We are disappointed but unsurprised to see the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board supporting Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke’s regressive call to repeal the Pretrial Fairness Act’s human rights protections for people subjected to electronic monitoring. Like Burke’s op-ed, the Ed Board’s’s call to action relies on fear and misinformation to make its points.

The facts remain the same: 

• Since Illinois implemented the Pretrial Fairness Act, we have seen record drops in violent and property crime. 
• 94% of people who returned to the community while awaiting trial in Cook County have not been charged with any new violent or person offenses while on pretrial release.

With crime down, opponents of the Pretrial Fairness Act have had to narrow their calls for rollbacks to this historic civil rights legislation. By focusing on individual cases and ignoring the success of the overwhelming majority of people on pretrial release, proponents of mass incarceration are trying to manufacture a problem for the “solution” they’ve wanted since this law took effect. This is part of a larger pattern where fear and misinformation surrounding individual cases is used to call for changes to the law benefiting hundreds of thousands of Illinoisans and their families every year. The Chicago Tribune’s own reporters identified the same dynamic in the Chicago Mayoral race where mayoral candidates are trying to distort the public’s view of public safety in Chicago in order to create fear and drum up votes for regressive policy positions. 

At the root of these attacks on pretrial electronic monitoring is a much more nefarious idea: that people accused of certain offenses should be jailed  without trial and regardless of the facts of the case, information is available about that person’s likelihood to succeed pretrial, or how they would be adversely impacted by pretrial jailing. This isn’t just an attack on the Pretrial Fairness Act, it’s an attack on the foundation of our criminal legal system: the right to due process and the presumption of innocence.

We must also remember that prior to the Pretrial Fairness Act, people subjected to electronic monitoring in Cook County couldn’t even take the garbage out of their homes without fear of going to jail. For people subjected to electronic monitoring, there was no way to go to a grocery store or laundromat and in many cases, it was impossible to maintain employment. The stories of Tim Williams and Lavette Mayes succinctly illustrate the harms caused by pretrial electronic monitoring and shows why the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus took action to address the human rights crises occurring on Cook County’s electronic monitoring program. In fact, even after the reforms went into effect, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office considered checking the mail in the foyer of a resident’s apartment building to require movement permission or risk a violation—a reality of essential movement that is obscured by false claims about “free roaming” and “wandering.”

Illinois legislators must stand strong on defending the right to pretrial release. We must not allow opportunistic politicians to bully their way into returning to a time when countless people subjected to electronic electronic monitoring lost their jobs and housing, were prevented from accessing medical care, going to a grocery store or laundromat, or other seemingly mundane yet important locations to meet basic needs. That system didn’t make anyone safer.

Want to dive into the factual inaccuracies of State’s Attorney Burke’s attack on EM? Click here to find the blog post we released when Burke’s op-ed was originally published.