Incarceration Reform

From the Desk of John McLees…

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The stakes are high in the November election in two must-win fights for justice here in Illinois, where we can make a difference if we give them our attention for the next 65 days, starting now.

Supporting Election of Reform Prosecutors – Eric Rinehart and Kim Foxx

In addition to supporting the election of Kim Foxx in Cook County: https://www.kimfoxx.com/, please consider devoting time and resources between now and November to electing Eric Rinehart as Lake County State’s Attorney, to bring change to this significant prosecutor’s office that has been run by opponents of reform for 40 years.  You can learn more about Eric at:  https://rinehartforlakecounty.com/ and about his reform plan at: https://rinehartforlakecounty.com/reform-plan/.  He is running to end racial profiling and a culture of wrongful prosecutions, to upgrade the quality of the prosecutors who serve Lake County, and to build trust between all communities and the courthouse.  

A former public defender, Eric has caught the attention of the criminal justice reform movement and has earned the endorsements of Kim Foxx and the Real Justice PAC: https://realjusticepac.org/.  He has also built a broad coalition of Democratic leaders such as U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, U.S. Congressman Brad Schneider, U.S. Congresswoman Lauren Underwood, former State Senator Daniel Biss, State Representatives Bob Morgan, Dan Didech, Sam Yingling, Lindsey LaPointe, and Will.

Eric needs our support to win this race.  In addition to contributing to his campaign at https://secure.actblue.com/donate/rinehart1, please consider volunteering at his phone banking link:  https://rinehartforlakecounty.com/phone-banking/.  Also consider becoming a host for the online campaign event for Eric on Zoom in late September, featuring Kim Foxx, by committing to write or raise $2500: contact Elizabeth Evans at [email protected] or 773-876-7472.

Supporting The Fair Tax Amendment                              

Passage of this amendment to the Illinois Constitution, allowing for a progressive income tax in Illinois, will create a fairer tax system, and it will provide resources needed to fund initiatives required to reform our justice system and to address the root causes of crime in our communities. 

This excellent video explains the importance of the Fair Tax proposal:

https://www.yesforfairtax.org/blog/watch-the-fair-tax-explained-in-about-a-minute/

Please consider participating to the extent that you can in the campaign to approve the Fair Tax, which will require approval by either 60% of those voting on the question or a majority of those voting in the election. 

Maximum efforts are needed to defeat the well-financed interests that are opposing approval of the Fair Tax amendment.  As discussed in more detail in the very helpful document attached here, you can make a difference:

• Endorse the Fair Tax on behalf of yourself: https://actionnetwork.org/forms/fairtaxendorse and your organization: https://actionnetwork.org/forms/fairtaxorgendorse, and sign up to support the movement https://actionnetwork.org/forms/fairtaxsupport.
• Spread the word on social media:  use the hashtag #FairTaxNow and/or tag Vote Yes for Fair Tax at @YesForFairTax for all of your social media posts, making use of the suggestions in the attached document for text to use in drafting your Facebook posts, Tweets and Instagram posts.
• Encourage your friends to vote for the Fair Tax:
  • Send them the link to the video, and connect them with https://www.yesforfairtax.org/ for more information.
  • Consider organizing a community event to inform people about the importance of the Fair Tax and to encourage them to support it – let Vote Yes for Fair Tax know about your event at https://bit.ly/HostFairTaxemail, write them at  [email protected] to get a tailored slide deck for your event, and write to [email protected] to request a speaker for an your event. 

• Submit letters to the editor to educate voters about the Fair Tax, making use of the helpful suggestions in the attached document.
• Sign up for phone banking in support of the Fair Tax taking place on Tuesday and Thursday evenings (soon to be expanded to weekend times as well) at:  https://actionnetwork.org/forms/sign-up-to-phone-bank-illinois-voters/.
• Learn of other ways to volunteer by writing to [email protected].
• Get access to additional resources for supporting the Vote Yes for Fair Tax Campaign (available at https://www.yesforfairtax.org/resources/) by writing to [email protected].

