Front and Center #3: Research That Informs and Supports Practice

Research that Informs and Supports Practice

Visit the Center for Criminal Justice website, look up at the top, and you’ll see we do “collaborative interdisciplinary research” to support fairer and more effective approaches to criminal justice. The “collaborative” part means our research is mostly done with and for criminal justice practitioners, planners, leaders, and advocates, who use our work to do their jobs better. Because the Center is based in Chicago, most of our collaborative research projects are conducted with Illinois partners, state and local. Some are high-profile—like our ongoing evaluation of the Illinois Pretrial Fairness Act, which has been widely covered in the media. But most take place well under the radar. They’re not intended to make a splash, and they usually don’t. But they make a practical contribution.

One of the Center’s more intensive and long-running collaborative projects is aimed at improving access to opioid addiction treatment for people coming home from prison. Our work is conducted as part of the Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network (JCOIN), a multi-site research initiative funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. It’s a massive effort nationally—Loyola is just one of many research institutions involved in JCOIN across the country—but the Center’s part of it occurs mostly in Illinois, and with Illinois partners.

Since the work began in 2019, Center Co-Director (and Road Warrior) David Olson has been traveling all over the state meeting with work groups of parole agents, behavioral health treatment providers, public health officials, and other local representatives in Peoria, Rockford, Decatur, East St. Louis and elsewhere. Along with colleagues from Texas Christian University and the Center for Health and Justice at Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities, Olson presents local work groups with custom analyses of data on the characteristics and substance abuse treatment needs of people returning to their communities from the Illinois Department of Corrections, and guides strategic planning discussions aimed at crafting local responses that can meet those needs and improve public health and safety outcomes.

Our JCOIN work will continue through 2025. You can read a brief summary of the work and what’s been learned so far here.

Revisiting Women’s Imprisonment Trends

The Center served as research partner for the Women’s Justice Task Force of Illinois from 2018 to 2021. Our analyses of Illinois data on women’s incarceration contributed to the Task Force’s 2021 final report, Redefining the Narrative, which laid out ways to reduce the number of women in Illinois prisons as well as the harms associated with imprisonment of women. Recently, the Women’s Justice Institute (WJI), the Chicago-based nonprofit that led the Task Force, reached out for help in understanding the trends in women’s imprisonment since the publication of that final report. The Center responded with this brief analysis, which shows that, while the Illinois women’s prison population has bounced back somewhat since the sharp drop associated with the pandemic, the longer-term decline in women’s imprisonment documented in 2021 has largely continued.

Some of that decline is a result of decreased crime overall, and some is due to shorter average prison stays. But a third factor appears to have something to do with a broader change in the way prison is being used: among women convicted of “probationable” felonies—those for which imprisonment is possible but not mandatory under state law—the probability of being sent to prison has diminished over time. It’s intriguing, because it doesn’t seem to reflect any official change in policy or law, so much as a widespread change in how Illinois prosecutors and judges think about which offenses should be punished with prison sentences. We’ve noticed something similar in other Illinois data, and we think it bears more exploration.

Integrating Research and Teaching

An important contributor to the work of updating women’s incarceration trends in Illinois was Jannah Abu-Khalil, a Loyola undergraduate who is working at the Center this year as our Chicago Neighborhoods Fellow. Providing students like Jannah with mentored criminal justice research opportunities is a big part of the Center’s mission. In all of our projects, we try to involve Loyola undergrad and graduate student workers and fellows, tapping not only criminal justice majors in our own department but students in related disciplines like political science, sociology, gender studies, math and statistics, and computer science. In part, it’s a way to amplify the impact of our small research staff. But we also think it’s important to do what we can to recruit and train a new generation to carry on this work.

This term, we’re trying to expand that pool with three newly launched upper-level classes, taught by Center staff and blending traditional classroom instruction with exposure to the Center’s real-world research. One of the new classes focuses on pretrial justice reform, and will introduce students to what we’re learning in our ongoing statewide evaluation of the Illinois Pretrial Fairness Act. Another will provide training in criminal justice data science skills. And a third class on prison reform will connect students with hands-on learning opportunities through service to community-based and nonprofit organizations across Illinois.

That prison class will leverage the Center’s extensive network of relationships with the Illinois advocacy community, developed over years of work in support of the state’s criminal justice reform efforts. Credit for much of that work and those relationships belongs to Center Co-Director Dave Olson, whose decades of service and leadership in helping to improve the state’s criminal justice approaches were recently recognized by the Governor with an appointment as Board Chair of the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority.

Don’t Forget the PFA!

One of the questions we’re addressing in our evaluation of the Illinois Pretrial Fairness Act, the landmark reform that abolishes cash bail and imposes new restrictions on the use of pretrial detention in Illinois, is how the new law is impacting jail populations. The question can only be answered definitively by tracking jail data from each of the state’s 95 local jails, and we’re working on that. But in the meantime, our new Cook County Jail Tracker data tool will give you a look at the way the state’s largest jail has been changing. The tool updates daily based on “scrapes” from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office Jail Population Data reports, and shows trends in both the jail and electronic monitoring populations. Both are down significantly since September 18, 2023, the effective date of the law—but if you want the details, take a look for yourself.

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