Sheriff Tom Dart is pushing a concerning bill through the Illinois legislature that would give unprecedented power to jail officials to lengthen an individual’s prison sentence due to discipline violations.

Criminal Justice , , ,

By Sarah Staudt, Senior Policy Analyst and Staff Attorney

SB 416 allows jail officials to use their internal disciplinary boards to remove up to a year of pre-trial sentence credit for inmates who are found to have violated jail rules by committing “public indecency” or “assault or battery of a corrections officer” more than once. This bill would give correctional officers in county jail unchecked, unreviewable authority to make people serve longer prison sentences for violations of jail rules. I have three main concerns about this bill:

  1. The bill gives county jail officials much more power than even state prison officials have to severely punish disciplinary infractions by removing pretrial sentence credit;
  2. County Jail disciplinary boards would not be subject to any review by any judge for the decisions they made to remove sentence credit, and inmates would have no right to counsel or appeal;
  3. The infractions that jails could remove sentence credit for are too broadly drawn.

This bill would give county corrections officers a power that even IDOC officials do not have: the power to unilaterally remove a full year of sentence credit based on an internal decision that an inmate has violated the rules of the jail. State prison officials who want to remove sentence credit and increase the amount of time someone spends in prison due to their conduct while incarcerated have to make a petition to the independent Prison Review Board, who reviews the case and decides whether sentence credit revocation is warranted. This provides a vital check on corrections officers’ power to increase the amount of time people spend in prison based on disciplinary violations. SB 416 provides no such check on county officials, giving them much more power than state officials have to remove sentence credit. Furthermore, county jails will never have to pay the costs of the increased incarceration they are ordering. Instead, the state prison system would have to bear the brunt of the increased prison sentences county jails may order through this bill.

SB 416 is an unnecessary and troubling increase of the power of jail disciplinary boards to impose severe penalties for behavior that happens inside the jail.