Front & Center #2: Observations on the PFA's First Month

Observations on the PFA’s First Month

We’re now a little more than a month into the post-bail era in Illinois. The Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA) went into effect across the state on Monday, September 18th--completely overhauling Illinois pretrial detention and release practice, abolishing the use of cash bail as a condition of pretrial release, imposing strict new limits on the use of pretrial jail detention for people accused of crimes, and setting up an array of new hearings, procedures, and decision standards for courts. As evaluators of the PFA’s statewide implementation and impact, we’ve been monitoring the roll-out to get a sense of early challenges to implementation, primarily observing pretrial hearings in as many places as we can get to in these early weeks, but also analyzing data as it becomes available.

So how does it look so far?

Obviously, we can’t say anything definitive at this point, based on 150-plus hearing observations—mostly in Cook County, but also in Lake, Winnebago, Kane, and McLean Counties—supplemented by what early data are emerging with regard to hearing outcomes, jail populations, and the like. But we’re intrigued by what we’ve seen, and for what it’s worth, we’ve posted a detailed summary here. The main takeaways so far include:

• More clarity. By taking money out of the mix, the PFA seems to be focusing all parties directly on the central issues: whether to detain and/or what conditions to impose on release. At the end of every hearing, there is no doubt about what has been decided.
• Longer, more substantive hearings. Especially when detention is a possibility, early PFA hearings have been longer: across three days of observations in Cook County, for example, detention hearings took an average of more than 22 minutes.
• Focus on public safety. In hearings we observed, detention was usually sought on public safety grounds—the “real and present threat” the defendant posed to individuals or the community—rather than the risk of flight from prosecution.
• Detention outcomes. At least in the early going, judges seemed highly disposed to grant detention petitions brought under the PFA.
• Jail impact. It’s too soon to tell what impact the PFA will have on the number of people jailed pretrial, but the early returns suggest that the new law is reducing jail detention, in some cases substantially. We’re in the process of constructing a public data dashboard that will answer this question more definitively, tracking pretrial jail bookings and pretrial detention stays in each of Illinois’ 92 county jails, and allowing users to trace changes over time.

Illinois is the first state to abolish cash bail, and we know the rest of the country is watching to see how the experiment goes. That’s why we’ll be reporting frequently on what we’re seeing, hearing, and learning in our evaluation. We’ll let you know in future newsletters when we post new findings or tools—like the jail population tracker we’re working on now. But you can access all our PFA-related reports, news, and interactives anytime on the PFA Evaluation project page.

Are Guns the New Drugs?

One thing you can't help noticing when you sit through a lot of first appearance and detention hearings, at least in Cook County, is how many of the cases are solely or primarily about gun possession. If you leave out those in the special courtroom reserved for domestic violence matters, almost 40% of the hearings we observed in Cook County during the PFA’s first month involved defendants charged with gun possession offenses. They have various names and degrees—“UUW” (unlawful use of a weapon, which despite its name primarily covers gun possession alone as well as instances where a gun was discharged, but not at a person), Aggravated UUW, UUW by a Felon, and so on—but there’s no mistaking the fact that crimes of this nature, in which the core component is illegally possessing a gun, are extraordinarily common. Based on data from the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Felony Data Dashboard through October 31, 2023, one-third of all felony cases disposed of in Cook County involved UUW charges.

These charges are also subject to very severe criminal penalties, which have been considerably enhanced over the last several decades. Illinois law in this area is a kind of maze, and it’s not easy to summarize all the ways in which gun possession may escalate, as a result of “aggravating factors,” into the most serious felony classes. But one common scenario that qualifies as “Agg UUW,” for example, is having a loaded handgun and no Concealed Carry License (CCL). Any gun possession on the part of someone with a felony record is punishable as a Class 3 felony, and it becomes a Class 2 if the defendant has specified priors, such as a forcible felony conviction. Anyone convicted as a “felon in possession of a firearm” is subject to a mandatory prison sentence. Someone with two previous felony convictions of various kinds—including Aggravated UUW or UUW by a Felon—is an “Armed Habitual Criminal,” which is a Class X felony, and carries a mandatory prison sentence of at least 6 years.

Obviously, laws like these were enacted in response to the epidemic of gun violence in places like Chicago. They are intended to address one of the most serious problems we face as a society. While unlawful possession of a gun may not be a “violent” offense in the ordinary sense of the term, in some instances it can be connected with violence, and thus is often targeted as a means of preventing violence. This may be so even though research has challenged the common assumption that people carrying firearms illegally do so for criminal purposes, rather than for self-protection.

But how effective is this focus on gun possession in reducing gun violence? Dr. David Olson, Center for Criminal Justice Co-Director, who leads our research on firearms policy, explored this issue in a presentation to the 2023 National Research Conference for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms, which met recently in Chicago. The work he presented focused narrowly on the impacts of firearms policy on gun violence in Chicago and Cook County, and the preliminary findings boil down to this: while a combination of enhanced penalties and stepped-up enforcement for unlawful possession has dramatically increased incarceration of gun-carriers—putting more people in jail and prison and dramatically boosting the odds of a prison sentence for low-level possession offenses—that increased incarceration appears to have had little or no impact on violent crime committed with a gun.

If these findings hold true more broadly, could we be repeating a pattern from the so-called “War on Drugs” in the late 1980s and early 1990s? There too, in the face of a frightening social problem, the primary policy response targeted possession, with a relentless strategy of aggressive enforcement and escalating penalties. That strategy is now widely acknowledged to have been (1) ineffective in solving the primary problems of drug abuse and drug-fueled violence and (2) damaging in lots of other ways. It remains to be seen whether the same will one day be said of our current laws targeting gun possession.

In a “City of Mourning,” a Different Approach to Preventing Violence

Winnebago County, which includes the Rockford, Illinois, is one of many places that has been touched by America’s gun violence epidemic. As a matter of fact, in recent years Rockford has been among the most dangerous small cities in the country, with a violent crime rate in 2020 that exceeded Chicago’s. “We’ve become a city of mourning,” one community representative announced in a meeting we attended there last summer.

The Center for Criminal Justice has been working in Winnebago County since 2016, providing regular research support to the county’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council (CJCC), and otherwise doing what we can to help courts, justice practitioners, and community leaders understand and respond to local crime challenges. Some of our recent work in Winnebago County concerns an innovative, evidence-based violence reduction strategy called “focused deterrence.” Focused deterrence involves identifying those most at risk of becoming the victim or perpetrator of gun violence and communicating with them very directly, at in-person call-in meetings, with a firm and consistent message that comes from both the justice system and the community, combining a credible threat of traditional law enforcement sanctions with an offer of practical and potentially life-saving help. The helping part is what’s new in this approach, and it includes connections and access to education, employment, treatment, and social and other services that can provide a pathway out of the criminal lifestyle.

We just posted a brief report on our ongoing evaluation of the Rockford/Winnebago County Focused Deterrence Program, summarizing our first-year findings. Among other things, it appears that the program is succeeding at the basic job of identifying and engaging the kind of high-risk individuals that can benefit most from the intervention. Participants during the first year were overwhelmingly young Black men with gun crime convictions, the most common being unlawful possession. And by and large, they were receptive to the offer of help: three-quarters completed an intake and began working with the program’s community navigator—a very high uptake for a voluntary program. Finally, though it’s still early for many of the participants, 80% had not been arrested for any new crimes.

Results like these are encouraging, but there’s still plenty of work to do. Next steps in our evaluation include one-on-one interviews with participants to understand how they experience the program; focus groups with community representatives; and development of a matched comparison group for a three-year recidivism analysis.

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