Other Things to Note

The Getting Involved section and other Sections of the Website also highlight some important new resources:  

• on racial disparities in mass incarceration, on the devastating impact of residency restrictions in Illinois,
• on the Illinois Supreme Court Commission’s Final Report and Recommendations on Pretrial Practice,
• on reforming juvenile justice in Illinois, on the accomplishments of Kim Foxx as Cook County State’s Attorney,
• on the need for legislative changes on the imposition of court costs, fines and fees, on how governors can use their clemency power to liberate thousands of people who are unjustifiably incarcerated in state prisons, on the impact of parole and probation in feeding the mass incarceration crisis,
• on the “Justice for Black Lives” resolution passed by the Cook County Board of Commissioners to reallocate funds from the Cook County Jail to urgent community needs, and
• on additional resources for understanding prisons, policing and punishment.

From the Desk of John McLees…

The sections of this website on Getting Involved and Upcoming Events in Illinois highlight some of the rich selection of online programs that will be available to you to watch at scheduled times in coming days and weeks to learn about issues arising in our justice system and work being done to address them. 

Please also note the new section of this website for Webinars, Podcasts, Videos To Watch On-Line, which you will find under the heading Sources of Information and Ideas.  It gathers together information on recordings of webinars, podcasts and conferences that you can watch online at your convenience on demand.

Note in particular that you can registerhere to participate in the Justice 2020 Convening being presented by the Illinois Justice Project and Cabrini Green Legal Aid from 9:00 to 2:45 on Friday July 24, which will be one of the major programs of the year to address issues of policing, courts and incarceration and post release and reentry in Illinois.  After July 24, check the websites of the Illinois Justice Project and Cabrini Green Legal Aid for recordings of that program.

The section on Issue Advocacy in Illinois features a link for you to use to endorse the proposal on the November election ballot to allow Illinois to impose a progressive income tax: https://www.yesforfairtax.org/, and an address to use to request information on how you can volunteer to help in the Fair Tax campaign: [email protected]. 

Passage of that constitutional amendment will create a fairer tax system and will provide resources needed to fund initiatives that are required to reform our justice system and address the root causes of crime in our communities. 

From the Desk of John McLees…

New resources linked to the website reflect the increasing accessibility of important information through online presentations, both:

    Live online events, including:

• University of Chicago Law School Discussions on Policing
  • at noon on Wednesdays from June 30 through August 12
  • Register at: https://www.law.uchicago.edu/discussion-series-policing

And archived briefings, webinars, podcasts and colloquia, including:

• The University of Chicago Law School June 12, 2020 Colloquium on the Crisis in Policing:

Available here.

• The NEW Chasing Justice Podcast – with Chesa Boudin, San Francisco State’s Attorney
•      Subscribe or listen to all episodes to date at: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/chasing-justice/id1517729177 on subjects that include: 
  • Race Policing and Protest with James Forman, Jr.
  • Modern Civil Rights Movements with Angela Davis
  • Prosecutorial Discretion with Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx
  • The Personal is Political with San Francisco State’s Attorney Chesa Boudin and
  • An Epidemic within an Epidemic: The Drug Crisis with Dr. Leana Wen

We hope that you will find the time to watch or listen to some of them and that you will continue your advocacy and continue to read the important reports on criminal justice issues that are coming to us with increasing frequency.  New reports added to the “Other Sources of Ideas and Information” section of the website include:

• “Failing Grades: State Response to COVID-19 in Jails and Prisons” from the Prison Policy Institute and the ACLU:

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/failing_grades.html and

• “Can We Eliminate the Youth Prison (And What Should We Replace It With?)” from the Square One Project of the Columbia University Justice Lab:

https://squareonejustice.org/paper/can-we-eliminate-the-youth-prison-and-what-should-we-replace-it-with-by-vincent-schiraldi-june-2020/

From the Desk of John McLees…

One way to dedicate ourselves to fighting for the principle that black lives do indeed matter is to continue to learn about how the criminal justice system operates and about what we can do to address the moral crisis of mass incarceration, which has such a terribly disproportionate impact on the lives of so many black and brown people and their families.

The Reports in the section of the website containing links to “Other Sources of Ideas and Information” now include:

• The Final Report of the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Pretrial Practices Concerning Pretrial Reform in the Illinois Criminal Justice System, and
• The Prison Policy Initiative’s Legislative Guide for Winnable, High-Impact Criminal Justice Reforms, and
• Two recent reports of the John Howard Association:
  • its IDOC-wide Survey on COVID-19 inside Illinois Prisons and
  • its report: COVID-19 Exposes the Detrimental Impact of Housing Restriction Laws on Releasing People from Prison.

