CHICAGO — Cook County judges often grant prosecutors’ requests to hold defendants in jail while awaiting trial, according to a new report from a court advocacy group, even when defendants are given a low numerical score for risk of flight or committing new offenses.

The report, released Wednesday by the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice, a group that advocates to reduce pretrial incarceration, is based on the observations of trained court watchers who monitored one month of detention hearings during a specific court call at the Leighton Criminal Court Building.

Though county officials and the Office of the Chief Judge release some statistical data on court outcomes, complete raw datasets are not publicly accessible, leaving few avenues for independent review of pretrial outcomes. To produce the newly released report, court watchers collected data and anecdotal accounts of court hearings to evaluate how the Pretrial Fairness Act is functioning in Cook County more than two years after the landmark law eliminated money bond in Illinois.

Prior to the Pretrial Fairness Act, judges would often order defendants to post bail in order to be released from jail while charges were still pending. Now, judges decide whether to release someone in cases where prosecutors have filed detention petitions that seek to keep the defendants jailed. According to the law, judges generally must only jail people pretrial if they pose a danger to the public or are a flight risk.

The report’s findings offer context about jailing decisions as the Cook County Jail has seen a bump in population after years of decline.

“Illinois made the right decision by ending money bail, but two years after implementation it is clear that court stakeholders need to do more to ensure that our communities are fully benefiting from this historic civil rights legislation,” said Cathryn Crawford, senior policy adviser for the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice, in a statement. “We hope that court stakeholders will engage with the recommendations made in our report and work with advocates to return Cook County to its status of being a leader in pretrial justice reform.”

The report critiqued some aspects of how pretrial hearings are conducted, and made recommendations to State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke and Chief Judge Charles Beach.

In a statement, Beach’s office said if “a judge determines that releasing a specific defendant would put a person or the community in danger, detention is the appropriate legal outcome under the Act.”

It also said that the “report should be further analyzed, as the findings lack the granular detail necessary to truly evaluate the statistics presented,” adding that data gathered by the office of the chief judge shows that the “presumption of release remains the standard for the vast majority of people the justice system.”

During the period observed in the report, Cook County judges ordered detention in nearly 74% of cases before them in that court call, which included most felonies for which prosecutors sought detention, except for homicides and some sex offenses which are heard in a different call. Further, the report found, judges ordered detention in nearly 60% of cases in which a pretrial risk assessment tool deemed defendants low risk for flight or further offenses.

Cook County uses the Arnold Ventures’ Public Safety Assessment to perform an algorithmic risk assessment on defendants to give a numerical score in order to help judges make decisions in court. The tool, though, is just one piece of information judges are using to make detention decisions.

Still, the report argued that prosecutors and judges are failing to fully consider these risk scores.

“The tendency to detain as a default suggests that prosecutors and judges are ignoring the evidence that releasing people pretrial does not compromise public safety,” the report said.

According to data from the chief judge’s office, judges have been granting detention petitions in just over 60% of cases before them since the implementation of the Pretrial Fairness Act in 2023.

Among other findings, court watchers determined in the review window that more than two-thirds of detention petitions were filed against people accused of possessing, but not firing, a gun. Also, in that period, the vast majority of people that prosecutors sought to detain were Black or Latino.

The report also called on the state’s attorney to release “usable data” on detention petitions and outcomes. O’Neill Burke’s office maintains a number of data dashboards, though the report said they do not “allow the user to download the underlying data as a CSV or Excel file, making most statistics incredibly onerous to compute.”

In a statement, O’Neill Burke’s office noted it publishes multiple data dashboards and is in the process of adding the ability to export to Excel.

“These dashboards illustrate the outcomes of our detention policies, help ensure that we are following data-informed practices to seek justice and provide the public with transparency into the criminal justice system,” the statement said, adding that it is working on additional functionality, including the ability to download raw data.

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