As of September 2026, the Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA), which abolished monetary bail as a condition of pretrial release and imposed broad restrictions on the use of pretrial detention in criminal cases, has been in operation in Illinois for three full years. Our statewide evaluation of the law has been going on even longer. We’ve been publicly reporting what we’ve learned at intervals since 2022,

in an effort to provide the field and the community with accessible descriptive information about the functioning of the PFA. We expect to continue monitoring, measuring outcomes, and issuing periodic reports on the PFA’s impact for at least another two years.

But the recent three-year anniversary of the PFA provides a convenient occasion for a succinct, non-technical summary of our findings to date. This brief report is intended to give Illinois leaders, practitioners and the public a broad sense of how the PFA has been working, and the ways in which the law’s implementation and outcomes have varied from place to place. It will also sketch out some important questions about the law’s impact that remain unsettled.

This is not a technical report, and for the most part our data sources and the details of our analysis are described only in general terms. Over the coming year, we will be issuing a series of longer and more fine-grained reports that will focus on clarifying and quantifying the PFA’s impact in such areas as detention and release outcomes, jail admissions and populations, court attendance, crime, and sentencing. These reports will provide more detail regarding the evaluation methods we’ve used and the characteristics and limitations of the data we rely on. Here we are only giving our best estimate of the PFA’s “bottom line,” three years in.

The Arrest, Detention and Release Process

The PFA made a number of significant changes at the very beginning of the criminal justice process. First, it authorized—and in some circumstances required—law enforcement to issue citations in lieu of arresting many of those charged with low-level offenses, changing the way a great many defendants enter the pretrial system in the first place. It changed holding and release routines and requirements. It ruled out consideration of pretrial detention in a large set of cases, and created entirely new detention grounds and hearing procedures for the rest.

Law Enforcement Citations and Releases

One important set of process changes introduced by the PFA was aimed at expanding the use of law enforcement citation and release, as an alternative to being arrested and held in jail to appear before a judge. For traffic and Class B and C misdemeanors,

defendants must be cited and released with standard conditions, unless they cannot be properly identified or would pose a risk to the public or a danger to themselves if not taken into custody. For Class A misdemeanors and felonies that are not detainable, law enforcement has the choice of either (1) citing and releasing the defendant with standard conditions or (2) bringing the defendant to the jail to be held for a judicial hearing on release conditions. The PFA creates a presumption in favor of citation and release for Class A misdemeanors and non-detainable felonies, but it does not absolutely require it.

Unfortunately, while police were granted much more discretion to issue citations and release individuals without involving the courts, the PFA was mostly silent regarding how that discretion should be used, and no statewide training or guidance to law enforcement agencies filled the gap. Formal agency policies that provide police officers with criteria they should consider in exercising this discretion appear to be rare. The result has been considerable confusion regarding what the new law does and does not allow or require, and significant variation in the use of citations both across counties and among law enforcement agencies within the same county.

Nonetheless, judging from the somewhat fragmentary data available to us,

the PFA appears to be associated with some increase in the use of citations in the field, at least for specific types of minor crimes and in specific regions of Illinois. However, it is likely that there has been a more substantial increase in the proportion of individuals who were “booked and released”—that is, booked into county jails solely for fingerprinting and records-checking purposes, and then released that same day with a court date, without having to appear before a judge.

Detention Hearing Practice

For courts and court actors, the PFA has resulted in profound changes in the pretrial process. Both interviews with court practitioners and structured court observations (including observations of roughly 2,000 pretrial hearings) confirmed that, at least when detention is at issue, post-PFA hearings are far longer and more deliberative than pre-PFA bail hearings. Generally, when detention is sought, not only is more time spent conducting hearings, but more time, attention and resources are being focused on these cases at their earliest stages, more information is being shared about them, more evidence is being presented and scrutinized, and a broader range of issues is being discussed. As a result, all practitioners—police, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, and pretrial agency staff—are spending more time and effort at this early stage in the process than prior to the PFA.

But there also is much more clarity about the nature, purpose, and outcome of those hearings than under the monetary bail system. At the end of a PFA detention hearing, the outcome is not ambiguous—the defendant will either be detained pretrial or released, unless at some future hearing a judge determines the circumstances in the case have changed. Under the money bail system, the outcome of the hearing where bail was being set was often ambiguous—would the amount of bail set keep the defendant detained, or would the money needed to secure release be posted that same day?

