Tag Archives: Cook County Board of Commissioners

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...

Last year, when he was unable to "keep the people in his custody safe," Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart implemented punitive measures like prohibiting visitors to Cook County Jail from bringing in paper, attributing overdose deaths to paper soaked with narcotics and poisons. There were 17 deaths in 202...

This week, Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts gave testimony at two Cook County Board of Commissioners meetings on September 20 and September 22 to warn against the harms caused by electronic surveillance.  At the first Board of Commissioners meeting on September 20, our Director of Po...

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 a...

In June, the Sixth Amendment Center published a report, “The Right to Counsel in Illinois: Evaluation of Adult Criminal Trial-Level Indigent Defense Services,” which shines new light on Illinois’ indigent defense system—and its inability to live up to constitutional standards. Commissioned by the...