BELLEVILLE, Illinois — Nearly eight months after Illinois became the first state in the country to abolish cash bail, experts now say they have enough data to start analyzing the early impact of the "revolutionary" changes to the criminal justice system.
For nearly three years, critics who railed against the abolishment predicted the state would suffer a dramatic spike in violent crime incidents or would see a string of repeat offenders roaming free. However, a variety of experts in the criminal justice fields—police, prosecutors, and public defenders alike—say so far, the opposite has happened.
"Our jail population is actually down lower than what we've ever been in the past," Sgt. James Hendricks said.
He works at the St. Clair County Jail, where the detention facilities have historically been overcrowded with people who couldn't afford to post bond. Now, the total number of inmates in custody is at 384, down from a peak of 550, and a 19% reduction from where county jail population levels were on the day Illinois abolished cash bail.
Hendricks said while many officers are still navigating some of the changes, the new law also gives police another tool to arrest and jail repeat offenders who are caught violating the terms of their release while they await their trial.
"Absolutely, that's happening," he said. "That happens every day. And I will say that typically, those are the offenders that would have posted bond and been back out into the community. So in that instance, I do think that it's a little bit better for us that these people are now being held accountable, and they're not out continually victimizing the community."
Eric Rinehart, the top prosecutor in Lake County, said he once witnessed a defendant who was facing serious criminal charges for sexually assaulting a minor post a $200,000 bond and ultimately flee the country to evade prosecution.
Under the new system, Rinehart said judges now place their focus on "safety, safety, safety, and not access to cash.”
"When it comes to re-arrest rates, I think they're lower than they were under the cash system because the dangerous offenders are in custody," Rinehart said after speaking on a panel last month in Chicago.
"We're not seeing large numbers of failures to appear, and the dangerous offenders are detained. So they're making it to court," Rinehart said. "But by detaining dangerous offenders, we also are having the courts focus on those cases."
The full picture doesn't yet show how many defendants may have missed their court date.
A March report from the Civic Federation evaluated the impact of abolishing cash bail in Cook County and found that "questions remain about how the change in law is impacting recidivism and compliance with court appearances."
Farther south, in Jackson County, the public defender said their county jail has seen a 40% drop in the number of inmates.
"The pretrial Fairness Act: you don't have to like it, but it's working," Celeste Korando said. "Everyone had concerns. I mean, it was new. Nobody likes anything new. But the concerns really haven't come to fruition."
"This is working," Korando said. "Our crime rate is not up. If anything, it's holding steady. It's actually probably even on the decline a little bit."
She said the most noticeable change in her case load has been the absence of repeat offenders.
"We're not seeing the recidivism, we're not seeing the people who are out on pretrial detention committing repeated new offenses," she said.
"It's working," Rinehart added. "We're holding dangerous offenders so that they can't use cash to get out. It's working. And I think we're gonna see crime rates go down, partially because of the SAFE-T Act."
"I won't go as far to say that crime is down," Hendricks said. "I think that that's something that we're still gauging, the legal system is still gauging."
Most expert crime analysts want to look at larger sample sizes of data and compare year-over-year trends before they make a final analysis on whether crime truly went up or down. But even when data analysts at Loyola University compared seasonal averages, they found jail populations are lower almost across the board, and officials have not reported any alarming increases in crime.
The Civic Federation report also withheld judgment on the official impact of the new legislation while it awaits more data.
"While we know the jail population has decreased since the (Pretrial Fairness Act) was implemented, there is not yet data available to show whether there has been a shift in the types of crimes for which people are being detained, and how many of those released are being arrested and charged with new crimes."
Some advocates argued that the old money bond system drove crime rates higher.
"The system of paying bonds, paying ransom was never fair," Cook County Public Defender Sharone Mitchell said. "It didn't work. It didn't keep us safer. And it had a real devastating impact on families across the state."
Mitchell said those financial pressures drove families into despair and made it more likely some people would turn to violent crime.
"There is a very convincing case, a case that I believe in, that short-stay incarceration actually increases somebody's likelihood of returning to jail or being accused of harming somebody," he said.