By Dave Byrnes
Originally published in the Chicago Reader. Read the story on their website here.
On a Wednesday in mid-March, Janica Barnes sat in the gallery of room 102 at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse and waited for a judge to decide what would happen to her son, 22-year-old James Jones. He was accused of illegally possessing firearms while on parole for a prior firearm possession case, and a prosecutor with the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office argued he should be imprisoned ahead of trial. Jones’s public defender argued he was not a dangerous person; in fact, she told Cook County judge Deidre Dyer that he was a young father trying to break into the trades.
Dyer was unmoved. “You have not done well, from what I have heard,” she told Jones, commenting on his parole status amid this latest charge. She ordered him to pretrial detention following a hearing that lasted about 20 minutes, and though he had not yet been convicted, off he went to the Cook County jail.
Afterward, Barnes stood in the corridor outside and tried to express what it was like to see county sheriffs taking her son away. “They’re always rushed because they have so many people to get through,” she said of the court. Barnes had hoped that the court would have made an effort to get to know her son or consider the benefit of keeping him in the community, as his case was pending. “He’s a good father. He’s trying to work. He’s trying to get into school,” she said.
Barnes was not the only person that day—that week, that month, this year—to watch an unconvicted loved one led away by sheriffs to pretrial detention at the Cook County jail. Since taking office in December 2024, Cook County state’s attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke has pushed aggressively to increase the number of people held in pretrial detention in the name of public safety.
“We seek pretrial detention in the most serious violent offenses where the offender poses a clear and present danger to the community,” Burke’s office told the Reader in a statement. “When defendants who exhibit dangerous and reckless behavior are held in pretrial custody, they are not released into the community where they pose the risk of committing additional crimes and threatening others.”
Her critics say Burke’s heightened pursuit of pretrial detention violates the spirit of the landmark Pretrial Fairness Act, which abolished cash bail in Illinois in September 2023 and sought to reduce the number of people incarcerated before trial.
Opponents argue the people facing the sharp end of her policies, such as Barnes and her son Jones, experience a community harm from pretrial detention for which the system rarely accounts—in lost time, lost wages, and lost loved ones. Jones’s case is among many that legal scholars and advocates believe reflect a larger pattern: Burke has directed prosecutors to seek pretrial detention so aggressively, and in so many cases, that she is effectively re-creating through prosecutorial policy what the law aimed to curtail through reform.
The impact is evident in numbers. As of April 16, the Cook County jail population—a share of which includes those detained while awaiting trial—stood at more than 5,700, over 240 people more than when the Pretrial Fairness Act took effect. The jail population had been trending down for a decade before the act’s implementation. While it began slowly rising during former Cook County state’s attorney Kim Foxx’s last year in office, the pace of the increase rose dramatically after Burke took over.
Researchers at Loyola University, in a study on the rising Cook County jail population released in October, attributed much of the increase in the jail population over 2024 and the first half of 2025 to a rise in jail admissions. They linked a significant portion of the new admissions to an increase in detention petitions filed by the State’s Attorney’s Office and subsequently approved by county judges.
“Since [Burke]’s taken office, the number of petitions to detain that she has had her prosecutors file has jumped significantly. And that has led to an increase in the number of people who are held in the Cook County jail,” said Jessica Wang, a legal fellow with the progressive public interest law firm the MacArthur Justice Center. “She has been directly going against the spirit of the law.”
Specific articulable facts
The Pretrial Fairness Act, enacted as part of the larger SAFE-T Act in January 2021, was the culmination of years of organizing by groups such as the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice (INPJ). It made Illinois the first state to fully abolish money bail, replacing a wealth-based detention system with one that focuses on risk assessment, under which prosecutors must prove to judges that pretrial detention is warranted.
Before the act took full effect on September 18, 2023, Illinois ran a cash bail system that advocates argued disproportionately impacted Black and Brown communities, operating as “wealth extraction” from people often already struggling with poverty. Illinois residents collectively spent on average $140 million each year on money bonds, and the majority of people paying money bonds were low-income Black women, according to a report from the Chicago Community Bond Fund.
