Pretrial Reform in Rural Illinois

Illinois is a mostly urban state. It’s also, of course, a mostly rural state—it all depends on what you’re counting.

Our statewide evaluation of the Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA) attempts to capture and document the law’s implementation and impact across Illinois. Of course, the changes the law brings, abolishing cash bail and imposing broad new restrictions on pretrial detention, are being implemented at the county level, and as evaluators we recognize that every individual county is unique. But if we’re going to provide a comprehensive and accurate picture of the way the new law is working throughout Illinois, we have to find efficient ways to combine counties for purposes of analysis. One useful way is to group them broadly into 20 urban counties—mostly clustered into the upper right-hand corner of the map but distributed here and there across Illinois—and 82 rural counties that encompass most of the state’s geographic area. Both are “Illinois.” Both need to be taken into account.

Because so much of criminal justice case volume is generated in Illinois’ urban areas, where close to 90% of the population resides, state-level statistics necessarily describe urban, not rural realities.

For some purposes, statewide “grand totals” are useful. But relying solely on them to assess the impact of the PFA in Illinois means overlooking or distorting what is going in most of the state’s courthouses, jails and communities. That’s why real understanding of the law’s effects requires that we recognize and document county-level variations—and particularly the ways that individual rural counties’ PFA experiences may differ, both from one another and from typical urban experiences.

This research brief, exploring rural/urban differences in PFA implementation and impact so far, summarizes and expands on a presentation by the Center for Criminal Justice at the American Society of Criminology Annual Conference in November 2024. It is based primarily on information from three sources:

• Data provided by the newly launched Office of Statewide Pretrial Services (OSPS), concerning pretrial case-handling, assessment, and outcomes in the 78 counties (6 urban and 72 rural) in which the agency operates. (Note that the urban county data we analyzed did not include Cook County, which is not served by OSPS. We will be issuing a separate report in 2025 describing what we're learning about Cook County's experience with the PFA.)
• Jail population data from jails across the state, as reported to the Jail and Detention Standards Unit of the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC).
• Insights gleaned from 21 confidential interviews conducted with judges, prosecutors, defenders, and other criminal justice stakeholders in a range of rural counties, both before and after the PFA took effect statewide.

State Reforms and Local Realities

The PFA is a state law, but it must be implemented in a criminal justice system that is primarily county-based, county-run, and county-funded.

The basic thrust of the PFA is to require uniformity, formality, and transparency in pretrial detention decision-making, an area of law in which local practice has traditionally been informal, standards loose, and judicial discretion very broad. To some degree the new law seems to have succeeded in bringing county practice into alignment. But county-to-county differences remain—in PFA implementation and interpretation, in day-to-day practices, and in detention outcomes. Some of the starkest of these differences distinguish Illinois’ rural areas from urban parts of the state.

Rural Offenses and Defendant Characteristics

The PFA prohibits pretrial detention except when defendants have been charged with specified “detainable” offenses, judged to be serious enough to justify consideration of detention upon a sufficient showing of danger to the public.

Although the list of potentially detainable offenses is the same for all counties, both the volume and the mix of detainable offenses dealt with in rural counties tends to be markedly different from those in urban counties:

• Volume. In absolute terms, rural counties see far fewer cases in which detention is possible under the PFA. 70% of the rural counties we examined had fewer than 2 detention-eligible cases per week.
• Offense mix/severity. A larger proportion of detainable cases in rural counties involve domestic violence offenses, especially misdemeanor domestic violence—a Class A misdemeanor, and the lowest legal offense classification eligible for detention under the PFA (which for the most part restricts detention-eligibility to cases involving high-level felony offenses). A smaller share of detainable cases in rural counties involve murder and Class X felonies—the highest level of offense seriousness.

Volume and offense differences like these can be expected to lead to differences in the ways the PFA impacts rural areas. The same is true of county-to-county differences in the characteristics and needs of detention-eligible populations. Rural defendants charged with detainable offenses have a profile that is markedly different from urban defendants. They are considerably more likely to be white, for example. More of them are older. And far more of them have histories of substance abuse.

Rural Petitioning and Detention Patterns

During the first 15 months of PFA implementation, clear practice differences have also emerged between rural and urban counties, both in the frequency with which prosecutors in rural counties seek detention and in the outcomes of detention petitions.

