After months of planning and discussion, the Cook County sheriff’s office starting Tuesday will no longer accept new electronic monitoring participants, marking the beginning of a shift in one way pretrial justice is handled in Cook County.
The county will now run all electronic monitoring through the court system, merging parallel programs that have previously operated separately under the authority of Sheriff Tom Dart and Chief Judge Tim Evans. Often used as something of a middle ground between being released or jailed pretrial, both programs use GPS technology to oversee defendants that judges determine need additional supervision, even though they aren’t ordered to remain in jail.
Officials have discussed merging the electronic monitoring programs for years, but the move became a reality last year when Dart announced he would no longer take new clients. The change was supported by Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, but was initially resisted by Evans.
It’s a large undertaking: The chief judge’s office needs new staff, new space and the money to pay for both. Evans’ office estimated it would cost about $10 million this year alone as its responsibilities ramp up. It is also poised to set off battles with unions that represent sheriff’s office personnel whose electronic monitoring roles will no longer be needed as that program ramps down.
And the move has been divisive, bringing to the fore long simmering public debates about how electronic monitoring should be used and whether it makes the community safer.
Some experts and stakeholders support the change, arguing that the new system will be better aligned with more humane best practices and reduce inefficiencies from having separate, siloed monitoring programs. Others, though, including the Cook County state’s attorney, have raised concerns about the public safety impact of the change.
With dueling political philosophies, labor conflicts and budget issues on the horizon, the county will begin the transition Tuesday, though a full switch is likely at least six months away.
The Tribune sent a list of questions to the offices of Evans and Dart about the implementation of the change, cost and budget issues and public safety and other concerns raised by community and criminal justice stakeholders.
A spokesman for Evans referred to a presentation made to the county board’s Criminal Justice Committee in March, but otherwise declined to answer questions and said Evans would release a more comprehensive statement on Monday.
In written answers to Tribune questions provided by a spokesman for Dart, the sheriff said he made the decision to phase out his program because of longtime concerns about his office’s ability to manage the program safely.
“As Sheriff, I swore an oath to protect the citizens of Cook County, and I believe a true failure of leadership would be to continue an Electronic Monitoring program that has been degraded to the point that it can no longer responsibly serve our communities,” Dart said in the statement.
For years, the county has run multiple electronic monitoring programs, started at different points in time for different reasons. The sheriff’s program was created in 1989 out of a mandate to reduce overcrowding in the county jail following a consent decree, while the chief judge launched a separate program in 2009 to supervise people charged or convicted of violating orders of protection.
Dart has talked about shedding responsibility for his program as early as 2019, claiming that high-risk suspects released on electronic monitoring hurt his ability to effectively manage the program. That criticism from Dart only increased with passage of the Pretrial Fairness Act, when he said he was receiving more defendants accused of gun and violent offenses. Preckwinkle at the time welcomed a transition to the judge to foster a “program that supports rehabilitation and reentry.”
In the written statements to the Tribune, Dart said that for decades his program operated in order for “low-level, non-violent offenders to remain in the community while ensuring they appeared in court.” He was critical of changes in law and policy that he said led to more defendants charged with serious violent offenses being placed in his program.
Dart’s position, though, is at odds with reform advocates and other county leaders who have said that electronic monitoring is a restrictive measure that should be reserved for more serious charges.
Evans has previously pushed back on absorbing the sheriff’s program, questioning the notion that it would result in savings and efficiencies.
Electronic monitoring at times can put the agencies running the programs in a hot seat if suspects on the programs are accused of committing a new, high-profile crime, though it is up to individual judges to decide whether someone should be released and on what conditions.
The chief judge’s office runs a curfew program in which most participants are barred from being out at night and in the early morning but can still attend work, school and the doctor. Evans also runs a domestic violence-focused GPS program. The sheriff’s program usually defaults to a 24-hour “house arrest” model except for movement allowed by the law or judges.
According to the most recent available data, the sheriff’s electronic-monitoring program oversaw slightly more than 1,500 people while the two GPS-based programs run by the chief judge’s office had around 2,100 participants.
The sheriff’s sunset date is slated for September, though his head of intergovernmental affairs, Jason Hernández, said that date is “not ironclad” at an early March hearing in the county’s Criminal Justice Committee.
Costs and logistics
Phones used by detainees to call families to secure housing while on electronic monitoring are set up inside the electronic monitoring discharge facility of Division V at the Cook County Jail, April, 12 2018, in Chicago. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
There won’t be significant savings to balance the ledger from Dart phasing out his electronic monitoring program. Dart plans to offer new roles to the roughly 105 employees already assigned to the program, and will allow electronic monitoring employees to bid for other jobs, he said.
Asked whether it was fiscally responsible to keep the employees even though work was transferring out, Dart said they have more than 300 vacant correctional officer positions.
“Even with the EM Investigators returning to the jail there will still be the need for additional staff,” he said in the statement.
Jordan Boulger, an executive assistant for administration and research in the chief judge’s adult probation department told commissioners at the March hearing that in order for their office to match the full 24-hour monitoring currently done by the sheriff, including “device deactivations, swapping out malfunctioning devices, responding to alerts and knocking on doors and other manual work that our staff do in the field” — it would need about 66 to 83 new people in its home confinement unit, on top of the 39 officers and nine supervisors already working there.
Each person on electronic monitoring is also assigned a pretrial supervision officer. After the full transition, the office’s overall pretrial caseload — including defendants who are not on electronic monitoring — is estimated to rise from about 6,400 today to about 7,300 in the next six months, Boulger said, requiring another 54 to 70 people in that unit on top of the 73 already there.
