Field Testing in Drug Arrests

Earlier this month, both The New York Times and The Marshall Project ran excellent stories on how a roadside field tests for drugs can return false positives that send innocent people to jail or even cause them to plead guilty when they did not possess drugs. The articles highlighted alarming uses o...
July 13, 2016

Chicago Appleseed at NACM 2016 presenting on Criminal Justice Reform

At this year's National Association of Case Management (NACM) conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (July 10-14) Ali Abid, Senior Criminal Justice Policy Analyst at Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice and Peter Coolsen, Court Administrator for the Criminal Division of the Circuit Court of Cook Count...
July 11, 2016

New Book Looks at Racial Injustice in the Cook County Courts

On May 11th, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve spoke at University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration about her new book, Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court. (Stanford Law Books). Before a packed auditorium, Van Cleve, a Temple University criminal justic...
June 8, 2016

Report on the Impact of Court Fines, Fees and Costs

The Collaboration for Justice—the joint social justice effort of Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice and the Chicago Council of Lawyers—has released a report on the impact and legality of court fines, fees and costs. The report details how the recent trend of shifting court costs to low-income and in...
May 26, 2016

Budget Standoff Threatens Flagship Court Reform

The Chicago Daily Law Bulletin published an editorial by Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice regarding the impact of the state fiscal crisis on the state's flagship prison diversion program, Adult Redeploy Illinois. The full text is reprinted below and a .pdf is available here: In this week’s state...
February 4, 2016