.
The data is especially important for counties that resisted the reforms because it will allow watchdogs to ensure prosecutors and judges are jailing people only when they are a danger to public safety, said Rev. Violet Johnicker, a bond reform advocate with Rockford Urban Ministries.
Until the state begins complying with the law, there is no way to know how often prosecutors push to put people in jail and how judges respond to those requests, Johnicker said.
“Here in Winnebago County, our State’s Attorney was opposed to bond abolition. But now they are tasked with implementing it,” Johnicker said. “Who polices the courts? Whose job is it to make sure these things are implemented? Without that data, it really comes down to volunteer court observers.”
The Winnebago County State’s Attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Legal groups and champions of the bond reform law affiliated with the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice have run court-watching programs to collect limited, anecdotal data on pretrial detention. But the data gleaned from court-watching volunteers is limited and incomplete without a larger statewide system in place, Johnicker said.
“It is absolutely frustrating to not have a clear before-and-after picture. Here, we are relying on anecdotal data— stories that people have been able to share with us and that, that snapshot we’ve been able to get from court-watching,” Johnicker said.
Ultimately, the information is needed to give an accurate view into a policy that has been targeted by fearmongering, speculation and misleading claims, advocates said.
“There was active misinformation spread about the impact of the law that made it seem like the old system of money bond did things that it simply didn’t do,” Grace said. “The lack of data was a weakness in responding to those misinformation campaigns. The integrity of the court system is threatened when there’s a lack of data that allows people to counter misinformation.”
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