End of cash bail in Illinois has not resulted in more crime, but has impacted court system
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Next week marks one year since Illinois outlawed cash bail, and advocates and critics of the change have been waiting patiently to see it if has been successful — or as some predicted, a disaster.
A panel of stakeholders, including Cook County Chief Public Defender Sharone R. Mitchell Jr., spoke Wednesday about the largely positive outcomes of ending cash bail.
"There were a lot of predictions about things that did not happen," said Mitchell.
The biggest concern was that the abolition of cash bail would lead to a rise in crime. The bottom line from the first year of data since the Pretrial Fairness Act was implemented is that such a thing has not happened. In fact, violent crime and property crime are down.
"Cash bail was not making us any safer," said Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx.
But the law has, in fact, impacted the court system in other ways.
"We're hearing a lot more about the strength of the evidence," said Professor David Olson of the Loyola University Chicago Center for Criminal Justice. "We're hearing a lot more about the risk assessment."
According to the Loyola Center for Criminal Justice, which combed through court data across the state of Illinois, hearings are taking significantly longer since the Pretrial Fairness Act went into effect a year ago.
In Cook County, the length of time being spent in court went from about four minutes to 16 minutes after the law went into effect. This is because judges are explaining their detention decisions more thoroughly.
Of the nearly 9,000 detention-eligible cases in Illinois at which the team looked, 36% of defendants were detained. In 43% of those cases, prosecutors never asked for detention.
But are the defendants who are released actually showing up to their court dates? So far, yes. The failure to appear rates have largely gone unchanged. Before the law went into effect, about 17% of defendants missed their court appearance. Now, it is 15%.
Jail populations are also down. The population of the Cook County Jail is down about 14%. Other urban parts of the state are also down about 14% in their jail populations, while rural counties are down about 25%.
The use of electronic monitoring in Cook County was predicted to rise. But so far, the data show that it hasn't.
"So more individuals are being released from the jail. The jail population is down," said Olson. "They're oftentimes being supervised in the community, but not under any electronic monitoring."
Olson explained that so far, the biggest critique of the system has been a frustration over non-detainable offenses, particularly in rural counties where there is less violent crime. Defendants avoided roughly $6.7 million in bond costs in the first nine months since the law went into effect.
"So we see defendants that have higher risk for committing criminal activity are more likely to be detained," Olson said.
Olson said so far, the data show that outlawing cash bail has had the intended effects.
"I think there's still people who think there's some individuals that can't be detained, that they would like to see detained," Olson said, "but for the most part, the law is being followed, and we're seeing a reduction in jail populations."
CBS News Chicago asked State's Attorney Foxx why she thinks prosecutors aren't asking judges to detain criminal defendants in almost half the cases that are detention-eligible prosecutors aren't asking for detention.
"I think it has allowed for us to do a thorough review of our cases before we hit the courtroom to be able to make an honest assessment about what we need," said Foxx, "and so just because something is eligible — just because you can — doesn't mean that you should.