All those new employees will need space to work, and additional technology (the two offices use the same vendor for monitors) and training.
The chief judge’s current space at 26th Street and California Avenue is “bursting at the seams already,” adult probation officials testified. Their goal is to find more space close to the courthouse.
County commissioners shifted $6.3 million from Dart’s budget to Evans’ this year to help the chief judge pay for the transition, but it’s short of the estimated $10 million price tag. The chief judge put in a separate request with state officials earlier this month for reimbursement to cover some of the 150 new positions, a change that would require a tweak to the proposed state budget. Cara Smith, the state’s pretrial services director, told county commissioners earlier this month that legislators were aware of the request.
Looming fights with the unions that represent workers currently assigned to the sheriff’s electronic monitoring program could also add to the cost, as labor leaders pledge to fight the transfer of the work.
Anthony McGee, vice president of the Teamsters Local 700 and a former Cook County corrections officer, said leaders believe reassigning the some 90 investigators now assigned to electronic monitoring could run afoul of the law and their collective bargaining agreement and are “prepared to use every resource that’s available to us to right this wrong.”
Dart said his office has been conversing with the unions to “ensure a smooth and seamless transition.”
The union that represents the chief judge’s adult and juvenile probation departments, AFSCME Local 3486, meanwhile said it wants assurances that enough staff, training and equipment will be added to handle the growing caseload and the increasing responsibilities of later shifts.
AFSCME regional director Anne Irving told the Tribune that officers were already concerned about their safety before this transition. Members want assurances they can handle the additional caseload, be paired up when necessary and won’t be “running from case to case to case” without consideration of the risk level of that client or their environment, she said.
“That’s the kind of thing we’re going to have to bargain: What kind of enhanced security could we provide for folks working with that population?” she said.
At the March hearing, Office of Chief Judge staff said they expected to onboard an incoming class of probationary employees before April 1 to fill vacant positions and expected two more new classes to join the office in June and October.
Public safety debates
Every day, thousands of people pour into the county’s courthouses, some walking through the halls with a black device strapped to their ankle with a blinking green light.
Amid debates on how to best manage the program is discourse on the devices themselves and whether they are effective at getting people to court and stopping them from committing new criminal acts.
“There is really no research that shows that electronic monitoring promotes public safety or court appearance rates,” said Naomi Johnson, co-executive director of the Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts.
Some experts and advocates for criminal justice reform say the county should work toward shrinking its electronic monitoring programs, using the technology only in narrow, targeted circumstances. They point out that it is still a form of detention, forming barriers for people who need to work and meet other basic needs, which can create circumstances in which people are more likely to reoffend.
“Electronic monitoring is a tough issue. I think a lot of people think of it as this kind of risk-free way to ensure that people come back to court or that they’re maintaining some sort of level of safety, but we know that there are lots of downsides to both the overuse of electronic monitoring and the poor administration of electronic monitoring,” said Cook County Public Defender Sharone Mitchell, Jr. “So we are really excited for the opportunity to … improve this program.”
Others, though, raised concerns about shifting the responsibility for electronic monitoring away from the sheriff’s office, where sworn law enforcement could respond to potentially dangerous situations.
The chief judge’s probation officers do not have arrest powers and would need to rely on local police or the county sheriff to take potential violators into custody. In a statement, Dart said he has told the chief judge’s office that they are ready to “support them with any law enforcement services they may need to ensure public safety going forward.”
In a recent interview with the Tribune, Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke said she has “significant concerns” about the change, including how quickly there will be sufficient staffing for the chief judge’s program, the civilian status of the employees and whether additional movement would be allowed mirroring curfew rules for many of the defendants in the chief judge’s program.
Assistant state’s attorneys do have the ability to petition judges to ask that defendants be taken off electronic monitoring or otherwise detained.
McGee blasted Dart’s decision to step away from the monitoring program, calling it a “failure of leadership.”
He said the sheriff’s electronic monitoring investigators have specialized training to administer the program, which includes making sure participants adhere to the rules, sometimes conducting searches or seizing weapons.
“The fact that the sheriff’s office and the county are even considering something like this puts the public at risk,” McGee said.
In response, Dart in the statement said his program “has been hamstrung by legislation and arbitrarily altered from a non-violent program to a program monitoring violent participants to the point that it no longer serves the public.”
Other stakeholders, though, have hit back on claims that the changes could adversely affect public safety.
“It is highly unusual for a pretrial electronic monitoring program to be run by a sheriff,” said Johnson, who called the transition away from Dart “long overdue,” since it is more common for EM programs nationally to be administered by the judicial branch.
Sharlyn Grace, senior policy adviser at the Cook County public defender’s office, said the change also aligns Cook County with much of the rest of Illinois. The Illinois Office of Statewide Pretrial Services operates electronic monitoring with civilian employees, she said.
“That’s not a problem in the majority of counties in the state where statewide pretrial services is operating,” Grace said. “If someone is accused of committing a new offense, there’s the ability to collaborate with law enforcement.”
Supporters of the move also point to an opportunity to streamline the programs and make them more efficient, arguing that over the years they have become duplicative.
The Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts recommended the county merge its programs back in 2022 when it published a report after it was contracted by the Cook County Justice Advisory Council to review the electronic monitoring system. The report
called the current setup inefficient and confusing, citing siloed programs and communication challenges between programs.
“I think it’s important to remember that this isn’t a change. This is a slow transition that’s happening,” Johnson said. “The chief judge has had their electronic monitoring program for a long time.”
