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In late 2020, Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts contracted with the Cook County Justice Advisory Council (JAC) to provide technical assistance for a review of the pretrial electronic monitoring (EM) programs in Cook County. The aims of the study included developing strategies to keep people awaiting trial out of the Cook County Jail, to be responsive to people’s mobility needs in terms of healthcare, family responsibilities, employment, and education, and to ensure that public safety is not jeopardized. Along with CGL Companies, Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts was commissioned to provide this technical assistance to develop recommendations for improvement of these programs. While CGL’s role focused on the programmatic, technological, operational capacities and efficacy of the EM programs, Chicago Appleseed’s role was to engage stakeholders and community-based service providers to understand the needs of people in custody on EM – with a specific focus on the program’s effects on housing, employment, education, family and community, health and wellbeing, interaction with the legal system, and other specific concerns and social-cultural impacts.

For questions on Chicago Appleseed’s role in this project, please contact Stephanie Agnew (sagnew@chicagoappleseed.org).

After two years of research and subsequent review, the Electronic Monitoring Review Final Report (“report”) is finally public. The Cook County Board has posted the agenda for its meeting on September 22, 2022, and the report is one aspect of the agenda.

In order for the public to better understand the scope and need of this project, we have outlined and summarized the report in detail below—but the three more important takeaways from the findings and recommendations are as follows: 

1. The report recommends that Cook County dramatically shrink its pretrial electronic monitoring program. As explained in the report, Cook County is a national outlier in its heavy use of pretrial electronic monitoring. The report explains: “As of March 2021, Cook County has by far the largest number of persons monitored with this technology of any major urban jurisdiction in the United States,” with New York City and Los Angeles County (much larger systems), for example, having about 1,150 and 336 people on pretrial EM, respectively, compared to the 5,000 people on house arrest in Cook County. While this number has decreased a bit since 2021, the pretrial house arrest population in Cook County continues to far exceed any jurisdiction in the country.All evidence shows that EM does not meaningfully influence rearrest or appearance rates of people awaiting trial – most people (82%) on electronic monitoring appear at all court dates and less than 1% of people on pretrial EM are rearrested for violent charges – so a dramatic reduction of the size of program should have no influence on public safety.
2. The report recommends that the Cook County Sheriff no longer have control over pretrial electronic monitoring and that the programs should, instead, be consolidated under the Office of the Chief Judge or under a Statewide Office of Pretrial Services. The current overlap of the two programs “impairs coordination of pretrial release programs and increases costs, without providing discernible benefits to the County,” according to the report. Together, the Sheriff’s Community Correction Bureau and the Office of the Chief Judge’s Adult Probation Home Confinement Unit had a combined budget of over $35 million with 276 staff for FY 2021. While the report states that “neither program is perfect, the OCJ program provides a better model for a pretrial release monitoring program [than does the Sheriff’s program].”
3. The report finds that the Sheriff’s “incarcerate first, ask questions later” policy for people who have allegedly violated conditions of pretrial release has the potential to violate people’s due process rights, and should be replaced with a system that re-incarcerates people only after a judge has given an explicit order to do so. Although data shows that a significant portion of the alleged violation alerts for people on EM are false alarms, the Sheriff’s Office claims “that any rule violation can be considered grounds for re-incarceration and criminal prosecution.” These decisions are not made by a judge, but are instead up to the Sheriff’s staff, which disregards due process rights. Instead, judges should be in charge of making final decisions about whether or not a person is incarcerated to ensure that their constitutional rights are protected.

Chicago Appleseed has published information on electronic monitoring in the past (most recently with our report 10 Facts about Pretrial Electronic Monitoring in Cook County, which provided clarity on some of the burdens house arrest causes for people awaiting trial) but has continually faced limitations in accessing necessary information from the Cook County Circuit Court system. As a system-led endeavor, the report provides much more detail and context about EM in Cook County than has historically been possible and shows that electronic monitoring offers no real benefit to public safety or community wellbeing. Research shows that pretrial electronic monitoring does not impact appearance rates and is 2.5 times more expensive than regular supervision. In Cook County, especially, taxpayers spend copious amounts of money on a program that harms more people that it helps. In our interviews for the report, we were told repeatedly that people on EM face stigmas in their communities and with criminal legal system actors who treat them “as if they had already been found guilty of a crime and were inherently untrustworthy.” These people are presumed innocent, but face unnecessary barriers to their employment, housing, family and community engagement, and negative impacts on their physical and mental health and wellbeing.