Both defenders and prosecutors reported being challenged by the new demands and deadlines imposed by the PFA. For prosecutors, the PFA imposes a range of new responsibilities and burdens at the front-end of the process. Prior to the PFA, prosecutors generally made only cursory presentations in bond hearings, and often offered no specific recommendations as to bond amounts. The PFA now places prosecutors at the very center of the detention process, requiring them to make a prompt and thorough review of arrest reports, evaluate evidence and criminal histories in every case eligible for detention, determine those cases in which detention petitions will be filed, quickly assemble and share all relevant discovery materials with defense, review pretrial risk assessments, and present a thorough case for detention that meets an elevated burden of proof—usually all on the same day.

While the PFA shifted the burden to prosecutors to initiate the detention process, it also increased the burden on public defenders to be present and involved in the pretrial process in new ways. Before the PFA, particularly outside of urban counties, defense attorneys often had little or no role in the bond-setting process. It was common for defendants to be unrepresented by attorneys at that stage, especially in counties without full-time public defenders. Accordingly, for defense attorneys, one of the PFA’s most basic and consequential changes was its requirement that legal counsel be appointed prior to a defendant’s first appearance, “and with sufficient time for meaningful attorney-client contact to gather information in order to advocate effectively for the defendant's pretrial release.”

In mandating an enhanced role for defense attorneys in the pretrial detention and release process, however, the PFA exposed weaknesses in Illinois’ already overstretched indigent defense network, particularly in rural areas. Funding for public defender offices comes largely out of county budgets, and in practice that means Illinois’ indigent defense funding tends to be a patchwork—uneven from county to county, and often inadequate. Accordingly, it is common for a single public defender to be responsible for a whole rural county, and some counties must make do with a part-time defender.

Because most of Illinois (82 out of 102 counties, and more than three-quarters of the state’s land area) is rural, many areas are already being served by a small, dwindling, and aging pool of attorneys,

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making it that much more difficult to attract and retain public defenders even when funding is available.

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Detention and Release Rates

One of the primary purposes of the PFA was to limit the use of pretrial detention and increase the use of pretrial release. First, and most directly, it did so by making pretrial release mandatory for most offenses. Second, by discarding the monetary bail system, it eliminated detention associated with difficulties and delays in raising and posting bail, even for defendants who would ultimately be released. Finally, the PFA significantly raised the procedural and evidentiary bar required to justify pretrial detention in cases where it was still allowed, as well as the resource/time burdens associated with doing so. Thus, a central question explored in this evaluation is: how did the implementation of the PFA impact the likelihood of pretrial detention? Is that impact different in different counties or for different types of cases?

It’s difficult to make a one-to-one comparison between PFA detention and release rates and bond court outcomes under prior law.

Nevertheless, under any set of reasonable assumptions,

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the PFA resulted in an immediate and significant short-term reduction in overall detention rates, across all counties examined and across all categories of offenses. In the longer term, however, while detention rates in the sample of rural counties examined continued to decline or remained stable, those in a large urban jurisdiction increased over time, and had reached rates higher than pre-PFA levels as of two years after PFA implementation.

Pretrial Jail Populations and Bookings

It is by no means a straightforward matter to isolate the PFA’s impact on pretrial jail populations. Seasonality, broader crime trends, trends in the volume of arrests and case filings, case processing practices, and many other variations in criminal justice system operations can all be reflected in county jail populations. As a result, it’s difficult to measure the extent to which population changes can be attributed solely to the PFA, independent of other causes.

However, it’s clear that PFA implementation was associated with an immediate and very sharp decrease in jail populations across the state. Overall, the statewide monthly average pre-trial jail population fell 13% shortly after the PFA went into effect. Eighteen months after implementation of the PFA, jail populations remained down 10% statewide. By December 2025 (28 months post-PFA), the statewide aggregate pretrial jail populations averaged roughly 13,500, still 3% lower than in December 2022 (pre-PFA).

