“This day will always mark a special day for me,” Lavette Mayes, an advocate with the Chicago Community Bond Fund, said today during a press conference outside the George N. Leighton Criminal Courthouse to celebrate the first anniversary of the Pretrial Fairness Act.
Mayes emotionally recounted her experience of spending 429 days in Cook County Jail for a 2015 arrest due to her being unable to afford the $250,000 bond for her first offense. Mayes’ family received financial help from the Chicago Community Bond Fund for her release. She said with the passing of the Pretrial Fairness Act, she is happy that no one will have to experience what she did.
“Because of the trauma and the suffering that my family and kids went through, we feel like no one else should have to go through what we went through,” Mayes said during the press conference.
The Pretrial Fairness Act, also known as “no cash bail,” is one piece of the overall Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today (SAFE-T) Act that was passed in January 2021 and officially took effect on Sept.18, 2023 after legal challenges postponed its initial January 2023 implementation date. The Pretrial Fairness Act abolishes cash bail and instead assesses individuals’ cases by their safety risks to the community, creating a more equitable system.
As lawmakers pushed for the criminal reform bill, conservatives spent millions of dollars on a misinformation and fearmongering campaign dubbing the SAFE-T Act a “purge” law that would lead to dangerous criminals being let out of jail to wreak havoc.
As studies pour in on the impacts of the Pretrial Fairness Act, those who work in the criminal legal system say, just a year later, financially it has been beneficial for those historically impacted by pretrial arrests.
“In Cook County, the vast majority of people accused of offenses are Black, and [for] a long period of time, there were three options of what could happen with the person before their trial: either release or detention or money bond,” Cook County Public Defender Sharone Mitchell said. “The money bond option was the majority outcome, and that really caused families, mothers, sisters, aunts, churches, to have to go into pockets and bond people out.”
Mitchell noted that the outcome of cash bail weighs heavier on those who have to come up with the funds to prevent their loved ones from sitting in a cell pretrial.
“I dealt with families all the time where they had to go in their pocket and they had to make a decision about making payments to get somebody out or paying their rent or paying a light bill or paying a gas bill. So to remove this process, obviously, is a significant saving for those families,” Mitchell said.
The state of Illinois was estimated to have collected over $140 million per year in monetary bail before the implementation of the Pretrial Fairness Act — dollars that came out of families’ pockets. An estimated $14 million was “kept as administrative fees by counties, even for defendants whose cases were dismissed or who were found not guilty. For those found guilty, the remainder was also likely kept by counties for fees, fines, restitution, etc,” Don Stemen, Loyola professor and co-director of the University’s Center for Criminal Justice, said in an email to The TRiiBE.
As families have saved money with the passing of the Pretrial Fairness Act, Mitchell said the removal of cash bonds has resulted in less money for counties that used the money to “subsidize a portion of their criminal legal system.”
“To me, it’s quite horrifying. That means you have people who have only been accused, they’re not guilty, basically paying money to the state, and it’s not usually that person [paying the money]. It’s that person’s family, essentially, paying money to the county to help support the system.”
Mitchell said he has heard opponents say that funds for public defenders need to be replaced but he disagrees that payment for public defenders should come from the accused party.
While an uncommon practice in Cook County, Sharlyn Grace, senior policy advisor at the Law Office of the Cook County Public Defender said when the accused uses a public defender, many counties in Illinois take from their bond funds to pay for the services.
“It’s supposed to be based on ability to pay but that doesn’t really happen in many cases. If there’s a money bond posted, the court acts as though that is evidence of ability to pay for the public defender and can take up to $5,000 for felony cases,” Grace said.
Further research from Loyola’s Center for Criminal Justice shows “about four of every five dollars posted each year [for bond] went to court-imposed fines and fees alone.” This was also the case when the person was found innocent and the money was only used to secure release with an expectation that they would later be refunded.
Ahead of the passing of the Pretrial Fairness Act, some counties allocated more county funds for their court services, and the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts created a $10 million Public Defender Fund.
In its document “A Vision for Supporting Communities After the End of Money Bond,” the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice suggests long-term, sustainable funding from county budgets to be allocated for public defenders.
In addition to the amount of money individuals and families have saved by not having to spend money on bail, Mitchell said economic benefits also can be seen in not having people sit in jail for days trying to come up with funds to post bail. They now have the ability to return to work to earn money and not experience any interruptions to their routines.
“If you’re in jail for three days or five days or seven days, that means you’ve lost your job, right? That means that you can’t pay your rent. That means, if you had any type of education thing going on, that means you’ve lost that. If you had any type of public assistance that you relied upon, you were at risk of losing that. So those three-, five-, seven-day stays created a significant economic impact on families,” Mitchell said.
During a media summit on findings in the first year of the Pretrial Fairness Act, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx called the misinformation efforts racist.
“The notion of the purge, the people they were saying were coming for you were Black men coming and raiding your homes and all hell was going to break loose. It was rooted in racism,” Foxx said.
Mayes said she’s heard skepticism from people who are still worried about the negative impacts of the misinformation running rampant.
“Most people were saying it was going to be a purge, but I don’t think they really understood what [monetary bond] was doing to the community,” she said.
The Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice helped to establish the Pretrial Success Act, which will appropriate $3.5 million to expand “health and human services” to those awaiting trial starting Jan. 1. The bill was sponsored by State Representative Maurice West (D–Rockford) and Senator Elgie Sims (D-IL).
