Latest News

On November 14 the justices of the Illinois Supreme Court are coming to Cook County and convening a meeting of the heads of agencies effecting criminal justice to discuss the reformation of our pre-trial process. In this effort our Supreme Court follows in the footsteps of other state supreme courts throughout the country (Pennsylvania, Missouri, New York, Ohio, and others), which have helped coordinate criminal justice in counties and cities in need of systemic reform.

The meeting comes in response to mounting pressure to address our perennially overcrowded jail with particular focus on Cook County’s central bond court and its seeming proclivity toward placing monetary bonds on defendants, which appears to contribute substantially to overcrowding in the county jail. A study from 2005 found that Cook County held 47% of defendants on a monetary bond, as compared to 14% in Kings County, New York and 25% in Miami-Dade County, Florida, despite having similar rates of failures to appear and re-arrests.  Articles in the media have been critical of our troubled bond court process. Most recently, Mick Dumke of the Chicago Reader presented one of the more sophisticated portraits of our current woes in bond court, describing a hurried, random process where bond amounts are arrived at with little pre-trial services information and with seemingly no connection to flight risk or public safety. In another article appearing in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, the Honorable Gino DiVito responded to criticism of bond court judges, defending the practices of the judges and citing a lack of funding for treatment options to which to divert defendants.

We at Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice feel that focusing on the bond court alone is an unhelpful way of approaching reform. The truth of the matter is that bond court does not exist in a vacuum, and the reforms we need most are not in the hands of a single player. What we truly need is coordinated reform across the system to implement earlier assessment of cases based on evidence-based assessment tools—to decide which ones to dismiss, to try, or to divert into treatment. We also need to expand diversion and treatment programs so that thousands—not dozens—of defendants are given treatment that will both reduce their chance of recidivism and result in greater public safety and cost savings. These changes require the coordination of the court (both the bond court and the criminal division) along with the pre-trial services department, the state’s attorney’s office, the public defender’s office, treatment providers, and others. And any reform of bond court should be viewed in the context of this wholly revamped system.

This is not to say that bond court doesn’t need to change. Based on our extensive court observations completed for our 2011 Bond Court Report (cited in Dumke’s article and available on our website), hearings take twenty to thirty seconds per defendant, and monetary bonds are the rule rather than the exception – flying in the face of the bond statute, which strongly discourages monetary bonds, declaring that they should be used only when “no other conditions of release will reasonably assure the defendant’s appearance in court.”  Moreover, similarly situated defendants receive vastly different bond amounts due solely to which judge happens to be on the bench. Our over-reliance on monetary bonds cruelly transforms the bond hearing from a reasonable inquiry into flight risk and public safety into a hearing that is too often only about the financial means of defendants. This results in bizarre injustice where defendants who are charged with retail theft amounting to $8 sit in jail because they can’t put up the required $2,500 bail amount, while defendants who have gun convictions in their records and have been arrested for fighting with police are out on the street because they can afford $6,000.

But it is not only the behavior of our bond court judges that needs to change to bring our system into alignment. Many players share the blame. Our Pre-trial Services Department, for example, only assesses the flight risk and the risk to public safety of 15% of the defendants that are admitted into the jail, they rarely verify any of this information, and, consequently, bond court judges hardly ever rely on their reports. Additionally, public defenders often have little time to speak with the defendants before hearings start and they offer very little unique mitigating information to the court.

The result is that a defendant is saddled with a de facto unreviewable result of a thirty second hearing wherein no effort was made to put forth evidence on his behalf or defend against evidence introduced by the prosecution.

And there’s more. Despite our county’s over-reliance on monetary bonds and our bursting jail population, our State’s Attorney’s Office has in place a standing objection to any bond amount that is offered, arguing, in effect, that no defendant—no matter their charge or history—is safe to be on the streets. Furthermore, the State’s Attorney’s Office has no felony review of drug charges, meaning that they do not assess whether they intend to go forward with the case until weeks after arrest. Review of drug arrests does exist in many counties throughout the U.S., including the comparable Kings County, New York, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, and others. In 2010, for example, 12,446 defendants were released from Cook County jail after their cases were dismissed – on average, these detainees had spent 25 days in jail before dismissal. 45% (5,638) of those dismissals were drug charges—often-victimless cases that are relatively simple to assess. Not identifying these cases for dismissal early on not only runs afoul of basic notions of justice, but also represents a massive waste of resources.

So where does this lack of coordination leave us? In the end, we have a system hobbled by a lack of felony review of drug charges by state’s attorneys, a weak pre-trial services department, and our bond court judges’ inclination toward holding defendants on money bonds.  The result is that drug defendants, charged with possessing paltry sums of narcotics, often sit in jail for weeks—at a tremendous cost to taxpayers—only to have their charges dismissed by criminal division judges who find “no merit” to the charges.

