Yesterday, more than 50 community, legal, policy organizations, and service providers sent a letter to the Cook County Board of Commissioners in support of the proposal to streamline Cook County’s two electronic monitoring systems by housing all pretrial electronic monitoring under the Office of the Chief Judge. This proposed transition is both fiscally responsible and in line with the recommendations made by CGL and Chicago Appleseed in their 2022 Electronic Monitoring Review commissioned by the Cook County Board of Commissioners. The Review found that the “current system of dual pretrial release programs, one under the Sheriff and one managed by Adult Probation, is inefficient, confusing, and serves no positive program objective.” The plan to bring these two programs together would ensure that Cook County mirrors the rest of Illinois, where pretrial electronic monitoring programs are operated by Pretrial Services under the judicial branch. The Cook County Sheriff’s electronic monitoring only came into existence in response to the Duran consent decree that required the county to reduce incarceration in Cook County Jail. This consent decree was lifted in 2017. It is past time to eliminate Cook County’s extra electronic monitoring program.

Currently, Cook County spends more than $35 million dollars annually to operate these duplicative programs. This is particularly concerning because there is no evidence showing that this technology improves community safety. A 2021 study by the Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts showed that people on electronic monitoring have the same extremely low rates of re-arrest as people who are released pretrial without monitors.

While Cook County has in many ways led the nation in pretrial reforms, we remain an outlier in our overreliance on electronic monitoring. Jurisdictions like New Jersey have shown that pretrial jailing can be reduced without increasing the use of electronic monitoring. While we are encouraged by the 18.8% decrease in the number of people on the Sheriff’s electronic monitoring program since the Pretrial Fairness Act took effect, more progress can be made by streamlining all pretrial electronic monitoring under the Office of the Chief Judge. We encourage the county to begin a rigorous education program with court stakeholders to further decrease the use of electronic monitoring. 

Over the last decade, Cook County has successfully reformed pretrial practices and reduced pretrial incarceration. The unification of the Pretrial Services and Sheriff’s electronic monitoring programs would streamline the use of this technology, save the county money, make the system easier to navigate for people on electronic monitoring, and be an important first step towards responding to the recommendations made in the County’s own 2022 Electronic Monitoring Review.