We hope that you will take a look at some of these and other resources that continue to be linked there, in whatever time you have that is not taken up with the proliferating Zoom meetings and webinars.

From the Desk of John McLees…

We hope that you are all safe and well.

We are two months deeper into the COVID-19 crisis in our jails and prisons from the time when citizens and advocates began alerting our public officials of the need for large-scale release of detainees and prisoners from our jails and prisons in order to avoid the creation of COVID-19 hotspots that would kill prisoners and guards and create a public health crisis that would also substantially increase the number of COVID-19 deaths in the general population

The response of Cook County and Illinois state officials has not been adequate, and we are now watching the consequences unfold.

The Reports referenced in the section of the Website with “Other Sources of Ideas and Information” now include a detailed report of ACLU Analytics and University partners that attempts to quantify the impact of this failure, projecting that failure to decarcerate from jails alone will result in from 100,000 to 200,000 additional deaths from COVID-19 in the United States, three-fourths of which will occur outside the jails in the general population.  

Advocacy continues on these issues.  There is a link in the section of the website on Issue Advocacy for signing the petition that the Chicago Community Bond Fund continues to circulate, demanding that Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx do more to decarcerate the Cook County Jail in response to COVID-19.

Please also consider jumping on the short-notice opportunity to get trained tomorrow or on Saturday to engage in Court watching (from your home) to monitor bond decisions being made by Cook County judges during the COVID-19 pandemic, and responding to the short-notice opportunity to participate in the Webinars being presented by The Sentencing Project on May 14 and May 20 on Challenging Mass Incarceration During COVID-19.

But the heightened focus on decarceration and criminal justice reform needs to continue beyond the Coronavirus emergency.  So we encourage you also to read and consider some of the other resources that under Reports in the section of the website on “Other Sources of Ideas and Information”, including the Episcopal Public Policy Network Criminal Justice Series of reports on criminal justice reform, the new organizing and advocacy resource from the Community Justice Exchange and Defender Impact Initiative, and some of the many other reports listed there.         

From the Desk of John McLees…

After more than a month of intense advocacy, there is increasing urgency to confront the failure of State and County officials:

• to release large numbers of prisoners in order to mitigate the rapidly developing crisis from the spread of the Coronavirus in our prisons and jails and
• to create minimally acceptable conditions in the jails and the prisons to protect the detainees and guards remaining inside, and their family members and others, from the spread of the virus.

Demanding Release of More Detainees from the Cook County Jail

Please consider signing this new petition asking State’s Attorney Kim Foxx to do more of what is within her power to reduce the population of the Cook County Jail by another 30 percent.  On Friday the Cook County Public Defender and the John Howard Association issued another urgent plea explaining why jail and prison populations in Cook County and in Illinois must be further reduced immediately:
            https://www.thejha.org/statements-and-testimony/041720

Cook County Jail in particular is a death trap, the number one COVID-19 hotspot in the country according to the New York Times.  Leaving people there who could reasonably be released during this pandemic will result in the needless illness, suffering, and deaths of people in the jail’s custody, staff working inside the jail, and others in the community as our shared health care system becomes overwhelmed.

Writing To Your Cook County Commissioner Now, In Advance of Thursday’s Online Meeting of the Cook County Board

The Cook County Board of Commissioners will hold an online public meeting starting at 10:00 a.m. this Thursday morning April 23.  Discussion of the COVID-19 crisis in the Cook County Jail is on the agenda for that meeting, and the County Board must begin to take responsibility for insuring:

• that the County maintains conditions in the Jail that will minimize the spread of the virus,
• that the County provides adequate treatment to detainees who contract the virus, and
• that the County provides the public with full and accurate information about the situation in the Jail, in order to meet its responsibilities to the detainees, to its employees and to the public. 

