Report

Returns to Prison for Technical MSR Violations in Illinois: An Updated Look

    By
  • Name
    Dave Olson ·
  • Name
    Lucy Einstein ·
  • Name
    Ashlyn Sundell ·
  • Name
    Patrick Griffin ·
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In Illinois as in most other states, anyone given a prison sentence for a felony offense is also subject to a period of mandatory supervision in the community following release. This post-release supervision period is known as “parole” in most places, but as “Mandatory Supervised Release” or MSR in Illinois. The length of the MSR period in Illinois is determined primarily by the felony class of the offense that led to the original prison sentence. Throughout the MSR period, compliance with a set of strict rules and conditions is required, with noncompliance potentially resulting in swift return to prison as a “technical violator.” Technical MSR violators make up a significant component of annual prison admissions in Illinois, generally accounting for between 20% and 30% of total admissions.

Loyola University Chicago has conducted two previous studies exploring the role of technical MSR violations as a driver of Illinois prison admissions and prison populations. In 2010, the Illinois Sentencing Policy Advisory Council (SPAC) asked researchers at Loyola to work with the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) to analyze returns to prison for technical violations, to better understand the reasons for these admissions and the degree to which they influenced the size and characteristics of the state’s prison admissions and population. The resulting report, published by SPAC in 2013, provided a detailed account of the history and evolution of technical violation admissions to prison in Illinois from state fiscal years (SFY) 1990 to 2011.

In 2023 Loyola revisited the Illinois technical violations data, examining the extent to which the characteristics and volume of individuals returned to prison for technical violations had changed in the decade following the previous study. The 2023 analysis covered the period from 2011 through 2021—including the beginning of the COVID pandemic.

The current report provides an updated look at prison returns for technical violations through the end of SFY 2024 (June 30, 2024). It includes analysis of recent trends in:

  • The overall volume of technical violation admissions to IDOC;
  • The relative importance of technical violations as a component of total prison admissions and the total prison population; and
  • The kinds of technical violations that result in returns to prison in Illinois.

What is a Technical Violation?

Technical violation admissions to IDOC include all admissions that result solely from violations of MSR conditions and NOT from new convictions and judicially imposed sentences. Because one of the standard MSR conditions is to “not violate any criminal statute of any jurisdiction,”

people arrested for new crimes while on MSR can be returned to prison as technical violators by the state’s Prisoner Review Board without any new conviction or sentence.
But technical violators also include people who break rules applicable solely to those on MSR. Noncriminal MSR violations may include lacking or losing an IDOC-approved housing site; failure to abide by electronic monitoring (EM) or global-positioning-system (GPS) monitoring restrictions; sustained failure to report as required to the assigned parole agent (referred to as being absent without leave or “AWOL”); and noncompliance with treatment requirements or other special MSR conditions imposed in individual cases.

The trend-line of annual admissions to Illinois prisons for MSR violations over the past three decades shows three distinct phases. After a very sharp (roughly fifteen-fold) increase from the mid-1990s through 2001, technical violation admissions fluctuated at high levels for a decade, until 2010. (These fluctuations could be due to a number of factors, including changes in IDOC policy governing responses to violations, changes in parole agent staffing levels, changes in the nature of MSR conditions imposed by the Prisoner Review Board, and changes in Illinois law dictating how violations involving new arrest charges must be handled.) Since then, IDOC admissions for technical violations have declined markedly, particularly during the COVID outbreak, when they fell 38% in just two years. While annual technical violations admissions have stabilized post-COVID, overall they are down 62% from their 2010 peak.



Technical Violators as a Percentage of IDOC Population and Admissions

While technical violation admissions to prison have fallen dramatically in recent years, so have court-sentenced admissions to prison. As a result, the proportion of all prison admissions represented by technical violators has not changed that much. And because the state’s total prison population has also declined significantly, the share of the prison population represented by technical violators has changed even less. In any case it should be noted that, since technical MSR violators don’t tend to stay as long in prison as those serving original sentences, their share of the prison population at any one time tends to be much smaller than their share of annual admissions.



Reasons for Technical Violation Returns

Recent years have seen a shift in the kinds of MSR violations that lead to returns to prison in Illinois. Broadly speaking, the share of technical violation returns resulting from new crimes has grown, while the share taken up by noncriminal rule violations has shrunk.

In 2024, 72% of those returned to prison as technical violators had been arrested for new offenses. Of these arrests, about half involved violence (including domestic violence) or gun charges. Noncriminal violations of MSR rules accounted for only 28% of technical violation returns.



By contrast, in 2011, a majority of technical violation returns were due to noncompliance with MSR rules rather than new criminal activity. The most common MSR rule violation resulting in “return” to prison in 2011 was not having an approved host site to be released to in the first place. People in this position, who are known as “gate violators,” are classified and held in IDOC as technical MSR violators and counted in the annual technical violation admissions, even though they never left prison at the conclusion of their sentence. In 2011, a quarter of all technical violation returns were accounted for by people on gate violator status. In 2024, gate violators made up less than 12% of prison returns.



How Will Shortened MSR Periods Impact Prison Returns?

In 2021, as part of the sweeping criminal justice reform bill known as the SAFE-T Act,

Illinois amended the criminal sentencing statute that sets MSR terms for various offense categories,
reducing the period of required MSR supervision for many of them. For most Class X felonies, for example, the MSR period was reduced from 3 years to 18 months, and the required period of post-release supervision for most Class 1 and 2 felonies fell from 2 years to 1 year. These reductions, which went into effect on July 1, 2021, have great practical consequences, both for those reestablishing their lives after prison and for the communities they are rejoining.

The reductions in standard MSR terms will also have consequences for Illinois prisons, and will undoubtedly be reflected in the volume of admissions due to technical MSR violations. It’s too early to quantify the impact of the changes,

but shorter MSR periods mean less time at risk of being returned to prison for noncompliance; less time at risk will presumably translate into fewer technical violations overall. We will explore these effects when admissions data beyond SFY 2024 become available, and a future report will seek to quantify them and discuss their consequences.