Under the new system, prosecutors must petition judges to order defendants detained before trial, and judges must consider those petitions under a three-prong test. First, the judge must find that the state has shown the “proof is evident or the presumption great” that the defendant committed a detention-qualifying offense. Detainable charges include aggravated sexual assault, aggravated domestic battery, and unlawful possession of a firearm by a person convicted of a felony. Second, the judge must find that the accused person would pose “a real and present threat” to the safety of the community or would be a flight risk if released. Third, the judge must conclude that “no condition or combination of conditions,” such as electronic monitoring, can mitigate that threat or risk. The law also requires judges to base their decisions on the “specific articulable facts” of each case, but it’s this insistence on specificity that critics argue Burke’s policies have undermined.
Burke is a former prosecutor, assistant state’s attorney, and a retired Illinois appellate court justice. Her predecessor, Foxx, had served in the role since December 2016 and was Cook County’s first Black state’s attorney. Foxx announced in 2023 that she would not seek reelection. On Burke’s first day in office, she announced she would direct her office to seek pretrial detention for “the highest classes of violent offenses, all violent offenses that occur on public transit, any offense that involves the possession or use of an assault weapon, as well as numerous domestic violence/sex offenses and crimes against children.”
The State’s Attorney’s Office, in its official December 2 pretrial detention policy, further stated pretrial detention “shall be sought” in every case involving a detainable felony offense where an “offender” is charged with murder or another crime in the most severe felony classification, or has another pending gun or violent crime case, or is currently on probation for a gun or violent crime case, or is on parole, or is alleged to have committed a violent crime while on pretrial electronic monitoring.
“Taking an across-the-board position like that subverts the goal of judges making individual determinations,” said Craig Futterman, a clinical professor of law and a director of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project at the University of Chicago’s Mandel Legal Aid Clinic. He focused particularly on the firearm policies, noting what he said were illegal firearm possession charges’ “powerful correlations to wealth and race.”
In the 16 months since Burke took office, prosecutors have requested pretrial detention in nearly 12,800 cases. That includes almost 2,700 cases involving alleged unlawful weapon use, and 835 felony cases involving automatic weapons. Of those for whom prosecutors have requested pretrial detention, more than 8,200—over 64 percent—have been Black. More than 2,800, another 22 percent, have been Latine.
County prosecutors, in the 16 months before Burke took office, requested detention in about 7,600 cases, including about 2,300 unlawful weapon use cases and about 520 felony cases involving automatic weapons. The proportion of Black and Latine individuals among those for whom prosecutors requested pretrial detention was about the same under Foxx as under Burke.
About two-thirds of Black people and nearly 60 percent of Latine people in Illinois live in Cook County as of 2020, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health. And while Burke’s office has sought to crack down on crimes involving assault weapons here, in other Illinois counties, including whiter parts of the state, there is little of the same zeal. Multiple Illinois sheriffs in counties outside Cook have even refused to enforce the state’s ban on assault weapon possession.
Sharlyn Grace, deputy public defender for policy at the Law Office of the Cook County Public Defender and a leader in the movement to abolish cash bail, framed the issue not as Burke rejecting the Pretrial Fairness Act outright, “but a leaning into oversimplified ideas of what makes us safe, what creates safer communities, and when pretrial detention should be requested.” Grace worked with groups that advocated for the abolition of cash bail, including the Chicago Community Bond Fund, the Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts, and the Coalition to End Money Bond. “The Pretrial Fairness Act’s structure depends in part on focusing court resources on the most serious cases, including an allegation of violence, or risk of violence, of harm to someone else,” she said.
In a separate study published in September 2024, Loyola University researchers found the length of pretrial detention hearings increased significantly after the Pretrial Fairness Act took effect. Before the act, hearings in Illinois were “almost uniformly short,” with a median length in Cook County of about four minutes. In the Pretrial Fairness Act’s first year, the median length of a Cook County detention hearing jumped up to 16.5 minutes and sometimes lasted almost an hour.
