Our Fifteen Minutes of Fame

The Center for Criminal Justice was in the news a bit more than usual this summer.

Following the White House’s August 25 issuance of an executive order announcing steps to bring an end to “cashless bail,” the nation’s media abruptly turned their attention to the Center’s ongoing statewide evaluation of the Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA), which abolished cash bail in Illinois. And for a few days there, reporters came calling from all over.

The executive order did not specifically mention the PFA, which has been operating in Illinois for just over two years, but it ordered a review and possible termination of federal funding for states that have “eliminated cash bail as a potential condition of pretrial release from custody for crimes that pose a clear threat to public safety.” It was accompanied by a White House press release denouncing the “failed experiment” of bail reform, and asserting that it has triggered “a government-backed crime spree” and “turned the streets of America’s cities into hunting grounds for repeat criminals who mock our justice system by committing crime after crime without consequence.”

We were asked for comment.

Altogether, by our count, our interim reports and findings on the PFA’s implementation and impact were cited in 18 different media outlets around the country, and Center Codirectors Dave Olson and Don Stemen were interviewed by CNN, USA Today and a number of state and local broadcast and print outlets.

Mostly, they tried to inject objectivity and calm.

After all, one of the broad findings emerging from our study of the first year of PFA implementation is that the law seems to have resulted in less change in Illinois than either its proponents hoped or its opponents feared. As Olson told CNN, “We got rid of money, the jail population went down a little bit, the (pre-trial) hearings got a little bit more complicated and take more time. It doesn’t seem like crime has gone up.” Prosecutors have chafed at the law’s procedural requirements and offense restrictions, but as Olson pointed out to ABC News Chicago, "I think many of them do recognize the value of being able to detain someone who poses a danger and know that they can't post money (and be released)."

Probably we didn’t settle any arguments. But we’ll keep doing our best to share what we’re learning from our independent PFA evaluation, posting reports and making presentations, answering questions as they arise, and supporting the efforts of Illinois officials, prosecutors, defenders, judges, and others involved in trying to improve the effectiveness of the criminal justice system.

What Impact Has the PFA Had on Jail Populations? (Depends Where You Look)

One of the big takeaways from Loyola’s report on The First Year of the Pretrial Fairness Act, issued a year ago, was that pretrial jail populations had fallen substantially under the new law. Not everywhere, but almost everywhere. It made sense. It was what most people—both opponents and backers of the new law—had predicted.

But is it still true?

A new analysis of pretrial jail populations incorporating another year of data reveals a more complicated picture. While pretrial jail population numbers were generally still down in Illinois as a whole as of July 2025, they had rebounded considerably. And in Cook, Lake, Kane, and a few other large counties, pretrial jail populations are now actually higher than they were before the PFA.

Accounting for the Jail Population Rebound

Explanations for these changes have to begin at the individual county level. Every county’s different. In Cook County, for example, recent jail population increases are probably tied both to changes in local detention petitioning policy following a change in leadership in the State’s Attorney’s Office, and to the phasing out of the Cook County Sheriff Department’s electronic monitoring program. (We’ve just posted a report analyzing recent jail population trends in Cook County alone.)

But many practitioners we’ve spoken with around the state have offered a broader explanation for jail population increases in the PFA’s second year. The increases, they say, reflect responses by State’s Attorneys and judges to violations of pretrial release conditions. While the PFA sets a high bar for initial detentions, it’s much easier to detain someone who, having been released, fails to comply with the conditions of that release. The court, on its own motion or a motion by the State’s Attorney, can hold a hearing and sanction a defendant’s failure to attend required hearings with up to 30 days in jail, for example. A similar process—a motion by the court or the State’s Attorney—can also result in a revocation of the defendant’s pretrial release altogether, upon a sufficient showing that “no condition or combination of conditions of release would reasonably ensure the appearance of the defendant for later hearings or prevent the defendant from being charged with a subsequent felony or Class A misdemeanor.”

It makes sense that violations of release conditions would tend to pile up over time. What we may be seeing in the second year of PFA implementation is the cumulative impact of these violations, and courts’ responses to them, on pretrial jail population numbers. We are currently investigating the issue, and will have more to say in our second-year PFA report at the end of 2025.

An Expansion of Pretrial Control

One additional point is important to remember: while pretrial jail populations are still down in Illinois as a whole after two years of PFA implementation, the overall number of people subject to some form of pretrial custody/control is way up. That’s because jail population declines have been more than offset by increases in pretrial supervision populations, especially in rural counties. The Office of Statewide Pretrial Services (OSPS), created by the Illinois Supreme Court in 2021 and made a free-standing state agency in 2023, is the big factor here. Most Illinois counties had no pretrial services at all before OSPS came on the scene. Now OSPS provides state-funded supervision and other pretrial services in 82 of the state’s counties, and all 102 counties now have a full complement of pretrial services available.

As a result, from the time the PFA went into effect to July 2025, Illinois’ total population under pretrial correctional control (either pretrial supervision or jail custody) rose by 17%, or about 6,500 people.

New Dashboard Provides Easy Access to Illinois Prison Population Data

Loyola’s Center for Criminal Justice has just unveiled a new online Illinois Prison Dashboard intended to give planners, policymakers, and the public an easy way to access and understand data on recent trends in prison populations, prison admissions, lengths of stay and releases, and post-prison supervision (i.e., Mandatory Supervised Release, or MSR) in the community. In combination with the Illinois Sentencing Dashboard, launched last year and recently updated with 2024 county-level sentencing data, we’ve given people powerful new tools for exploring and visualizing how responses to crime are changing in Illinois.

The new prison dashboard is based on Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) data that had been publicly available but hard to find, assemble, and analyze. The dashboard enables users to explore how prison populations, admissions, and releases have changed over time, and to break down results by the demographic characteristics of the people incarcerated, by offense types and offense levels, and by sentencing or supervision region. It plainly shows some striking trends, like the steep decline in prison admissions and prison populations since 2018—consistent across all regions of the state and for all demographics. Average lengths of stay in prison are also declining, as are the numbers under post-prison supervision in the community. You can trace all these changes for yourself.

Switch over to the Illinois Sentencing Dashboard and you can get a sense of what’s behind these trends. The Sentencing Dashboard is the only public source in Illinois showing felony sentencing trends and patterns across individual counties, among judicial circuits, and between urban and rural communities in Illinois. It relies on probation intake data reported by probation departments to the state’s Administrative Office of the Courts, combined with prison admissions and other data from IDOC.

The recently added 2024 data show that the overall proportion of prison to probation sentences has continued to decline in Illinois. It’s not a new development—we’ve reported on it before. But in 2024, roughly 32% of those sentenced for a Class 1-4 felony were sentenced to prison, down from around 50% during the period from 2005 through 2009. Conversely, the proportion of those convicted of Class 1-4 felonies getting probation has increased from around 50% in the 2005-2009 period to almost 70% in 2024. This shift in sentencing practices translates to roughly 30,000 fewer prison sentences over the past 15 years. Center co-director Dave Olson recently presented the dashboard and findings from our research at a conference of Chief Circuit Court Judges, court administrators, and probation directors from the judicial circuits in northern Illinois. Dave noted that between 2005 and 2025 the number of people sentenced to prison in Illinois for drug and property crimes fell by 79%. As a result, while drug and property crimes accounted for 76% of all sentences to prison in 2005, in 2025 they accounted for less than 40% of all prison sentences.