Front & Center #12: December 2025

Coming Home?

A new CCJ report describes the results of the first-ever Housing Assessment Survey of people nearing release from Illinois prisons. Designed in collaboration with the Illinois Reentry Council (IRC), a broad-based statewide collective focused on removing the many legal, financial, and practical barriers to successful community reintegration following release from prison, the survey was administered last spring in the Logan, Dixon, Illinois River and Lincoln Correctional Centers in Northern and Central Illinois. The results, based on nearly a thousand responses, were interesting and potentially useful, shedding light on the complex challenges facing people seeking stable and affordable housing at a crucial turning point in their lives.

The Center is not new to prison surveys. In just the last couple of years, we’ve partnered with the Women’s Justice Institute (WJI) on a three-prison survey exploring the role of gender violence in shaping women’s pathways to prison; worked with the John Howard Association to analyze responses to its Measuring the Quality of Prison Life (MQPL) survey, which tracks prison residents’ views on the quality of life in the facilities where they’re held; and helped the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) to survey people in its custody regarding their preferences for new facilities being planned to replace the antiquated Logan and Stateville Correctional Centers.

Housing Instability “All the Time”

There were lots of striking takeaways from the responses to the Housing Assessment Survey. But the biggest had to do with the complex and unstable housing histories people reported before prison. During the three years prior to their incarceration, 42% of the women responding to the survey said they’d been unsheltered or unhoused at some point, as did 28% of the men. Many—again, almost a third of the women—had also been evicted during these years. Overall, 18% of the men and 29% of the women said their housing in the three years before prison had been unstable “all the time.”

That’s crucial information for those working to create access to post-release housing for this population. The survey also uncovered an array of other challenges that were common in this group—including mental and physical disabilities and limitations, histories of mental illness and substance use, and convictions requiring placement on registries—all of which could be expected to limit housing options or complicate housing searches.

A Model Process?

Just as interesting and important as the results of the Housing Assessment Survey was the survey design and administration process itself, which benefited greatly from collaboration with partners whose reentry housing expertise was grounded in personal experience.

Everything about prison survey research—getting inside, working around institutional constraints, being seen as neutral, winning trust, securing the voluntary participation of a sample that is not pre-selected by prison administrators or otherwise biased or skewed—is notoriously difficult. One key to success in this case was the involvement, from start to finish, of people with first-hand knowledge of what the survey was about—who had actually faced and overcome the challenges of making a life after prison. Because the IRC is itself a broad-based “inside-outside” collective, with active participation and leadership from formerly incarcerated people and impacted community members as well as policy advocates and housing, treatment, corrections, and human services agency officials, the survey questions were informed by hard-won personal knowledge, and framed in language that would make sense to people who had to answer them.

Perhaps more importantly, the survey’s administration inside the prisons was also overseen by formerly incarcerated people, whose credibility with their former peers contributed directly to the survey’s exceptionally high rate of participation. A total of nearly a thousand people completed the paper-and-pencil form, voluntarily answering four pages of detailed questions about difficult personal matters.

More Analysis to Come

When Codirector Dave Olson presented the Center’s preliminary analysis of survey responses at the Illinois Reentry Council Fall Quarterly Meeting in September, people with lived experience as well as other kinds of expertise were in the audience, and among the first to dig into what the results meant.

That collaborative process will continue. This is a unique and rich dataset, and we’ve only taken our first cut at it. More detailed analyses will determine what the data can tell us about the needs of people with multiple intersecting issues, for example, and the kinds of service combinations that will enable them to succeed after release from prison. We will continue to work with the IRC and its partners to explore these and other issues, and their implications for reentry housing policy in Illinois.

The PFA and Defenders

Loyola’s statewide evaluation of the implementation of the Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA) in Illinois focuses in part on the ways the law has changed the everyday practice and work routines of justice system actors. In abolishing cash bail and fundamentally rewriting the state’s pretrial detention and release procedures, the PFA effectively required court actors, law enforcement officers, and other justice professionals to change how they do their jobs. The ways they have adapted to the demands of the new law are an important part of the story of the PFA.

This is particularly true of the state’s defenders. It’s part of the design of the PFA that decisions to restrict pretrial liberty should be more thoughtfully considered and vigorously contested than they were under the cash bail system. That means requiring more active representation and involvement from defenders in the pretrial process.

In confidential interviews conducted as part of our PFA evaluation, we’ve spoken at length about these new demands with ten public defenders from across Illinois. It’s not a representative sample, but we plan to do more interviews in the new year. And in the meantime it’s provided us with some important insights into the ways the PFA is changing pretrial defense practice in Illinois, and its consequences for people accused of crimes.