Please write to your Cook County Commissioner, if possible prior to Thursday’s meeting, to demand that the County Board take responsibility for insuring the adequacy of current and planned responses to the COVID-19 crisis in the Jail in light of the failure of Sheriff Dart to create conditions in the Jail that are needed to deal with the spread of the virus in the Jail, and his failure to report truthfully and completely on the situation in the Jail and the condition of the inmates who have acquired the virus.  We can also contribute to timely resolution of these issues by asking the County Board to agree to allow court-appointed independent monitors into the Jail, as requested by the plaintiffs in the pending U.S. Federal Court proceedings in the case of Mays vs. Dart.

For your convenience we have included below a draft of a message that you can modify and send to your County Commissioner to discuss your reasons for urging the County Board to address the COVID-19 crisis in the Jail.

You can easily send a message to your Commissioner by pressing the Forward command for this message, completing and modifying the draft message below as you like, signing it (with your address) and sending the message to your Commissioner by e-mail after deleting this introductory message from me.

If you don’t know your Commissioner’s name and e-mail address, you can find that information by:

• entering your information and doing the search requested at the following link to identify the district number of your County Board District:

https://www.cookcountyil.gov/service/cook-county-find-my-commissioner

• and then going to the following link and clicking on the picture of the Commissioner for that numbered District to find her or his contact information, including e-mail address:

https://www.cookcountyil.gov/all-people?field_people_agency_target_id_entityreference_filter%5B%5D=2208&apply_filter=yes

You can also provide written comments prior to Thursday’s meeting on the urgent need to address the conditions in the Jail, which will be read at the meeting, and will become part of the record of the meeting, at:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3MY285H?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery

In response to the request on that form for “File ID number,” you can simply include words such as “COVID-19 in the Cook County Jail” , and you should check the box for “Provide Written Comment for Information Only.”

Thursday’s online meeting of the Cook County Board is scheduled for 10:00 a.m. and will be open to the public.  You can watch the meeting at the following link:

https://www.cookcountyil.gov/service/watch-live-board-proceedings

Thank you for making your voice heard in a way that can matter to all of us, and in particular to the most vulnerable among us, in minimizing the suffering and economic loss from the current crisis.

From the Desk of John McLees…

After three weeks of intense advocacy for immediate release of large numbers of older prisoners and those who have been accused or convicted of minor crimes from Illinois prisons and jails, it still hasn’t happened, in spite of widespread recognition that this is essential in order to mitigate the development of a public health crisis from the spread of Covid-19 in our prisons and jails. 

On April 2 a coalition of advocates filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Illinois Department of Corrections and Governor Pritzker demanding the immediate release of incarcerated people who are at high medical risk and those who are scheduled for release in the next few months.  The fact that a lawsuit is required illustrates the continuing resistance from the Governor and from Cook County officials to exercising the power that they have to do what needs to be done to mitigate this crisis.

What you and your friends can do, in addition to joining Tuesday’s Caravan described below:

• It is still as relevant as ever to write to Governor Pritzker and Illinois Department of Corrections Director Jeffries at the links provided in the attached document on Getting Involved in Criminal Justice Reform, with the specific messages that you can find for them there. 
• Please also open and sign these letters to Governor Pritzker and Cook County officials asking for early release of juveniles from youth prisons and from the juvenile temporary detention center, and for other protections for the juveniles who remain in custody. 
• You can participate in the campaign relaunched on April 3 of writing and calling Chief Judge Evans and other Cook County officials to demand mass release of many more of those being held at Cook County Jail, using the call-in scripts, phone numbers and email addresses are available here: chicagobond.org/call-in.
• And you can still make your impact felt by accessing and sending electronically this open letter to Kim Foxx, who has the power release many prisoners in the Illinois Department of Corrections and to advocate for release of individual prisoners from the Cook County Jail.

Tuesday’s Solidarity Caravan

If you have a car, do consider joining the “Solidarity Caravan” (a protest you do in your car! Social distancing!) that a coalition of community groups are organizing for Tuesday, April 7 beginning at 10 AM, to demand mass release from adult and youth prisons and jails and immigration detention.  You can get more details about participating in the Caravan by accessing this invitation email, and you can register to participate in the Caravan by using this registration form. 

As noted in the registration form, those who register will receive a text message on Tuesday morning telling them where the Caravan will begin, and will also receive text messages throughout the day on where the Caravan will be a particular times during the day.

You can let others know about the Caravan, by inviting them directly, but please do NOT share information about the Caravan on social media. 

