Tag Archives: cook county jail

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...

Today we published a new report, Punishing Fear: Facts about the “War on Guns” in Chicago, which analyzes the policies, processes, and sociocultural realities that have led to the hypercriminalization of gun possession—the “War on Guns,” which parallels the historic War on Drugs and has similarly de...

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...

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...

As we have reported before, the Cook County Felony Courts saw a massive slowdown in case resolutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because in-person courts were closed for the majority of 2020 and some of 2021, trials became extremely rare. At the same time, other kinds of case dispositions, like gu...