New Responsibilities for an Overstretched Network

Before the PFA, outside of Illinois’ urban counties, defenders often had little or no role in the bond-setting process—it was common for defendants to be unrepresented by attorneys at that stage, especially in counties without full-time public defenders. Accordingly, for defenders, one of the PFA’s most basic and consequential changes was its requirement that legal counsel be appointed prior to a defendant’s first appearance, “and with sufficient time for meaningful attorney-client contact to gather information in order to advocate effectively for the defendant's pretrial release.”

That’s harder than it sounds, especially in rural areas. There are three big complicating factors to keep in mind here:

• Decentralized Funding and Oversight. While the state bears responsibility under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments for ensuring the provision of indigent defense in criminal cases, in Illinois that responsibility is effectively delegated to the counties. Funding for public defender offices comes largely out of county budgets, and administrative oversight of defenders is provided by trial-level judges. In practice that means Illinois’ indigent defense funding tends to be a patchwork—uneven from county to county, and often inadequate. And for isolated defenders, being dependent on local authorities for their livelihood makes it that much harder to call attention to the system’s inadequacies.
• Wide Open Spaces. Most of Illinois—82 out of 102 counties, and more than three-quarters of the state’s land area—is rural. Defenders are thinly stretched across all this real estate. It is common for a single public defender to be responsible for a whole rural county; in fact, according to a 2021 study commissioned by the Illinois Supreme Court, 57 rural counties had only a part-time public defender. In some instances a single individual was providing indigent defense representation—covering hearings, visiting jails, arguing motions, conducting trials—in multiple counties.
• A Dwindling, Aging Pool of Lawyers. Moreover, much of rural Illinois is quite literally running out of attorneys. The phenomenon of the “disappearing rural lawyer” is not unique to Illinois, but it has certainly intensified here in recent years, resulting in huge and growing “legal deserts” across the state. According to Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission (ARDC) data from November 2024, more than 90% of new Illinois attorneys (admitted in the last four years) now work in Cook and its collar counties, leaving a relative handful of newcomers to take the places of those who die or retire in the rest of the state.

The legislature anticipated that existing weaknesses in the state’s indigent defense system, particularly downstate, were bound to be exposed and exacerbated by the PFA, and created a Public Defender Fund to provide resources for public defenders and public defender services to handle the increased workload. But more money hasn’t always produced more attorneys, at least in the counties that need them. As one Chief Defender from a rural county told us, “The number one problem I'm facing is finding lawyers who are qualified for the slots I have available.”

More help is on the way. With the recent enactment of the State Public Defender Act, Illinois has moved at least a little closer to a system of state responsibility for indigent defense, establishing a State Public Defender Commission and an Office of the State Public Defender that will eventually take on the job of developing practice, workload, and budget standards for county public defenders, collecting statewide data on defender performance, and providing training and financial support that will supplement (but not supplant) local funding. All this is in the future, however: the first State Public Defender won’t take office until the beginning of 2027, and will be required to spend the first two years engaged in various organizing and fact-finding activities specified in the Act.

The Consequences for PFA Implementation

In reflecting on the ways the PFA is changing indigent defense practice in their counties, and what it means for their clients, the defenders we’ve interviewed seem to agree on a few key points:

• Frontloading and Triage. The PFA has had the effect of forcing the whole system to commit more time, resources, and scrutiny to cases at the very beginning, where defenders had previously had little or no involvement. Given the PFA’s time limits and other requirements, defenders are forced to concentrate their efforts on cases in which their clients are facing detention petitions. One defender told us that clients whose pretrial release is mandated under the PFA are getting far less intensive representation with respect to their pretrial release conditions: “We don't get police reports on those, and we go to court, we tell them, ‘Hey, if you agree to this, you're going to get out a lot quicker than if we have a hearing and nitpick your conditions.’ And you know, 90% of those, we have an agreed hearing [and] will stipulate to probable cause to speed things along.”
• A Rise in Pretrial Control. Perhaps partly as a result of this dynamic, in which defenders focus most of their efforts on contesting detention in a small subset of their cases, it may be that the imposition of noncustodial forms of pretrial control in other cases is becoming easier and more routine. Of course, the recent growth in pretrial supervision began even before the PFA went into effect, with the establishment of the Office of Statewide Pretrial Services (OSPS), a state agency that now provides state-funded pretrial services in many Illinois counties where they had not been available before. But it’s possible that both factors are at work in combination, with front-end pressures on local defenders creating a situation in which there is little practical resistance to the imposition of a newly available (and “free”) pretrial supervision service.
• A New “Backdoor” Into the Jail. As we reported in October, not only has Illinois seen a sharp rise in pretrial supervision cases, in many counties pretrial jail populations are growing as well. Defenders we spoke with suggested one explanation, pointing to a little-noted feature of the PFA: the law’s detailed offense-eligibility restrictions, evidentiary requirements, and heightened standards of proof apply only to initial pretrial detention hearings, not to detentions that may be ordered in response to violations of pretrial release conditions. In counties where jail populations have rebounded since the first year of PFA implementation, it may be because violations of release conditions have accumulated over time, resulting in more and more release revocations and jail sanctions. In parts of the state where there are few if any mental illness or substance use treatment resources, we were told, it's people with these kinds of unaddressed problems who are often the ones missing hearings, being arrested again for drug possession and similar offenses, and ultimately entering the jail through this “backdoor.”