One of the unique features of the PFA is its requirement that prosecutors file a formal detention petition in any case in which the state seeks to detain a defendant pretrial. This is a departure from traditional practice, in that prosecutors are given the sole responsibility for determining whether detention will be considered in detention-eligible cases. While judges retain the ultimate decision to detain or release, they do so only after a petition has been filed. No detention is possible if the prosecutor decides not to seek it.

There are wide variations from one county to another in prosecutors’ exercise of of this new discretionary petitioning responsibility. Collectively, however, prosecutors in rural counties are less likely than their urban counterparts to file petitions for detention in cases involved detainable offenses, and because of this, there is an overall lower likelihood of detention.

How have these practice patterns impacted local jail populations? While there are variations from county to county, pretrial populations have declined in most county jails, rural and urban, since the PFA went into effect. But pretrial jail populations in rural areas have collectively declined much more steeply.

Making Sense of Urban-Rural Differences

Our ongoing interviews with justice stakeholders in rural counties help to illuminate and explain these observed differences in the PFA experiences of urban and rural counties. A consistent theme of these interviews has been that rural counties confront a different set of problems than urban ones.

They also operate under conditions and constraints that their urban counterparts don’t share.

One broad and obvious difference relates to levels of criminal justice funding, staffing, and resources. Many stakeholders we interviewed pointed to what they saw as a mismatch between the PFA’s formal requirements and the actual county criminal justice infrastructure they have to work with. “We only have so much staff, we only have so many resources,” said one. “I've been telling everybody this since day one,” added another, “we operate with a shoestring budget.”

Some rural counties make do with a single Public Defender, for example, or even a contracted part-time one; sometimes the same individual covers multiple counties spanning hundreds of miles, and handles trials, motions, and all other aspects of defense representation in addition to pretrial detention matters. Likewise, some rural State’s Attorney’s offices are one- or two-person shops. Circuit Courts in many rural counties hear criminal matters only on certain days of the week.

In counties like these, consistently meeting PFA-mandated requirements for pretrial detention—holding timely, on-the-record hearings, with defendants in court and represented by counsel, in cases that arise infrequently, and without warning—is far more challenging and burdensome than in larger counties.

“We’re Not Having Weekend Court”

One vivid illustration of the practical constraints faced by rural counties in implementing the PFA concerns “weekend court.” The PFA requires that a first-appearance hearing for a defendant in custody be held within 48 hours, and also that the defendant be present in person and represented by counsel at any hearing in which nonmandatory conditions of release are set. Accordingly, if an arrest occurs late in the week and the prosecutor does not wish to see the defendant released with standard conditions, the PFA would appear to require formal court proceedings on Saturday or Sunday.

Larger counties, with larger budgets and larger case volumes, have been able to adapt to this requirement; many already had regular arrangements for weekend hearings. But for rural counties, according to the stakeholders we interviewed, meeting the PFA’s 48-hour deadline by convening court on weekends is not a practical option. “There's no weekend court,” one judge told us. “Due to, I would say, the union labor contracts for the clerk's offices [and] court reporters….The judges [in our circuit] have taken [the 48-hour requirement to mean] if they get arrested Friday, they're going to wait till Monday, because we're not having weekend court.”

Raising the Costs of Detention

A useful way to look at the PFA’s new procedural requirements is in “cost-benefit” terms. By imposing new procedural burdens, discovery requirements, and deadlines on pretrial detention decision-making, the PFA has effectively raised the “costs” of detention statewide. And many rural counties are simply less able to bear these costs without strain.

This may begin to explain some of the urban-rural pretrial practice differences noted above. A lower detention petitioning rate in a rural county, for example, may in part reflect the State’s Attorney’s awareness of the difficulty and expense of satisfying PFA requirements for pretrial detention on an ad hoc basis. Given that misdemeanors and lower-level felonies form a larger proportion of detention-eligible cases in rural counties, the perceived public safety benefits of pretrial detention for those counties may more often be outweighed by these perceived costs.

We see this reflected in rural counties’ handling of what is by far the most common form of detainable offense: misdemeanor domestic violence. While there is considerable variation from one county to another, overall these cases are only half as likely to be subject to detention petitions in rural counties as in urban counties—perhaps reflecting rural prosecutors’ greater reluctance to incur the procedural expense of pursuing detention.