But these statewide trends mask differences at the local level. Jail populations in rural counties decreased far more than in urban counties. And in the state’s largest county, by the end of 2025, the jail population was higher than it was before the implementation of the PFA – influenced in part by to increases in detention petition rates following a change in the elected State’s Attorney. While pretrial jail populations fell overall, the volume of pretrial jail did not decrease as much between the pre- and post-PFA period, indicating that much of the decrease in the population was due to shorter lengths of stay rather than fewer jail admissions. In fact, as noted above, many local jurisdictions have continued to use their local jails for “book and release” purposes – leading to sustained or higher jail bookings but flat or lower jail populations. When these pre- post-PFA trends were examined across each individual county, most (58% of counties) saw decreases in both their pretrial jail population and pretrial jail bookings, but 37% of the counties experienced increases in either bookings or populations, or both, while 5% of the counties experienced no substantive change in either.

Pretrial Supervision

Although pretrial jail populations have declined statewide and in most counties since the PFA became effective, growth in pretrial supervision populations has more than offset this decline. Overall, the statewide monthly average pretrial supervision population increased by 9,700 individuals (48%) from December 2022 to December 2025 (28 months post-PFA); during the same period combined statewide pretrial jail populations fell by 439 individuals (-3%). In other words, the total number of people under some form of pretrial custody/supervision in Illinois as a whole—either in jail custody or under pretrial supervision—has increased since the PFA was implemented, with the magnitude of that increase varying from county to county.

Much of the growth in pretrial supervision is due to the wider availability of pretrial services following the creation of the Office of Statewide Pretrial Services,

rather than a movement of individuals from pretrial detention to pretrial supervision in the community. This was particularly true in Illinois’ rural counties, where the expanded availability of pretrial supervision led to a substantial increase in the proportion of pending criminal cases under some form of pretrial custody or supervision. From 2022 to 2025, the proportion of all pending criminal cases under some form of custody/supervision grew from 8% to 15% in rural counties.

This widespread increase in the availability of pretrial supervision options, even in the absence of the changes introduced by the PFA, would likely have resulted in growth in the number of people on pretrial supervision in Illinois. But the simultaneous implementation of the PFA, restricting the availability of pretrial detention in some cases and raising the bar for justifying it in others, undoubtedly intensified this effect. There were many more individuals who might have been detained in the past but could no longer be detained under the PFA, and for whom judges might feel that pretrial supervision was needed. In addition, in “close” cases, where the state may have sought detention, a judge may determine that release under pretrial supervision (with or without GPS monitoring) is a “condition or combination of conditions” that “can mitigate the real and present threat,” (725 ILCS 5/110-6.1(e) which judges must take into consideration during a detention hearing. Indeed, our analysis of OSPS data found that the factor that most strongly predicted a pretrial supervision order (with or without GPS) in post-PFA cases was whether a detention petition had been filed but denied.

Pretrial Failure to Appear (FTA) Rates

One of the traditional purposes of the posting of monetary bail was to secure the defendant’s attendance at subsequent court hearings. Because the PFA mandated pretrial release of most defendants and ended the posting of money as security for hearing attendance, there was some concern that the new law would result in an increase in failures to appear (FTAs) at required hearings.

Using case-level court data obtained directly from circuit clerks of court in a sample of 21 rural counties and one urban county, we examined FTA warrants (i.e., instances in which the judge ordered issuance of an arrest warrant in response to a defendant’s non-attendance) to determine whether the PFA was associated with increases in FTAs

Overall, the likelihood of an FTA warrant increased slightly in the sample of rural counties and the urban county examined. Still, the vast majority of criminal cases – over 87% of cases – did not have an FTA warrant within 6 months, either before or after the PFA.

The slight increase in the overall FTA warrant rate was driven by specific categories of crimes, but not by the detainable public safety offenses. The FTA rate for the detainable public safety offenses did not change at all in the urban county and increased only slightly in the combined sample of rural counties. Moreover, FTA warrant rates for detainable public safety offenses remained below 8% both pre- and post-PFA.

In contrast, the FTA warrant rate increased in both the rural and urban counties for cases that were not detainable under the public safety standard of the PFA. In fact, the largest increase in FTA warrant rates occurred among offenses detainable under the willful flight standard of the PFA – specifically, Class 3 felonies or higher. Still, the majority of these cases—over 80% -- did not have an FTA warrant within 6 months.

