Dispelling Myths: The Pretrial Fairness Act and Domestic Violence
In January 2021, the Illinois General Assembly passed a sweeping criminal justice reform package, presented by the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus, which includes the Pretrial Fairness Act (HB 3653 SFA2). The Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA) abolishes money bail; ensures faster release for people presumed innocent; requires courts provide common sense pretrial services; mandates government transparency; and reforms the warrant system in Illinois. The bill alleviates the financial burden that money bonds put on innocent families and ensures lack wealth is never the reason people stay in jail.
The Pretrial Fairness Act ensures poverty is no longer a driver of incarceration. Once Governor Pritzker signs the bill into law, this victory will do more than end wealth-based incarceration – it will create an overall fairer pretrial system in Illinois.
The bill also abolishes money bond and reforms the pretrial decision-making process so that risk, not access to money, determines who should be incarcerated pretrial. It creates a system that balances the need to restore the right of innocence until proven guilty, with the option that if a person is a risk to flee or are a threat to a person’s safety, they can be detained. Additionally, it ends the practice of taking through bond payment millions of dollars out of the pockets of families (typically Black and Brown women) who often can barely afford it and transforms a broken pretrial system that has been a key driver of mass incarceration and wrongful convictions.
Letter to Governor Pritzker in Support of the Pretrial Fairness Act (February 5, 2021) – Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts & Chicago Council of Lawyers
Still, opponents of the PFA’s reforms have continually asserted misleading public statements that use survivors of gender-based violence as props to sow fear that the Pretrial Fairness Act makes victims unsafe.
The truth is that anti-domestic violence (DV) and anti-sexual assault advocates have worked with Chicago Appleseed and other members of the Coalition to End Money Bond and the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice to ensure that reforms to the state’s pretrial criminal system only enhance protections for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. Through rigorous information sharing and collaboration, numerous DV and sexual assault groups helped shape the Pretrial Fairness Act to, among other things, strengthen currently-lacking notification processes by mandating DV survivors be notified at every stage of the decision-making process for their case.
Right now in Illinois, some people charged with Domestic Violence are released soon after they are arrested because they can afford to pay a cash bond. Meanwhile, people highly unlikely to hurt another person languish in jail because they do not have enough money to bail out.
The Pretrial Fairness Act takes money out of the equation by ensuring pretrial decisions are made based on safety, not on whether or not a person has access to money.
This bill was crafted with domestic violence advocates and a Domestic Violence Working Group is statutorily enforced in its text. Modeled after successful groups in other states, this advisory group will provide additional evidence-based recommendations to ensure the safety of interpersonal violence survivors and their families. The proposed reforms will require courts to carefully scrutinize the unique facts of gender-based violence cases, particularly when there is a history of abuse. The Pretrial Fairness Act creates a task force to ensure that survivors, advocates, and experts are continually providing evidence-based recommendations to reduce harm in courts across Illinois.
As a member organization of the Coalition to End Money Bond, Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts was deeply involved in the drafting of the Pretrial Fairness Act. This transformative piece of legislation will not only end our unjust money bond system, but will mitigate some impacts of systemic racism in our courts and make our legal system fairer and more effective for everyone involved – both people accused of breaking the law and survivors of violence.
Click here for a one-page information sheet about the Pretrial Fairness Act and domestic violence from Chicago Appleseed and The Network.