In order to understand how the PFA is being implemented across Illinois, all these factors—a dwindling pool of indigent defenders, severely overstretched in some parts of the state; a challenging new pretrial procedure, featuring more discovery, more formality, and higher-stakes hearings; circumstances that have greatly expanded conditional releases, combined with rules that make it relatively easy to jail those who violate conditions—are important elements of the background. Surfacing these aspects of the PFA story helps us to interpret the data and provide a more comprehensive account of the law’s effects, both intended and unintended.

Winnebago County Gets a New Dashboard

We recently helped Winnebago County, Illinois build and launch an online criminal justice data dashboard, giving planners, policymakers, and the general public a new way to track and visualize trends in reported crimes, arrests, jail bookings, criminal case filings, sentences, and other measures of local justice system performance.

The Center has a long history of working with community leaders in Winnebago County, the home of Rockford, a medium-sized city about 80 miles west of Chicago. When the county’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council (CJCC) was first being formed in 2017, as part of an inter-agency planning pilot sponsored by the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, we provided research and data support to the effort. After that you could say we just never left. Center Codirector Dave Olson still attends quarterly CJCC meetings to make presentations and answer research questions from county justice leaders. And over the years the Center has done all sorts of small and large jobs in Winnebago, including a series of comprehensive “Trends and Issues” reports, two Rockford-wide perceptions of crime surveys, and multi-phase evaluations of the county’s focused deterrence and deferred prosecution interventions.

It’s not just Winnebago. We’ve done comparable work in lots of Illinois counties—like this just-posted preliminary evaluation of a juvenile probation program for high-risk youth in Lake County. This kind of county-specific research provides concrete benefits to justice planning and problem-solving efforts in partner counties, of course. But the Center benefits too. Unlike purely academic research shops, we want and need real-world grounding and connections for our work—not just big datasets to churn through, but problems to tackle, and people to learn from. Winnebago, Lake and other partners have supplied us with plenty of both, and we look forward to more!

Ten Years at the Center for Criminal Justice

For purposes of a recent presentation before the Board of Trustees of Loyola University Chicago, we did some quantification of the activities, reach, and impact of the Center for Criminal Justice during the ten years since our formal establishment in 2015. Ten years is a long time, of course, but we’re a small shop, and even we were surprised at some of the totals we came up with. We’ve worked with more than 175 government partners and organizations in 17 states, for example. And while our home is Chicago, and a lot of our work is focused on Chicago and Cook County, we’ve also worked in 39 counties across Illinois.

Our applied research work—in prosecution, pretrial reform, gun violence, incarceration of women and other areas—has been supported by more than $11 million in external funding, from public and private sources that include the National Institute of Justice, the Microsoft Justice Reform Initiative, Arnold Ventures, and the Joyce, MacArthur and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations.

We’ve established formal research collaborations with 16 colleges and universities across the country, including Stanford, Northwestern, the University of Maryland and the University of Colorado, and worked with individual researchers at many more.

We teach, too. Not only in the classroom—where we’ve established three Loyola classes based on ongoing Center projects—but as part of our externally funded research, with more than a hundred students participating in Center projects as research assistants over the years. After learning justice research methods and skills alongside Center staff, many of them have gone on to jobs as government researchers, policy analysts, and advocates in the criminal justice field—where we sometimes get to collaborate with them in their official capacities.

We also counted lots of other things that have piled up over the years: reports, presentations, interviews, media mentions, and so on. It all adds up to more than we expected.

We hope it’s made some difference. If you’re a regular reader of Front & Center, we’ve brought you along for a lot of it. Thanks for being interested in our work, and we’ll see you next year!