Background on Pretrial Electronic Monitoring in Cook County

In addition to sounding the alarm about the massive size of Cook County’s electronic monitoring programs, the report notes that the bifurcation of EM administration in Cook County is also unique from other criminal legal systems. Importantly, the report includes a detailed breakdown of the different programs that administer pretrial EM, as well as an analysis of the demographics of people in each program. As stated in the report: 

The fact that Cook County has two distinct pretrial release programs which rely on electronic detention, one under the Sheriff and one under the OCJ, is extremely unusual in the United States. Best practices call for a single pretrial services agency that coordinates and manages the entire spectrum of supervision and program services for released defendants. A single agency responsible for the program simplifies communication, reduces overhead, and results in a more consistent treatment of defendants. 

While “there are no discernible advantages to Cook County’s current system,” there are notable differences in the two programs, as well as several similarities—including the “pervasively negative” impressions that community stakeholders have of both programs. 

The Adult Probation Department’s Home Confinement Unit (HCU), run by the Office of the Chief Judge, managed 1,625 people on electronic monitoring as of August 2022. According to the report, about 32% of the HCU’s $11.1 million budget for FY 2022 was spent on electronic monitoring equipment and services and the remaining 62% was spent on staff costs. The HCU uses two types of technology to surveil EM participants: radiofrequency (RF) devices and GPS devices. With the exception of people charged with domestic violence, the HCU uses RF devices for people on house arrest. Consistent with the Cindy Bischof Law, the court can order people charged with domestic battery or violating an Order of Protection to use GPS instead of RF devices. As of August, 916 people (74.9% male, approximately 50% under age 35), mainly accused of domestic violence, were on GPS devices administered by the HCU—48.5% of which had been charged only with a misdemeanor. The active RF caseload consisted of 775 people (75% male, approximately 60% under the age of 36)—about 5% of these people were charged with misdemeanors and 76% with felonies, and the most common charge type overall was gun possession. The average amount of time someone on GPS under the HCU is 60 days; the average amount of time someone is on RF is 120 days.

The Community Corrections Bureau of the Cook County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) managed 3,686 people on electronic monitoring as of August 2022—an increase of 51% over the previous 12 months. The total amount allocated to EM in the CCSO’s FY 2022 budget was $24.4 million. In 2020, the CCSO announced it was switching its entire electronic monitoring system to GPS devices, which track exactly where a person is at all times, from the RF devices, which simply record whether someone is in their home. The largest demographic group (44%) in the CCSO’s EM program are Black males under age 30 who primarily come from majority-Black and Latine communities on Chicago’s South and West Sides. Almost all the people on EM under the Sheriff are charged with felonies (2.6% are charged with misdemeanor or petty/traffic offenses and less than 1% of charges are “unknown”). As of May 2021, about 43% of all people on Sheriff’s EM caseload were charged with gun possession. By nature, a “gun possession” charge – either Aggravated Unlawful Use of a Weapon (possession) or Aggravated or Reckless Discharge of a Firearm (which are charged when a gun is fired, but is not aimed at a person) – does not involve violence against another person. About 28% of people in the Sheriff’s caseload were charged with allegations of violence, such as Armed Robbery, Aggravated Battery with a Firearm, or Vehicular Hijacking. While about 75% of people on EM under the Sheriff’s supervision are removed from the program within 6 months, at least 57 people have been on EM for more than 2 years at the time of analysis. 

Recommendations in the Report

The report concludes that “the use of electronic monitoring in Cook County has several problematic features that are inconsistent with research” and best practices around alternatives to incarceration and pretrial services, which “likely impair the effectiveness and efficiency of its use.” To that end, the report makes 11 detailed recommendations: 