“We Know All of Them”

But there may be other factors than cost considerations influencing detention decision-making in rural counties. Many of those we interviewed emphasized another distinctive feature of criminal justice in rural areas: stakeholders’ deep familiarity with the population of defendants in their communities. “We deal with the same people over and over every day,” one Sheriff explained. “They don't disappear, they're not lost in the masses. They're here. And we know them and they know us…We got [less than 10,000] people in our community and I deal with about 100 of them give or take, outside of a few traffic tickets.”

It is possible that this shared familiarity with defendants, their histories, their families, and their circumstances plays some role in rural detention decisions, solidifying a consensus among stakeholders regarding who does and does not need to be detained.

One frequently heard critique of the PFA in rural counties is related to the value placed by stakeholders on this deep knowledge of defendants and their histories. According to this view, by strictly tying detention-eligibility to charge seriousness, the PFA hampers rural courts’ ability to use their intimate local knowledge to make detention decisions consistent with community safety. “Give the judges the discretion,” one rural sheriff said, “especially in a place like this, they know these defendants, they know their families. Give them the discretion to say, we're going to hold you, you're going to stay in pretrial detention. It is not a judge who has seen hundreds of people a day who lives in the suburb and drives into court and doesn't know these people. We know them, we know all of them. Give the judge authority to detain someone who he knows, he won't say it, but he knows their criminal history, he knows their lifestyle, don't take that discretion away.”

“They’re Begging for Help”

The argument for broader discretion in the use of detention was made primarily in connection with defendants charged with drug-related offenses, which are not generally detention-eligible under the PFA. Rural interviewees were almost unanimous in citing drugs, and particularly methamphetamine, as the major driver of crime in their counties. As one judge put it, “I would say it's almost all related to meth in some form or fashion down here. Even if it's a burglary, they were usually high on methamphetamine and they broke in somewhere. If it's a domestic battery, they were drunk or high on methamphetamine and they beat up their wife.”

Indeed, of those individuals charged with non-detainable offenses interviewed by OSPS after their booking into rural jails, 49% were identified as having a substance abuse history, compared to 30% of those in the urban counties studied.

The scourge of substance abuse in rural areas, the outsized role it plays in generating violence, property crime, and public disorder as well as drug offenses, and the severe shortage of local treatment options were acknowledged by everyone we interviewed. And dealing with this set of problems, we were told, has been made even harder by pretrial reform. Before the PFA, in strapped counties with rampant drug- and alcohol-related crime and few or no in-patient treatment alternatives available, periods of detention in the jail served as a temporary stopgap, and local stakeholders did not hesitate to resort to it when needed. The use of jail as a substitute or conduit to treatment was defended on both humanitarian and public safety grounds. “They're begging for help,” one stakeholder told us, of rural defendants with substance issues.

“If someone gets arrested on possession of methamphetamine and they are high on methamphetamine,” a rural sheriff pointed out, “if we let them out that night, they're going to stay high on methamphetamine. If they stayed in jail for 10 days, unable to post bond, maybe we can get them into rehab, maybe we can get them help, maybe we can get them talking with someone… In that moment, they don't want help, they don't want to rehab, they want more meth. That is our biggest problem here.”

Even some defenders saw this as a downside of the PFA. One agreed that the typical attitude of pretrial clients was, “‘I need out today so I can get high.’ And [under the new law] they're going to get out today and they're going to go get high. And they don't care anything that I say about treatment or getting them into care.”

The fact that pretrial detention before the PFA was often used in rural areas to respond to drug-related offending, in the absence of better treatment options, may account for the rural-urban difference in post-PFA jail usage trends. As noted above, since the PFA went into effect, overall jail populations have declined statewide, as might have been expected given the new detention-eligibility restrictions that came with the new law. But in Cook and other urban counties, the drop was more modest (14%) than in rural counties (25%), which may reflect the fact that the new law prohibited a drug-related use of detention that was more common in rural than in urban counties.

More to Come

This discussion does not exhaust the rural-urban differences that may be significant for an understanding of the different ways the PFA is playing out in counties across Illinois. We have not, for example, attempted to link PFA implementation or outcomes to rural cultural or ideological factors, law enforcement attitudes, or views regarding crime and punishment, all of which must matter in a county-run system led by popularly elected officials. We have touched only briefly on what may be a crucial rural difference: the difficult position of isolated rural defenders, who are relied upon both to participate in a chronically strapped rural justice system and—where necessary—to challenge its shortcomings. Future research briefs will explore these and other issues, report updated quantitative findings, and continue to share what we’re learning from stakeholder interviews and focus groups.