Burke’s office said it supported the Pretrial Fairness Act, asserting its pretrial detention policies do not conflict with it. But seeking blanket pretrial detention for an array of offenses, Grace warned, evokes the previous era of detention hearings. “Treating every case the same is what we used to do under the money bond system, and that’s why we spent 30 seconds to two minutes per case for the vast majority of people,” Grace said.
Concerns about Burke’s blanket detention-seeking policies extend beyond Illinois. Heather Pinckney, director of the Public Defender Service for Washington, D.C., was among multiple public defender officials from across the country who attended Cook County pretrial detention hearings on April 9. Washington, D.C., also has a local law in place that limits the use of money bond, though the law stops short of completely abolishing it.
Pinckney said she admired the lawyers operating in the courtroom, particularly the “very succinct” arguments made by Cook County public defenders, but like Futterman, raised concerns about Burke’s commitment to pushing for pretrial detention in all instances of certain offenses. “It cannot just be the nature of the charge,” Pinckney said. She also expressed doubt that increasing pretrial detention necessarily led to safer communities. “The idea, right, is we have concerns about the safety of the community if this person is released,” Pinckney said. “Just trying to hold people for the sake of holding people doesn’t address that.”
A real and present threat
No matter how many pretrial detention petitions prosecutors file, judges still have to approve them.
In the 16 months since Burke took office, county judges granted detention in about 73 percent of unlawful weapon use cases and 65 percent of felony cases involving automatic weapons, granting detention overall in about 67 percent of cases.
These figures mark an increase over Foxx’s last 16 months, during which judges granted detention in 66 and 68 percent of unlawful weapon use and felony automatic weapon cases, respectively, for an overall detention rate of 63 percent. Prior to Burke taking office, judges also granted detention in about 65 percent of the requested cases involving Black people and 61 percent of cases involving Latine people. Since Burke became state’s attorney, judges have granted detention for 68 percent of requested cases with Black people and 67 percent of cases with Latine people.
“If judges didn’t agree with [Burke], they would grant detention less often,” said David Olson, a criminologist at Loyola University, codirector of Loyola University Chicago’s Center for Criminal Justice, and a coauthor of the October 2025 study on the rising Cook County jail population. “It’s not just her controlling who goes to jail.”
But critics have pointed to other policies Burke has enacted, and to courtroom tactics prosecutors have employed, that they say pressure judges to grant pretrial detention. Matthew McLoughlin, an organizer with the INPJ, described several “cookie-cutter” arguments he said prosecutors have deployed while pushing for pretrial detention, such as claiming the time of day a person was arrested suggested they were especially dangerous. “If police arrest somebody with a gun in their car in the day, the argument will be, ‘This is extremely dangerous because it’s during the day and people are out, going to school, going to their jobs,’” he said. “If they get pulled over at night and they have a gun in the car, now the argument has been flipped, ‘This is extremely dangerous because it’s nighttime and there’s not a lot of people around.’”
The Reader witnessed McLoughlin’s claims firsthand while observing multiple cases, spread over pretrial detention hearings on March 17 and 18 and again on April 9, with prosecutors repeating similar arguments to judges in separate cases involving separate incidents. One repeat tactic, as McLoughlin noted, was to cite the time of day of an alleged incident to argue an accused person posed a danger to the community.
In one hearing on March 17, the Reader observed a 21-year-old Black man, allegedly found with an illegally modified firearm on a weekend afternoon, who was said to pose a danger to the community because it was daytime and people were out. In another March 17 case, a 37-year-old Latina woman allegedly involved in a drunk-driving crash at 7 AM on a Sunday was said to pose a threat to public safety because the incident occurred early in the morning. In yet another case on April 9, a county prosecutor argued a 20-year-old Latino man was dangerous because he told police he had a gun on him following a car search that occurred after 10 PM.
In the two cases observed on March 17, the judge released the defendants to electronic monitoring over the State’s Attorney’s Office’s objection. That objection is itself another pressure tactic, critics argued. Last April, Burke instructed her prosecutors to object when judges opt to place accused individuals under electronic monitoring rather than pretrial detention. The news came about a week after the Cook County Chief Judge’s Office began taking over the county’s electronic monitoring program from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, amid what then–chief judge Timothy Evans said were staffing concerns.
