Sarah Staudt -Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts

About Sarah Staudt

Since 2018, Sarah Staudt (she/her) has led our criminal legal system reform efforts and now oversees the entire legislative and policy portfolio as our Director of Policy. Sarah primarily focuses on pretrial issues, leading our involvement in the Coalition to End Money Bond, and was instrumental in advocating for the groundbreaking Pretrial Fairness Act, which passed in 2021. Additionally, Sarah leads our program work focused on electronic detention, abolishing overly punitive sentencing systems, and promoting court system efficiency, fairness, and accountability. View all posts by Sarah Staudt →

Pretrial Fairness – Beyond Ending Money Bond

Chicago Appleseed is a founding member of the Coalition to End Money Bond. Since 2016, we have been pushing criminal justice system decision-makers and our legislators to get rid of the discriminatory, unconstitutional, and ineffective practice of holding people in custody while...

Summer 2019: Violence was down and Homicides were at their lowest in five years

Now that October has come and the summer is decidedly over, policy makers and journalists alike are engaging in a yearly, grim calculus: How bad was the gun violence in Chicago this summer? Did it get worse? Is it getting better? And most importantly, why? This summer, however, has been unusually p...

CPD’s “Gun Offender Dashboard” contains Disturbing Inaccuracies that are Misleading the Public about the Causes of Violent Crime

Chicago Police Department’s “Gun Offender Dashboard” contains Disturbing Inaccuracies that are Misleading the Public about the Causes of Violent Crime By Sarah Staudt, Senior Policy Analyst and Staff Attorney on behalf of the Criminal Justice Advisory Committee (CJAC) On Monday, Police Chief Eddi...

The Data is Out: Bond reform in Cook County has been a tremendous success

A Policy Statement from Chicago Appleseed and the Chicago Council of Lawyers The Data is Out: Bond reform in Cook County has been a tremendous success By Sarah Staudt, Senior Policy Analyst and Staff Attorney Bond reform has freed thousands of people from pre-trial incarceration, avoided...

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.

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 c...

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