1. Cook County should undertake a strategic planning process to ensure its EM program(s) are consistent with national standards. This process should build off of this report, which provides an objective description of the programs and an assessment of issues, and include input from all relevant stakeholders (such as the Office of the Chief Judge, the Sheriff, the State’s Attorney, Public Defender, and the Office of the County Board President) to develop a “common vision” for the future. 
2. All responsibilities for pretrial supervision of accused people waiting for trial, including by way of electronic monitoring, should be consolidated into management under one agency. The current system is “inefficient, confusing, and serves no positive program objective,” and would be better managed by a “state-wide system, should one arise, or as part of the Pretrial Services Unit of Adult Probation in Cook County.” 
3. Reduce the number of people on pretrial electronic monitoring. All evidence shows that there are no discernible public safety benefits to the large-scale electronic surveillance of people awaiting trial and that community supervision appears just as if not more effective for most people. In fact, research demonstrates that the “generalized use of electronic monitoring for released defendants, beyond those cases with a clear public safety interest, may then produce worse outcomes for defendants and the community.” 
4. Conduct a validation and reliability study for the use of the Public Safety Assessment (PSA) risk assessment tool. The PSA was developed in 2015 and has been “successfully used in many other jurisdictions,” but has not been validated for use in Cook County, which limits its predictive value and reduces reliability confidence.
5. Determine better ways for the courts to serve survivors of domestic violence by working with advocates. False alarms and unnecessary alerts limit the benefits that GPS electronic monitoring has to protect people experiencing domestic violence. Both survivors and accused people reported that the GPS program disrupted their housing stability and employment, and that program administrators were “careless with the personal information of victims, informing the defendant of the victim’s address or showing up at the victim’s work or home.”
6. End “Zero Tolerance” policies and implement a “graduated sanctions approach” to violations that requires explicit judicial approval for incarceration of electronic monitoring participants instead. Best practices call for clearly defined program policies, but neither the OCJ nor the CCSO have clearly written guidelines for what rule violations can lead to a person’s incarceration, which has caused these rules to be enforced arbitrarily. Many of the alerts for violations the Sheriff’s Office responds to are false alarms or equipment malfunctions. According to a University of Chicago analysis given to Sheriff’s Office staff, 80% of alerts from the third-party vendor are “false positives,” with 15% of people flagged with a false positive alert each day. Moreover, the Sheriff’s policy of incarcerating people without judicial approval has the potential to significantly impinge on people’s due process rights. 
7. Consistent with the SAFE-T Act’s provisions (effective January 1, 2022), the County should institute mandatory status reviews of electronic monitoring every 60 days with the presumption that “program-compliant” individuals be removed from electronic monitoring. Currently, judicial orders for EM are open-ended, which unnecessarily extends the duration of surveillance “beyond levels required to assure public safety and compliance with court requirements.” The current open-ended nature of the program means that most people stay on EM until their court case is completed, even when they’ve followed all rules. 
8. Conduct a staffing needs assessment for both EM programs. Because of the large-scale of the County’s EM programs, and the fact that there are no commonly-accepted ratios of staff-to-participants nationally, each jurisdiction must assess its needs independently. Any such assessment should “develop ratios of staff monitors to defendants on electronic monitoring” in order to help with future scaling down of the programs.  
9. Develop a system that expedites the collection and transmission of information for consideration by Bond Court. Without such a system, people remain in detention for prolonged periods of time and release orders may “not [be] consistent with defendant characteristics.” By all accounts, communication between the Courts and CCSO acts as a barrier to timely responses to violations, changes in supervision schedules, and other program requirements. The third-party vendor used by the Sheriff’s Office consistently makes movement requests more difficult, “failing to return phone calls, explain ever-changing processes, and blocking direct contact with the Sheriff’s staff,” which causes delays in processing movement requests and resulting in the Sheriff either denying approved movement or charging false violations. According to the report, “one particularly destructive communications issue is the failure of the Sheriff’s staff to notify participants’ legal representatives of the re-incarceration of their clients,” which has caused people to be held in detention for 24-to-48-hours—and in one extreme case, weeks due to a lack of notification to the Public Defenders’ Office.
10. Develop a system that expedites review and approval of movement requests for people on house arrest. The persistent delays in approvals of movement requests that currently exist create unnecessary punishments from people awaiting trial by impacting participants’ employment, education, healthcare, treatment, and family/community engagement. 
11. Update the case management systems used by the CCSO and the OCJ. Both of the systems currently used are antiquated, and an updated system could better track program performance and outcome data.

Conclusions and Next Steps

Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts was honored to assist the Justice Advisory Council in developing this report. As explained in the report, in order for Cook County to fully and properly implement these recommendations, the full engagement of the key stakeholders – including formerly incarcerated people – is necessary. We hope that the report’s recommendations will be taken seriously by the Cook County Board—especially those that suggest the development of systems to continually review people’s EM status, prevent re-incarceration, and provide more flexibility for people to continue their lives while awaiting trial; the consolidation of pretrial EM services under the umbrella of the OCJ; and the general and significant shrinking of the pretrial electronic monitoring program overall. We believe – and evidence shows – that these things can be done without impacting public safety or compliance with court requirements, and will benefit our communities instead.