“On December 2, 2024, I issued a policy requiring that you seek detention in specific circumstances,” Burke wrote in her April 2025 memo to prosecutors, as reported by the TRiiBE. “I am now directing you to object on the record whenever you have sought detention, and the Judge has chosen to place the defendant on electronic monitoring/home confinement.”
Burke’s stated concern was public safety, specifically the alleged inability of staff in the chief judge’s office to act as law enforcement officers. “I believe this is a serious threat to public safety, and we must make that clear on the record, given that we have approved 57 escape charges since December 2, 2024,” the memo stated.
But the INPJ argued that objecting when judges release people to electronic monitoring is another way in which Burke’s office has pushed judges to grant more pretrial detention petitions. The Chicago Tribune editorial board ostensibly agreed, cheering in an April 9, 2025, column that said Burke’s decision “put judges on the spot to keep Cook County residents safe.” The INPJ, meanwhile, called the new policy “nothing more than fearmongering.”
McLoughlin also pointed to a Cook County Justice Advisory Council study, published with assistance from the Chicago Appleseed for Fair Courts in September 2022, which found that only about 17 percent of those on electronic monitoring were rearrested while released, including for misdemeanors and missed court dates. Fewer than 1 percent of those on pretrial release, both on and off electronic monitoring, were rearrested for violent crimes.
The Reader reported in February 2025 on how researchers in a November 2021 study found that up to 96 percent of alerts for people stepping outside their approved electronic monitoring zones “are resolved as non-violations.” Cook County chief judge Charles Beach II announced heightened scrutiny for people on electronic monitoring late this past January.
A separate Chicago Appleseed for Fair Courts study published in August 2025 argued that electronic monitoring “has evolved into a punitive system that disproportionately harms Black and Brown communities, reinforces carceral control, and perpetuates socioeconomic and racial inequities.” The organization called on Burke’s office to request pretrial electronic monitoring “only in cases where it will truly benefit public safety.”
“If we expect any criminal justice reform to be 99.9 percent effective, we’re never going to get out of this cycle of incarceration that is ultimately exacerbating the harms in our communities,” McLoughlin said.
By the numbers
The population of the Cook County jail began rising shortly after Burke took office, with a sharp increase in early 2025. After the Pretrial Fairness Act took effect on September 18, 2023, the jail population dropped quickly from a little under 5,500 people to about 4,650 on New Year’s Day 2024. That winter marked a low ebb for the jail population, the continuation of a yearslong decline from a peak of more than 11,400 jailed people in September 2013, according to April 2025 data the Chicago Tribune obtained from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office. The only time in the prior decade the jail population dipped lower was in the spring of 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Data analyzed by Cook County agencies in collaboration with Loyola University shows that, by the end of 2025, the average daily population in the Cook County jail had jumped to more than 5,840 people—an increase of more than seven hundred people compared to the end of the prior year and more than one thousand additional people on average since the start of 2024.
The same dataset shows that, in the first quarter of 2025, which included Burke’s first months in office, the average daily jail population was almost four hundred people higher than in the last quarter of 2024.
In raw numbers, the jail population peaked at more than 6,100 people in September and again at more than six thousand in January. As of April 16, the Loyola researchers found the average daily jail population was up 5.5 percent since the implementation of the Pretrial Fairness Act.
Olson noted that the county jail population rose during Kim Foxx’s last months in office. But he told the Reader he believed the slow rise in the jail population under Foxx was due in part to some people likely spending longer in jail than before the passage of the Pretrial Fairness Act, which abolished one’s ability to pay their way out. As a likely result, he said, “the jail population started to creep back up due to the longer lengths of stay.”
The October 2025 Loyola study found that “almost all” the increase in the Cook County jail population from the start of 2024 through mid-2025 had been due to increased jail admissions and that roughly 41 percent of those increased admissions were attributable to the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office filing more pretrial detention petitions and judges increasingly granting them.
“The state’s attorney’s new policies are indeed resulting in an increased number of people who are presumed innocent but held in jail,” Futterman said.
