Last year, the Illinois General Assembly passed the Pretrial Fairness Act, ending money bail across Illinois.  

Unsurprisingly, law enforcement decried the new law. Perhaps the most perplexing argument from law enforcement against the end of money bail came from DuPage County Sheriff James Mendrick.  According to Sheriff Mendrick, the end of money bail will limit the ability of jails to provide treatment to individuals with substance use disorders. The Sheriff noted that “(p)eople are not going to get off drugs on their own. We have a captive audience here. We take advantage of that.” 

These are strange sentiments coming from someone who was recently sued by the ACLU in order to ensure that their client would not be denied access to methadone while incarcerated in DuPage’s jail.  

The Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice fully supports assisting people who struggle with substance use disorders, what would be most helpful is to fully implement the Pretrial Fairness Act and to invest in harm reduction and treatment services outside the criminal legal system–a system which is fundamentally ill-equipped to manage complex health conditions. 

Today in Illinois, people who are arrested for issues related to substance use are often detained in jails while awaiting trial, even though there may be no reason to believe that their release would pose any pubilc safety risk. Judges sometimes acknowledge that an individual could be safely released, but order the person detained anyway, under the erroneous belief that treatment behind bars provides the best means for rehabilitation. 

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart has repeatedly claimed that the system “is so screwed up that I’ve become the largest mental health provider in the state of Illinois.” Yet many features of jails are inherently detrimental to people with substance use disorders and other mental health needs: overcrowding, violence, enforced solitude and isolation from social networks or, conversely, lack of privacy, lack of meaningful activity, insecurity about future prospects, and inadequate health services—especially mental health services.

Jails are not treatment centers and sheriffs are not clinicians. In fact, pretrial incarceration dramatically worsens health outcomes for people who use drugs: People who use opioids are 40 times more likely to die of an overdose in the first two weeks after being released from incarceration. And even relatively short periods of incarceration disconnect a person from family and friends, employment, education, and stable housing, destabilizing their social supports and increasing the chances that they will be rearrested. 

People confined in jails need access to necessary medical care, including evidence-based treatment for substance use disorder and mental health issues. But the overwhelming majority of people who use drugs do not have a “substance use disorder” nor do they require treatment. And while approximately half of incarcerated people do have substance use disorders,most jails do not provide meaningful access to medically appropriate treatment. Among people in Illinois jails and prisons, only an estimated 17 percent¹ of those in need of clinical treatment services actually receive those services during their incarceration. Even when jails do offer treatment programs, those programs usually fall far short of clinical best practices. Furthermore, exposure to the traumatic environment of jail makes recovery difficult even in rare instances that evidence-based treatment is actually available. 

While jails can and should provide substance use treatment to those in their custody who need and want it, no person should ever be incarcerated for the sole purpose of getting them into treatment. This is an abuse of power. Voluntary community-based treatment is far more effective than coerced or jail-based forms of treatment, and can be provided at a fraction of the expense. Rather than paying an average of $38,268 per person per year to incarcerate people who use drugs, local governments should spend those funds to expand access to community-based treatment and harm reduction services–as well as other essential resources with a track record of success like public housing, education, and jobs programs that help stabilize families and communities.

Learn more about our recommendations for implementation of the Pretrial Fairness Act in our new report “From Policy to Progress: A Roadmap for Successful Implementation of the Pretrial Fairness Act”. Download it here: bit.ly/Policy2Progress

¹Sneed, Erin. Predictors of Prison-Based Drug Treatment in Illinois. Loyola University Chicago Master’s Thesis, 2015.