Front & Center #1: Abolishing Cash Bail in Illinois--What You Missed

Abolishing Cash Bail in Illinois: What You Missed

Over the summer, the Illinois Supreme Court cleared the way for the implementation of the Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA), the ambitious, much-debated, and long-delayed new law that will eliminate the use of cash bail when it goes into effect on September 18, 2023. In addition to making Illinois the first state in the nation without any form of cash bail, the PFA will impose new limits on the use of pretrial jail detention for people accused of crimes, mandating release in cases that do not involve serious charges, and requiring formal, appealable findings of risk (either risk to public safety or risk of flight from prosecution) to justify holding people in jail.

It's a historic change. As part of our long-term evaluation of PFA implementation and impact, we’ve spent more than a year studying the Illinois pretrial landscape, collecting and analyzing baseline data on pretrial decisions and outcomes, observing hearings, and interviewing judges, prosecutors, defenders, sheriffs and other stakeholders about their current practices. Along the way, we’ve been issuing detailed interim reports of our qualitative and quantitative findings. But here they are in a nutshell:

Predicting the PFA’s Impact on Pretrial Detention

One question we've been examining is how abolishing cash bail and the new limits on pretrial detention might impact how many people are held in jail prior to sentencing. To get an idea of the rough volume of arrestees who will be detainable under the new law, we collaborated with the Illinois Sentencing Policy Advisory Council (SPAC) to look at data on Illinois arrestees from 2017 to 2021 and found that 37%—about 70,000 individuals per year statewide—would have been eligible for detention consideration under the PFA. Nearly half of those 70,000 were arrested for domestic violence offenses, like battery or violations of orders of protection. (We created an interactive data tool to allow you to explore how these proportions varied across judicial circuits.)

Of course, this is only eligibility for detention. There’s no knowing what proportion of those eligible would actually have been detained under the PFA—that would depend on the risks they posed. But when we applied a widely used risk assessment instrument to the data on past arrestees, we found that most of those eligible for detention were not “high-risk,either for new criminal activity or for failure to appear at future hearings. In fact, we found elevated risks in only about 15,500 of the 70,000 detainable cases.

Baseline Pretrial Practices

Our analyses of pre-PFA administrative data provide a detailed picture of the working reality of the current cash bail system in Illinois:

• Most jail stays are short. While large numbers of arrestees are currently being admitted to jail pretrial—about 173,000 people a year, on average—many of them are released shortly after booking, and our analysis of jail data suggests that the majority are out within a week.
• Most defendants do not await trial in jail. When we looked at pending felony cases across Illinois, only 17% were in jail custody, while another 18% were on pretrial supervision. The rest—about 65%—were living in the community, without any sort of supervision. However, these patterns varied considerably across Illinois’ diverse jurisdictions.
• But getting out of jail in Illinois has a price. We analyzed a year’s worth of bond decisions in 11 counties, and found a consistent pattern of routine imposition of money bail, even in less serious cases that will not be detainable at all under the PFA. In all but two of the counties, monetary bail was imposed on the majority of defendants.

How Practitioners See Things

Our confidential interviews with criminal justice practitioners across Illinois yielded some valuable insights into widespread attitudes and beliefs about pretrial detention and cash bail, many of which depart substantially from those that are usually stated in public:

• In Illinois, cash bail serves many purposes besides its “official” ones. We heard cash bail described—and often defended—as a rough and ready sanction for criminal activity, a convenient mechanism for achieving de facto preventive detention, and a kind of security deposit for later collection of post-conviction fees, fines and restitution.

• Pretrial detention also has its unofficial purposes and benefits, at least in the eyes of practitioners.

  • Shelter, treatment. Many local officials told us that, for the homeless and drug-dependent in their counties, the jail is all there is.
  • Informal deterrence. We heard from others who frankly described jail holding as a necessary local deterrent to crime, more immediate and effective than official punishments.
  • Pressure to waive trial rights. Without routine pretrial jail holding, we were told, a vital incentive to resolve cases via negotiated plea will evaporate—and the system will break down under the weight of too many trials.

What’s Next

Obviously, practitioner attitudes and beliefs like these have a way of complicating ambitious reform efforts and may be of great practical significance to PFA implementation. We’ll be following this process over the next three years—observing the statewide roll-out, interviewing stakeholders regarding their implementation experiences, analyzing administrative data from a variety of sources, and working with state and local leaders to understand the new law’s effects on rates and conditions of pretrial release, rates of failure to appear and new arrests during the pretrial period, overall case outcomes, the size and composition of jail populations, the lengths and costs of pretrial detention, and the work routines of criminal justice stakeholders. Throughout our evaluation, we’ll be doing our best to keep the field and the public informed about the progress of the new law, sharing what we learn through periodic reports and interactives, presentations to stakeholders, posts on our website, and this newsletter.

CCJ Partners with John Howard to Assess “Quality of Life” in Prison

The Center recently launched a new collaboration with the prison watchdog group John Howard Association (JHA) of Illinois, providing JHA with ongoing data-analytic support for its independent monitoring of the state’s prisons while giving our students valuable hands-on experience and exposure to the real world of citizen correctional oversight. So far, the collaboration includes a new undergraduate seminar on prison reform, jointly taught by JHA and Center staff, and paid research fellowships for Loyola students providing research support to JHA internships for students. But the most intriguing thing we’re working on together is a project designed to monitor and assess the quality of life in Illinois prisons, using data from the “Measuring the Quality of Prison Life” (MQPL) survey instrument.

The MQPL is a detailed survey that gathers prison residents’ views on the quality of life in the facilities where they are held. Originally developed by criminologists at Cambridge University, the MQPL is now routinely used by the British government to monitor climate and social conditions in prisons throughout England and Wales. It yields valid and reliable measures of multiple aspects of a prison’s social environment, including intangible but important qualities like humanity, respect, order, fairness, and staff professionalism. Under an agreement with the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC), JHA is now making a shortened and adapted version of the MQPL available in paper form to incarcerated people and staff in IDOC facilities, and hoping to make regular MQPL survey administration part of its routine monitoring of Illinois prison conditions and performance.

Thousands of completed MQPL surveys have been returned already, with more coming in, and CCJ and Loyola student researchers are working with JHA staff to code responses, analyze results, and visualize findings in ways that will enable IDOC administrators and the general public to understand and act on them. What we’re finding—including both individual responses and patterns across the data—is fascinating, and potentially important. Check here for more in the coming months!

CCJ Co-Hosts Prosecutors Network

Prosecutors from across the country will be in Chicago later this month for a meeting of the Prosecutorial Performance Indicators (PPI) Network, hosted by CCJ in partnership with Florida International University and the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. The goal of PPIs is to promote more just, effective, and transparent prosecution through the use of publicly reported performance metrics. As a founding partner in the project, CCJ has helped elected prosecutors in Illinois, Wisconsin, Colorado, Maryland, and Florida to launch public data dashboards that serve to “open up” prosecutors’ offices, enabling them to engage with communities, build trust, and hold themselves accountable for fair outcomes. It’s paradigm-shifting work, and the offices involved are led by some of America’s most thoughtful and progressive reformers. They’ll come together with funders and the PPI support team for a full day at Loyola’s Quinlan School of Business, to share updates on implementation in partner sites and discuss challenges and issues arising from their shared work.

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