In January 2022, pretrial home confinement for people on electronic monitoring in Illinois changed radically. The Pretrial Fairness Act, passed under Governor J.B. Pritzker in 2021 as part of the SAFE-T Act, mandates that all people on home confinement be allowed two days per week to leave the home to take care of basic necessities like grocery shopping, medical appointments, or job hunting.
Though criminal justice advocates in Illinois say the changes to home confinement have largely been a success, they’ve also been the target of some pushback. Some elected officials have tried to convince the public the changes are dangerous and have sought to repeal them. Judges have tried to undermine them.
So far, advocates say, these efforts have not been successful. But the two-year anniversary of the law’s implementation is a reminder that every victory against carceral systems needs to be carefully monitored and defended, or it may be reversed.
Before the passage of the Pretrial Fairness Act, home confinement in Cook County under Sheriff Tom Dart had been “particularly draconian,” according to Briana Payton, the director of policy and advocacy at the Chicago Appleseed Center For Fair Courts. Payton added that Cook County may have had “the most restrictive pretrial electronic monitoring program in the entire country.”
Cook County’s pretrial detention program is enormous. In 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, agencies managed more than 5,300 pretrial defendants through electronic monitoring, according to an Appleseed report. In 2022, that number dropped to about 2,300, in line with pre-COVID numbers. New York City and Los Angeles, which have significantly larger justice systems than Cook County, have only hundreds of pretrial defendants on electronic monitoring. They manage most of their pretrial detainees through less restrictive community supervision.
The large size of the Cook County pretrial detention program made management unwieldy. Documentation requirements for medical care were so extensive that they sometimes violated people’s HIPAA rights.
Lee, who is not using his last name out of concerns for safety and privacy, was arrested in connection with Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 when he was in his late 20s. He was placed on home confinement, an experience he told Prism, was “very, very hard and challenging.” He wasn’t able to go to the grocery store or run errands; he couldn’t take his and his wife’s six children to doctor’s appointments. Requests for movement had to be filed some two weeks in advance or more. He almost missed the birth of his daughter and wasn’t able to attend his brother’s burial because it was across state lines.
Lee was on home confinement for 16 months, and he was still being monitored when the new rules went into effect.
“It did help,” he said. “I was able to take my kids to the doctor when I needed to.” He was able, he said, “to be a father.”
Lee didn’t immediately get the two days of movement promised under the law, however. That’s because the sheriff’s office refused to give that time to people who already had an order allowing them to go to work or school.
Lee was attending school and had to get permission for any other movement. It was only after he quit school that he was able to get the two days a week of movement, which allowed him to care for his children.
The sheriff’s office has backed off on this stance to some degree, Payton says. Dart now allows judges to issue orders giving people on monitors both work or school allowances and the two essential movement days provided for in the Pretrial Fairness Act. Payton says that judges are granting that movement in at least some cases.
Judges have been half-hearted in implementing another aspect of the act, though. People on monitors are supposed to have their status reviewed every 60 days. If they have complied with the requirements, they should be taken off home confinement.
However, Payton says, many judges make little good-faith effort to review home confinement status; once you’re on, you don’t get off. It’s an area, Payton said, where “more advocacy is needed.”
Activists also have had to be vigilant to prevent legal gains from being eroded. Conservatives have attempted to claim that the Safe-T Act as a whole is a “Purge Law” that allows dangerous people to go free and reoffend.
Dart has targeted the home confinement aspects of the law in particular. In May, he told the Sun Times, “I’m wildly opposed to this, and I’m going to try and do everything I can to stop it.” He said he would try to persuade legislators to repeal the law by pointing out that between January 2022 and May 2023, 129 people in home confinement were arrested on essential movement days, 29 of whom were arrested for gun-related crimes, mostly for gun possession.
However, Dart’s efforts to roll back the free movement days have been unsuccessful, and the legislature has made no changes to the law. Dart’s own numbers undermined his case, Payton told Prism. There were some 2,400 people on electronic monitoring in the period Dart was discussing, and Payton said Dart also included non-violent arrests in the already low number.
“Any policy that had a success rate this high would be praised in any other context,” Payton said. Legislators agreed.
Activists have also been concerned that Illinois’ groundbreaking elimination of cash bail might prompt judges to push for more home confinement as a substitute for the bail system. Cash bail was officially abolished in September 2023, and activists have been carefully monitoring the situation at the state and county level. According to Matthew McLoughlin, a campaign and communications strategist with the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice (INPJ), the feared jump in electronic monitoring has not materialized. But, he said, “we’re only two months into the laws’ implementation … It’s something we’re going to need to closely watch.”
There have been a number of other vital home confinement changes that have been successfully implemented. First, under the old rules, the state could file felony escape charges if someone’s monitor glitched or if the confined person missed a deadline to return home by a small amount of time. People could end up being sent to prison for infractions. The new rules stipulate that charges can only be filed if someone is in violation for 48 hours.
Second, the new rules ensure that time spent on home confinement counts as time served if the person on home confinement pre-trial is eventually sentenced to prison.
“Those conditions on electronic monitoring are so strict that in many ways they actually replicate incarceration in a brick-and-mortar jail,” McLaughlin said. “People should get credit for the time they were punished while they were awaiting trial.”
Home confinement in Illinois is less inhumane today than it was in 2021. But those on monitors still face real hardship and still need advocates and solidarity. People don’t always understand how difficult it is to be on electronic monitoring, Lee told Prism.
“You can’t be a helping, productive human being” on electronic monitoring, he said. “You see what that does to your loved ones or your significant other—that will take a toll.”
