Front & Center #7: The PFA at One Year

Happy (Belated) Birthday, PFA!

The Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA) turned one last week: the landmark Illinois measure that abolished cash bail and introduced broad restrictions on the use of pretrial detention went into effect on September 18, 2023, and has now been in operation statewide for a full year. As evaluators of the new law, the Center has been all over the media in recent weeks, sharing what we’ve been learning through hearing observations, interviews, and analyses of a year’s worth of administrative data from a variety of state and local sources. It’s still early, of course, and we have a lot more work to do. But we’re forming a picture of the ways Illinois pretrial practice and decision-making have changed under the PFA, the ways prosecutors and judges are using the new law, and the effects being felt in local jails and communities.

In part because we knew the public, policymakers, and the field would be interested, we’ve issued a report summarizing our findings on the PFA’s first year. Ultimate questions about the effects of the new law on defendants, on court and jail operations, and on public safety can’t be answered till more time has passed and more data becomes available. But right now we can say a few things with reasonable certainty:

• Pretrial practice has changed. Hearings are more deliberative and focused, at least when detention is a possibility.
• Prosecutors don’t seek detention just because they can. For some offenses that are eligible for detention consideration under the new law, like misdemeanor domestic battery, detention petitions are not filed in the majority of cases.
• Overall detention rates have declined, and so have jail populations. But pretrial supervision populations have grown even more.
• All these things vary, sometimes dramatically, by county. To take one striking example, the percentage of detention-eligible cases in which the prosecutor filed a petition for detention varied from 15% in one county to 95% in another.

What about hearing attendance under the PFA—are people released without posting money still showing up to court? We’re still working on an answer to that, but we can say that warrants issued for failure to attend hearings have not gone up.

Similarly, crime has not gone up—it went down, in fact. Which is encouraging, but it doesn’t really tell us what the PFA’s impact on public safety has been. Maybe crime would have gone down more if not for the new law? TBD.

Our evaluation runs at least through the end of 2025. Until then, we plan to continue to share findings and insights as they emerge, make the data we’re using accessible to the public whenever possible, and keep readers of Front and Center posted.

Helping the Media Get it Right

Last fall, when the PFA was brand-new, Arnold Ventures published an online story praising Illinois media (in general) for its coverage of the new law’s roll-out. “Reporting on implementation of the Pretrial Fairness Act has been relatively balanced and evidence-based,” wrote AV’s Thomas Hanna, “setting a standard for newsrooms across the country.”

The way the media cover criminal justice issues is important. The story makes the point by quoting criminal justice scholar Thomas Abt: “In a democracy, bad media translates into bad politics, which translates into bad policy, which translates into bad outcomes.”

And big, complicated changes, like eliminating the familiar cash bail system and replacing it with something entirely new, can be easy to get wrong. We take seriously our obligation to work with the media to help ensure that the public has an accurate picture of the PFA—what it does and doesn’t do, and what we can and can’t say about its workings and effects.

Center Codirectors Dave Olson and Don Stemen seemed to be doing this work everywhere in the lead-up to the PFA’s one-year anniversary, showing up in the Chicago Tribune, on CBS News Chicago, ABC News Chicago, and WTTW Chicago, on WBEZ and Illinois Public Radio, in some national outlets like Axios and the Washington Examiner, in the State Journal Register and many smaller Illinois papers served by the Capital News Illinois nonprofit news service, and even here and there in far-flung places like the Royal Oak (MI) Daily Tribune and Walla Walla (WA) Union Bulletin.

Everywhere they appeared or were quoted, they offered facts, perspective, useful context, and a healthy dose of caution about the PFA. The basic message they conveyed was something like: there’s a lot we don’t know, and a lot we have yet to learn.

But the sky is not falling.

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