VICTORY: Sheriff’s Electronic Monitoring Program Will be Phased Out!
This morning – Thursday, November 21, 2024 – the Cook County Board of Commissioners voted to pass a budget amendment that significantly reduced funding for the Cook County Sheriff’s pretrial electronic monitoring (EM) program. This puts the county on track to consolidate the two EM programs into one program administered by the Office of the Chief Judge (OCJ).
This significant victory is a direct result of Chicago Appleseed’s advocacy, advocacy of our partners in the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice, and the advocacy of community members who have been directly impacted by the harms associated with electronic monitoring.
For years, Chicago Appleseed has advocated for the removal of the pretrial electronic monitoring program from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office in favor of a unified program. Our 2021 report, “10 Facts about Pretrial Electronic Monitoring in Cook County,” outlined our various concerns about the Sheriff’s EM program; our 2022 Electronic Monitoring Review, co-authored by CGL Companies for the Cook County Justice Advisory Council, looked deeper into the issue, recommending that the Cook County Sheriff no longer have control over pretrial electronic monitoring and that the county’s two programs be consolidated under the OCJ or a statewide Office of Pretrial Services.
The 2022 report was cited in both the Sheriff’s and OCJ’s budget hearings as the key reason for this reform. This victory was a direct result of our research.
Hundreds of hours of research have shown that the Cook County Sheriff’s pretrial electronic monitoring program has been incredibly harmful to people being monitored and their families. We’ve shown that its unnecessary standards, inconsistent management, technical inadequacies, and false alarms wreak havoc on people’s lives and abilities to provide for themselves and their families.
One person on EM told us:
If one of the goals of the criminal justice system as a whole is to help people become productive members of society, not allowing a person to work and go to their job is to the detriment of that goal. If someone cannot work, what are they going to turn to?
The rules of the Sheriff’s electronic monitoring program exacerbate housing and income instability. For example, people are inhibited by restrictive movement policies that prevent them from qualifying for certain housing options. The program’s policies restrict participants’ abilities to change addresses when and if they do eventually qualify. Constant false alarms from faulty technology cause repeated visits from the Sheriff’s police, which can create tension with landlords and neighbors.
The electronic monitoring program also places immense burdens on parenting and family life by confining a person to their home. As a person we interviewed who worked at a community organization stated:
I have one person who basically had to go live with his girlfriend [because of EM housing rules], and that was fine, but they thought [his EM placement] was for a couple months. It’s been a year now. This is especially true during the pandemic…it’s taxing and people get angry. Plus, when you add siblings to the mix? Then you’ve got an annoying sister who knows that you can’t leave the house just to cool off who just like will needle you—it’s traumatizing for the families and it’s psychologically exhausting.
Electronic monitoring is a form of incarceration that has negative impacts on people’s lives. While we remain concerned by the court’s over-reliance on EM, we are hopeful that consolidating the county’s two pretrial EM programs will reduce some of these harms.
Our research shows that the Office of the Chief Judge’s program is less harmful to people being monitored because it appears to align more closely with evidence-based practices and appropriate staffing models. Neither program is perfect, but the OCJ’s program provides a better model for a pretrial release monitoring program.
While we renew our calls for transparency into the Office of the Chief Judge’s pretrial electronic monitoring program (the OCJ’s program, like the rest of the judiciary in Illinois, is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act—a problem we are dedicated to solving), we commend the Cook County Board of Commissioners for making this change. We are committed to continuing to monitor the implementation of pretrial electronic monitoring and encourage the OCJ to provide transparency into their Adult Probation Electronic Monitoring Program, including the racial demographics of monitored people and their lengths of stay.
We are thrilled that our long-term advocacy has borne fruit. While advocacy like this can take years, we are proud to have sustained this advocacy, which has made a tangible difference in people’s daily lives and reduced the scope of mass incarceration in Cook County.