This last point about criminal division judges bears a bit of explaining. It is a little known fact outside of those practicing within the field that our bond court judges are not the same judges that preside over the rest of a criminal case. Instead, our bond court, serving Chicago on the weekdays and also suburban Cook County on the weekends, operates out of the First Municipal District and then transfers its cases to the Criminal Division. While the case is in this bureaucratic limbo, the clerk’s office transfers files and the case is switched over to different public defenders, ASAs, and judges. It is typically only after this that a defendant has any chance of being placed into a specialty court or other diversion program; it is only in the Criminal Division, typically, that their cases are dismissed, weeks after they should have been. And it is this informational and structural divide that represents the largest roadblock to speeding up the pre-trial process—dismissing cases that should be dismissed, disposing of or diverting cases faster, and relieving the jail population.

In our latest report, Pre-Trial Delay and Length of Stay in Cook County Jail, available on our website, we found that one of the major drivers of the jail population is the increasing length of stay in the jail due to delays in the pre-trial process. Between 2007 and 2011 the average length of stay increased 6.2 days—this means an additional 1,246 detainees in the jail’s average daily population or—at a rate of $143 a day—an additional $65,048,984 in cost to taxpayers. Even those who exited the jail by posting bond (as opposed to dismissal, acquittal, or a sentence) spent 45% more time in the jail in 2011 than in 2007.

In our investigation into the cause of pre-trial delay we didn’t find that bond court was solely to blame—in fact, we didn’t find a “smoking gun” at all. What we found is a lack of information-sharing and cooperation between the stakeholders, a lack of training in case management skills, a lack of modern information management technology, and a lack of knowledge regarding diversion programs and treatment options throughout the system.

But we are finding ways to get around this coordination problem. For example, in the pilot Access to Community Treatment (ACT) Court, we are working with all the stakeholders in helping design a diversion system that could work for all courtrooms throughout Cook County. The ACT court sends low-level felony defendants with drug dependence and abuse issues to treatment rather than to prison. In this court, the stakeholders are working together to speed up the pre-trial process: assistant state’s attorneys are flagging eligible cases at the bond court stage, new information management systems are being piloted, and specially trained probation officers are serving the cases. And all this is under the supervision of a judge who is well-informed regarding treatment, diversion programs, and case management. But in order for the ACT Court to truly expand beyond the walls of one courtroom, to truly bring diversion to scale, we need coordinated reform across entire agencies.

In light of all of the above, we have several proposals for the Illinois Supreme Court to consider at its meeting with the stakeholders and the conference to follow. We have divided these proposals into long-term goals for a coordinated diversion system and short-term, immediate goals.

An Integrated Pre-Trial and Diversion System

First, pre-trial services should be expanded so that officers are not only reviewing all defendants coming before bond court as to their flight risk and risk to public safety, but also for their eligibility for the various Specialty Courts or the ACT model court. Second, following our recommendation and the recommendations of the Community Renewal Society amongst other organizations, the state’s attorneys should reinstitute felony review of drug cases so that those defendants facing the least serious charges are not spending taxpayer resources for cases that will likely be dismissed. Third, the court should consider placing bond court under the criminal division instead of the First Municipal District, so that the same judges who follow criminal cases through completion could handle them at their inception, and to remove the information-sharing roadblocks which keep early assessment programs from taking hold.

Immediate Goals: An Audit of the Bond Court and Stakeholder Cooperation

The Illinois Supreme Court should require full data regarding bond amounts with respect to charges and defendant criminal histories, so that they and the residents of this county finally have transparency regarding bond court processes and a basis for sound and accurate evaluation our system.

And lastly, the Supreme Court should encourage the attendance and cooperation of all the stakeholders in the system if they are truly going to get change; this includes the Court, the State’s Attorney’s Office, the Public Defender’s Office, Adult Probation, Pre-Trial Services, the Clerk, the Sheriff, the Cook County Board President, and, quite critically, the Chicago Police Department.

It may seem, from all of the above, that the problems in Cook County are intractable and that immense changes need to occur for any measurable difference to be made. We don’t believe that is so. At a recent Chicago Appleseed event, Greg Berman, director of the Center for Court Innovation, which has led the transformation of New York City by introducing evidence-based improvements in the quality of criminal justice, said that the remarkable improvement of New York’s criminal justice system was not the product of seeking out and neutralizing one smoking gun or titanic problem, but rather through the introduction of “a thousand small sanities.” In essence, that is what we believe needs to change about our current system and what we hope will be the product of the forthcoming conference organized by the Illinois Supreme Court: the introduction of a variety of evidence-based improvements in the quality of criminal justice arrived at in a coordinated fashion so that the handling of the typical case in the Cook County court system is improved.