One possible explanation for these patterns is not the elimination of monetary bail, but rather, the change in how cases are being processed under the PFA. Prior to the PFA, individuals charged with a felony offense had to be held in jail and brought before a judge to have bail and any conditions of pretrial release set. However, under the PFA, many of the individuals charged with felonies detainable under the willful flight standard are being cited and released, or booked and released, with only a piece of paper indicating when they must appear in court. Our analyses indicate that FTA warrants are being issued earlier post-PFA cases relative to pre-PFA cases – this suggests that many of the FTA warrants post-PFA are associated with a failure to appear at the first court date.

Crime and Public Safety

As described above, the implementation of the PFA resulted in a smaller share of those charged with crimes being detained pretrial, and smaller pretrial jail populations throughout most of Illinois. What effect did this have on crime and public safety?

Here again, answering this question is difficult, primarily because of the way crime reporting procedures for local law enforcement agencies in Illinois have changed in recent years. As a result of the complex and lengthy transition, beginning in 2021, a summary reporting system of counting crime to one based on “incidents reported” (the Illinois National Incident Based Reporting System or NIBRS), many local law enforcement agencies reported incomplete crime data before 2025. That makes accurate measurement of statewide crime trends during the period before and after the PFA was implemented, as well as simple comparisons of pre- and post-PFA crime rates, difficult.

Nevertheless, using data only from those agencies that had complete NIBRS reporting from 2022 through 2025 (426 out of a total of 1,167 agencies),

we were able to measure monthly changes in the number of crimes against persons, crimes against property, and crimes against society reported to the police during the 2022-2025 period, and to analyze pre- and post-PFA trends over time for 1) Illinois as a whole, 2) Cook County, 3) urban counties outside of Cook County, and 4) rural counties.

Using a technique called interrupted time series analysis on all these data, and accounting for the seasonality of crime and broad economic indicators, we found no statistically significant changes in the number of reported crimes associated with the implementation of the PFA—at the state-level, across the individual regions, or across the various crime categories. Does that mean there were no changes at all? Certainly not. It only means that whatever fluctuations there were in the reported crime numbers, they could not be shown statistically to be due to the new law.

This is not our last word on the crime and public safety issue. We have yet to complete a separate set of analyses that will help us determine whether pretrial defendants released to the community under the PFA are more or less likely to be charged with another crime while on release than those released on bail under the previous system. The results of those analyses will be reported when they are available.

Conclusions

The PFA is a state law, but its implementation—and impacts—vary from county to county

Much of criminal justice case volume in Illinois is generated by the 20 urban counties where close to 90% of the state’s population resides. But relying solely on statewide “grand totals” 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. Our evaluation makes clear that the PFA is working differently in different counties. And the most striking instance of this variation can be seen in the ways that the state’s 82 rural counties’ PFA experiences differ from those of urban counties.

One of the primary goals of the PFA—removing money from pretrial release decision-making—has been fully achieved statewide

We should not lose sight of the fact that, at least in one respect, there is one clear area where the PFA has accomplished what its proponents intended: there is no longer such a thing as cash bail in Illinois. A mechanism that had been central to the Illinois pretrial justice system was discarded at a stroke. Whatever other variations in PFA implementation we may have seen, we have come across no counties where monetary bail is still being imposed as a condition of pretrial release, and are not aware of any calls to return to monetary bail.

The PFA has formalized the detention and release decision-making process and clarified its purposes

In addition, as noted earlier, in cases where pretrial detention is at issue, the PFA has unquestionably brought a measure of statewide standardization, transparency, and clarity to the hearing and decision-making process. In contrast to the typical bond hearing under the cash bail system, in which both the purposes and the grounds for individual bond decisions tended to be unstated and undiscoverable, there is never any doubt at a post-PFA detention hearing regarding what is being decided, the grounds for the decision or its practical effect.

The PFA has also had the effect of stimulating and fast-tracking other reforms

Before the PFA, there was no statewide provision of pretrial services, and the system of indigent criminal defense was acknowledged to be a patchwork, with little funding or oversight from the state. Especially in rural counties, the result was that the basic infrastructure needed for a high-quality pretrial process, including pretrial risk assessment, supervision and services as well as adequately funded and resourced criminal defense, was lacking. The PFA itself did not directly change these conditions, but it created pressure for change. So, for example, the creation of the Office of Statewide Pretrial Services was a legislative response to a need created by the PFA, for specialized pretrial supervision and supports that could substitute for pretrial detention.

