During yesterday’s Cook County Budget Hearings, commissioners discussed a plan to consolidate the county’s two electronic monitoring programs under Pretrial Services, a division of the Office of the Chief Judge. Cook County is an outlier—both nationally and right here in Illinois—in the structure of our pretrial electronic monitoring supervision and the extent of its use. The Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice fully supports the plan to consolidate the county’s two electronic monitoring programs as a fiscally responsible decision that better serves our communities.

For years, our county has run one of the nation’s largest pretrial electronic monitoring programs, operating two duplicative programs through the Sheriff’s and Chief Judge’s Offices. In 2022, there were nearly nine times as many people on pretrial electronic monitoring in Cook County as there were in the entire state of New Jersey, which has dramatically reduced its use of pretrial incarceration without seeing an increase in missed court dates or rearrests. New Jersey’s experience shows that reducing pretrial incarceration can be safely achieved without relying on electronic monitoring.

During the budget hearings, concerns were raised about reforms to electronic monitoring that were included in the Pretrial Fairness Act. We want to clarify that there is nothing in the law requiring the Cook County Sheriff or any other entity overseeing electronic monitoring to stop monitoring individuals during essential movement. In fact, every person on electronic monitoring is being tracked using GPS technology at all times. There is never a moment where the location of a person on electronic monitoring is unknown. The Pretrial Fairness Act included a provision guaranteeing that people on electronic monitoring be given two opportunities each week to perform essential tasks like grocery shopping and attending medical appointments. This was in direct response to practices in Cook County that jeopardized the health and safety of people on electronic monitoring. 

The tentative plan to consolidate the county’s electronic monitoring programs would bring Cook County into line with the rest of the state, which operates pretrial electronic monitoring through Pretrial Services. This plan also mirrors the recommendations made in a report commissioned by the Board of Commissioners in 2020 and conducted by Chicago Appleseed and CGL who both came away from their analysis of the county’s electronic monitoring programs with recommendations that the county both reduce the use of electronic monitoring and consolidate the two programs. For years, Cook County has demonstrated that we can reform pretrial practices to reduce the jailing of people awaiting trial without seeing an increase in missed court dates or rearrests. Consolidating the county’s two electronic monitoring programs is a sensible step in the county’s efforts to build a more equitable justice system.