According to Olson, prosecutors under Foxx sought detention in about 30 percent of eligible cases from January through October 2024, rising to 35 percent in her final month in office. Olson said there “appeared to be a slight increase in detention being sought by Foxx toward the end of her term.” When Burke took over in December 2024, that figure jumped to 49 percent, an unmistakable shift. Over the first quarter of 2025, prosecutors under Burke sought detention in 46 percent of cases overall.
Burke’s office also launched a pilot program with the Chicago Police Department in January 2025 that allows Chicago police to directly file certain nonviolent felony gun-possession charges without waiting for prosecutorial review. It began in the Englewood neighborhood, expanded to the Calumet neighborhood last April, and went citywide last November. Chicago police directly filed 161 cases in 2025 under the program, according to data acquired by the Reader from a public records request to the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office. Prosecutors sought pretrial detention for more than half the defendants in those cases, and county judges granted the petitions in 38 of them.
Olson and other Loyola researchers found in a separate study, also released in October 2025, that pretrial jail populations fell in other Illinois counties between September 2023 and July 2025. They fell by 17 percent in rural Illinois counties and 11 percent in urban counties outside of Cook.
“In Cook County, when the new state’s attorney was elected, there clearly was a shift in pursuit of pretrial detention, and she said that on the campaign trail,” Olson said of Burke. “So she did what she said she’d do.”
“It can jeopardize their access to housing, their access to employment, their custody of their children, access to government benefits, just a whole host of collateral consequences that come when someone is jailed pretrial,” Wang said.
Being placed in the Cook County jail carries risk in and of itself. The jail has a documented history of abuse, and 55 people died in custody between 2020 and 2023 alone.
“When we’re talking about the pursuit of pretrial detention, almost everyone who is criminally charged in Cook County will come back to Cook County in the future,” Grace said. “And most people will come back relatively quickly. Very few people are going away to never come back. So then the question is, are they coming back in a position where they’re better able to succeed? Or are they coming back in a position where they have more disadvantages, more handicaps, more trauma, less time working, less access to mental health care?”
Barnes, whose son remained in custody as of press time, gave her own frustration with the pretrial detention process. Whatever benefits to public safety the State’s Attorney’s Office claimed came from detaining Jones before he was convicted of the charge against him didn’t change the fact that her son was now gone. As sheriffs led him away, she had been expected to watch on in courtly, respectful silence. “I wish they would get to know the character of the person, or at least let the family members talk,” Barnes said. “Instead, we’ve got to just sit there and take it.”
In another courtroom in the Leighton courthouse that same morning in March, a different judge sent a 28-year-old woman to pretrial detention over charges that she had fought and injured someone. As sheriffs led her away, another young woman stood at the glass doors separating the gallery from the court officials and cracked them just an inch. “Call me,” the second woman called after her loved one. “I love you.” She declined to speak with the Reader. She said she had to tell her mother what had just happened.
A safer Cook County
Even as the jail population rose in 2024 and 2025, overall violent crime rates in Chicago were falling. The city ended 2025 with fewer violent crime incidents than in any year in the prior decade. The city recorded 420 homicides, 168 fewer than were recorded in 2024. The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office said it believed the drop in crime was partially due to its policies. “We believe our pretrial detention policy played a role by ensuring that individuals who posed a threat to the community were detained, rather than released to reoffend,” the office said in a statement to the Reader.
But Futterman pointed out, and city data shows, that overall violent crime rates, including homicides and all shooting victimizations, were already falling between 2023 and 2024, before Burke took office and instituted the new pretrial detention policies. Violent crime overall has continued to fall through 2026. However, despite Burke’s stance on pretrial detention for gun crimes, there were more homicides and shooting victimizations as of mid-April 2026 than over the same period in 2025.
“Even the detention of far less people did not result in a correlating increase in violence or crime,” Futterman said.
Besides the crime rate, Sharlyn Grace and Jessica Wang both stressed that jailing someone in Cook County ahead of trial carries knock-on effects for both the accused individuals and the communities they’re a part of. The compounding impact includes individuals missing work, children losing a parent, and families facing a loss of income.