Likewise, in part due to the recognition that the PFA was imposing new strains on local providers of indigent defense, the recent enactment of the State Public Defender Act has moved Illinois closer to a system of state responsibility for indigent defense.

Legal uncertainty and political controversy hindered state and local preparation for PFA implementation

As one of the most far-reaching pretrial reform measures ever enacted legislatively in any state, the PFA made fundamental changes to the status quo, requiring adaptations on the part of virtually everyone working in the Illinois criminal justice system. The implementation of such a sweeping measure would have been challenging under the best of circumstances. But the PFA’s implementation context was very far from ideal.

The legislation itself, hastily passed at an opportune political moment, was exceptionally long and complicated, and both the substance of the law and the circumstances of its passage provoked immediate controversy. Formidable and vocal public opposition from influential groups, including elected State’s Attorneys and County Sheriffs all over the state, formed instantly. A consolidated legal challenge to the validity of the new law under the state constitution delayed its implementation, and served to cast doubt on whether it would take effect at all. The PFA also quickly became a prominent and highly partisan issue in the 2022 gubernatorial election, which generated an unusual amount of fear and misinformation about what the law would and wouldn’t do. Nightmarish PFA crime scenarios were routinely predicted during the campaign, and in fact the new law was blamed for crime increases before it had even taken effect.

All of these factors reduced the usefulness of the lengthy pre-implementation period built into the PFA. What was intended to be an ample period of pre-implementation study and preparation—nearly two years between the PFA’s passage and its scheduled effective date, providing the various practitioner groups and agencies affected with time to become familiar with the requirements of the new law and to train and prepare for them—was often squandered. In many parts of the state, a combination of disagreements over the meaning and scope of the PFA’s requirements and basic uncertainty as to whether and when they would take effect tended to work against practical efforts to train and prepare for them. As a result, once the PFA became effective, counties varied widely in terms of their implementation readiness.

Essential data infrastructure mandated by the PFA has not materialized

Many fundamental questions concerning the impact and the ultimate success or failure of the PFA were expected to be answerable with data that the law itself required to be collected. Unfortunately, no new funding was provided for these new statewide data collections, and for the most part they have not occurred. Accordingly, this evaluation has used the limited statewide data available. Among the missing data pieces: statewide measures relating to failures to appear and new criminal activity while on pretrial release, before and after PFA implementation; consistently and completely reported data on crime, particularly during the pre-PFA period; and reliable data on jail admissions and populations, which are collected from county sheriffs by IDOC but not used or examined to ensure accuracy, consistency, or completeness.

The PFA reduced pretrial detention, but not as much as critics feared, or advocates hoped

Despite a dramatic early drop in jail populations immediately after implementation, the PFA does not seem to have had major long-term effects on the overall volume of jail usage. This is in part because, though the PFA does require prompt pretrial release of most defendants, the cash bail system also facilitated the release of most defendants—usually after only a slight delay, and once money had changed hands. And while the PFA may have made it more time-consuming and burdensome to justify detention in eligible cases, we found that in most counties, when the state seeks detention, it usually gets it.

Moreover, even for those accused of “nondetainable” offenses, the PFA leaves open various avenues for short-term jail holding. For example, some counties initially detain all defendants under the PFA, or at least all except those charged with the lowest-level misdemeanors, so that they can be brought before a judge and given conditions of pretrial release. Released defendants can also be jailed following a violation of their conditions of release, or as a sanction for nonappearance at hearings, even when their actual offenses are “nondetainable.”

The PFA has shifted the basic purpose of detention toward safeguarding public safety—and away from ensuring appearance or preventing continued offending

Nevertheless, the PFA can be said to have shifted the purpose of initial detention. By making pretrial detention eligibility dependent on current charges, and effectively limiting its availability to cases involving offenses that implicate public safety, the PFA has diminished the importance of other considerations that were once central factors in cash bail-setting, such as the risk that the defendant will miss court hearings, or will continue to offend while the case is pending. In fact, many of those who are charged with common offenses that are ineligible for detention under the PFA—such as drug possession—may be at very high risk for missing court and committing new crimes, including repeated drug possession. Nevertheless, while they may be placed on various forms of pretrial supervision (e.g., supervision, GPS/EM monitoring, etc.), they cannot be detained initially, regardless of these risks.