Earlier this week, the number of people in Cook County Jail exceeded 6,000 for the first time in more than three years.
The Law Office of the Cook County Public Defender is deeply concerned about the recent rise in pretrial jailing—incarceration before any decision on guilt or innocence has been made by a judge or jury.
During a time when due process is under attack in our country, we must remember that the presumption of innocence is not simply a dusty old legal principle, it is a constitutional right and the primary guardrail against wrongful convictions and mass incarceration.
We must not forget how jailing more people awaiting trial negatively impacts our communities. Jailing someone pretrial lowers employment rates, increases chance of rearrest, creates housing instability and food insecurity, and it inhibits access to mental health treatment. The harms of pretrial incarceration have been documented extensively. Further, these effects are concentrated in the very same neighborhoods that already suffer most from both criminalization and violence.
We have more progress to make, but Cook County communities have achieved hard-won reductions in violence through investment in social service resources, health care, and dedicated prevention programs. Any return to the failed policies of the past that expect incarceration to reduce rates of violence directly undermines this progress.
Both safety and justice demand that we stay true to our values and the research: pretrial reforms work. Cook County cannot go back to a time where pretrial incarceration is the rule rather than the exception.