Front & Center #9: Truth in Sentencing and Illinois Prisons

Truth in Sentencing and Illinois Prisons

The 1994 Crime Bill was probably the most far-reaching and consequential piece of federal crime legislation ever. Among other things, the law provided a massive infusion of federal funding for state prison construction and expansion, and set aside much of it for states that enacted “Truth in Sentencing” (TIS) laws—under which people convicted of certain serious offenses were required to serve all or most of their court-imposed sentences, with no offset or credit for good behavior or rehabilitative efforts in prison. The long prison terms that resulted from the widespread adoption of TIS turned out to be a big factor in the unprecedented growth in incarceration that took place across the country in the following decades, long after the wave of crime that prompted the Crime Bill had receded.

Illinois was one of many states to respond to the Crime Bill’s funding incentives, enacting and repeatedly expanding TIS legislation in the 1990s and early 2000s, and receiving a total of $124 million in federal prison construction grants as a result. A new Loyola CCJ report, analyzing Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) data through 2024, shows how profoundly a quarter of a century of TIS has reshaped the population of Illinois prisons:

• Longer prison stays. One theory about TIS was that it wouldn’t matter much: courts would end up taking the TIS structure into account when calculating sentences, and consciously or unconsciously “deduct” accordingly. That hasn’t happened. Reductions in court-imposed sentences for offenses subject to TIS have been minimal, and so actual prison stays in TIS cases have dramatically increased.
• A changing population mix. The number of those serving sentences not subject to TIS has been falling for decades in Illinois—reflecting both an overall decline in crime and a broader move away from use of prison for less serious offenses. Meanwhile, people serving TIS sentences have been piling up—mostly because it takes so much longer for them to be released. As a result, the TIS share of the Illinois prison population, just 16% in 2006, jumped to more than half by the end of 2024.
• More “virtual” lifers. Only 4% of the TIS-sentenced individuals in Illinois prisons (528 people) are serving “natural life” sentences, without possibility of release. But another 32% (4,224 people) will be held under TIS beyond the average age of death due to natural causes in prison (age 64). They can expect to die in prison, in other words, and are serving what amounts to “virtual life” sentences.
• Higher costs. The greatly lengthened prison stays under TIS clearly come at a cost, although calculating it is no simple matter. One thing we can say with precision is that, for those currently in Illinois prisons, TIS sentences will eventually result in a total of 111,487 additional years served. If we simply multiply this by the IDOC’s own estimates of the cost of incarcerating one person for one year, we come up with a taxpayer price tag of somewhere between $2.5 and$5.4 billion.

One interesting side note about this study is how it originated: from questions raised by students at the IDOC’s Danville Correctional Center, where Center Codirector Dave Olson was presenting to a policy class for people in custody, offered by the Education Justice Project at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The data analysis that answered those questions was in turn carried out with the help of Loyola undergraduate students enrolled in an independent study with Dr. Olson, who are credited as co-authors on the report. And the research itself took Olson back thirty years to his days as a staffer to the Illinois Truth-in-Sentencing Commission. The Commission, chaired by then-Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan and Cook County State’s Attorney Jack O’Malley, issued the recommendations upon which the state’s original TIS laws were based—and Olson was “in the room where it happened.”

Drug Use and Criminal Justice in Southern Illinois

In our last newsletter, we highlighted an interim report from our ongoing statewide evaluation of Illinois’ Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA), relating to the distinctive experience of rural counties during the PFA’s first year. As we explained there, pretrial reform looks different in rural areas because they have different crime challenges, different staffing and resource levels, and different kinds of leadership.

They also have critically different drug problems. CCJ Codirector Dave Olson dug into those differences earlier this month in two presentations to the Southern Illinois Drug Awareness Conference in Carbondale, before a large professional audience of criminal justice practitioners, social workers, educators, prevention specialists and treatment providers. Among the more striking contrasts he highlighted:

• Higher drug arrest rates. Non-cannabis drug arrest rates in Southern Illinois in 2022 were almost four times those in the rest of Illinois.
• More extensive drug abuse histories. Pretrial interviews conducted in Southern Illinois found that 43% of all defendants had a history of “persistent and chronic use of any illegal substance,” compared with 31% in the rest of the state.
• Higher proportion of drug-related prison admissions. 32% of 2024 prison admissions from Southern Illinois were for drug-law violations, compared with just 16% from the rest of Illinois.
• Much more meth. About 80% of prison sentences for drug-law violations in Southern Illinois were for methamphetamine offenses, compared with less than 30% in the rest of Illinois. And among those admitted to prison for any offense from Southern Illinois, a majority had used meth in the month before admission—compared to less than 20% of those admitted from the rest of the state.

For more details, you can access the presentations here and here.

CCJ Advises Illinois Emerging Adults Task Force

What do you make of this factoid?

• Total arrests in Illinois of emerging adults (18-24) fell 67% since 2010, compared to a 33% drop for older adults.

It’s the title of a chart in a report we posted last summer, on arrest and incarceration trends involving young adults in Illinois, and it’s both puzzling and potentially important. Members of this group are different from older adults, and the data clearly reflect it. But how should the criminal justice system respond to these differences?

In Illinois, CCJ will have a chance to help shape a research-informed answer to that question. CCJ Research Scientist Amanda Ward has been appointed to an Emerging Adults Task Force recently established by the Illinois Judicial Conference, which will “explore innovative and effective ways for improving how justice involved young adults are handled and ways to achieve more effective outcomes.” Ward has already begun briefing her colleagues on the research with respect to emerging adults at various points in the state’s justice system, and will help them develop recommendations later this year.

Lots More New Work

With new funding coming in from Arnold Ventures, the Joyce Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, CCJ is launching five new research projects in the coming months:

• Courtroom implementation of pretrial reform in New York and Illinois. Working with the Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, we’ll be using structured observation tools to compare how ambitious pretrial reforms play out in courtrooms across these two states.
• Restorative diversion of gun cases. We’ll also be evaluating a restorative deferred prosecution program for young adults in Cook County, 80% of whose participants to date have been charged with felony-level firearm possession offenses.
• A racial equity decision-making tool for prosecutors. In Colorado, we’ll be testing the impact of a racial equity tool designed to help prosecutors make decisions that mitigate racial disparities in the justice system.
• Factors impacting time to disposition. Using case-processing data from 128 counties, we’ll isolate factors that impact how quickly cases are resolved.
• Policy impacts on pretrial outcomes in three states. Looking at three states that have introduced differing restrictions on the use of monetary bail and pretrial detention—Illinois, Wisconsin, and Colorado—we’ll use an interrupted time series (ITS) design to study the impact each policy had on a range of outcomes.