From the Desk of John McLees…

Our new life of staying at home gives us time to dig deeper into learning about our criminal justice system, and efforts to reform it.  The website has been updated to include links to some important new reports for us to study on criminal justice issues, including

A new Episcopal Public Policy Network Criminal Justice Series, consisting of comprehensive reports on    

• School-to-Prison Pipeline
• Public Defenders
• Sentencing,
• During Incarceration
• Re-entry       

A new comprehensive report of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission on Women in Prison: Seeking Justice Behind Bars.

But this is also an urgent moment for advocacy, for the immediate reduction of the populations of our prisons and jails.  All states and counties must release large numbers of prisoners and must refrain from incarcerating additional low-level offenders and those pending trial for the duration of the current crisis in order to reduce the impact of the upcoming outbreaks of COVID-19 in the tight confinement of incarceration, which will otherwise lead to an epidemic of deaths of those who are incarcerated, especially those who are older and weaker, and a massive public health crisis as those concentrations of the disease spill into the general population.

Please respond immediately by supporting efforts underway to demand that public officials at all levels exercise the power that they have to release large numbers of prisoners who pose little or no danger to society.

In Illinois please use the links and scripts that we have provided in the attached documents on Getting Involved and on Issue Advocacy in Ilinois to correspond immediately with State’s Attorney Foxx, Chief Judge Evans, Sheriff Dart, Governor Pritzker and Illinois Department of Corrections Director Jefferies, asking them to take the emergency actions that they have the authority to take now to reduce prison and jail populations to mitigate this crisis

I have also provided links to more information about how those who are incarcerated, especially those who are elderly or physically compromised, are at heightened risk of death from COVID-19 as a result of their confinement and about how failure to release older prisoners now, to allow them to obtain the social distancing that is not available in prison, will most likely result in a local and national public health crisis.

From the desk of John McLees…

Soon the spring session of the Illinois Legislature will heat up, but our priorities now through mid-March must be:

• to support Kim Foxx and her reform agenda, by doing all that is necessary to enable her to win Democratic nomination for reelection as Cook County State’s Attorney in the March 17 primary, and
• to build support for the comprehensive reform of pretrial justice in Illinois by enacting the Pretrial Fairness Act.

So in my additions the document at the Getting Involved tab you will find information about:

• opportunities to support State’s Attorney Fox by donating, canvassing, phone and text banking, and writing to Mayor Lightfoot at [email protected] to thank her for endorsing Kim Foxx for reelection and asking her to campaign actively for the State’s Attorney between now and the primary and to reject the false narrative of the Federation of Police, and
• ways to support thoughtful reform of our broken and unjust pretrial system in Illinois by writing your representatives and joining in a lobbying day in Springfield on Tuesday February 25.       

Thank you for considering what you can do to help achieve these key objectives, to maintain our momentum toward justice in our County and our State.  

From the Desk of John McLees…

The good work being done by many organizations to understand the operation of our criminal justice system, and to improve it, continues to accumulate. 

In addition to checking out the events and opportunities for volunteering and training listed here for the new year, there are a number of year-end reports that deserve our attention, including:

• The John Howard Association Report on conditions at the Logan Correctional Facility, one year after Women’s Correctional Services Act passed– Read the report on Logan here and find WBEZ report here
• Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority Report on the Experiences of Justice Involved Girls:
  https://files.constantcontact.com/f05d77ca001/67bac8fc-66d0-4cac-bb93-cb22cd630120.pdf
• 2019 Report Chicago Community Bond Fund – 2019 Year-End Report
• Vera Institute of Justice reports on People in Jail in 2019: https://www.vera.org/downloads/publications/people-in-jail-in-2019.pdf

• NYT coverage of the report at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/us/rural-jails.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage
• The Sentencing Project’s Annual Newsletter for 2019 https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/sentencing-projects-2019-annual-newsletter/
• The Sentencing Project – Report on federal sentencing after one year under the First Step Act –  https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/one-year-after-the-first-step-act/
• The Brennan Center for Justice – 2019 Report of Crime Data in Major American Cities –https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/takeaways-2019-crime-data-major-american-cities

Please note in particular the first annual report of Governor Pritzker’s Justice Equity and Opportunity Initiative –  https://www2.illinois.gov/sites/ltg/Documents/JEO-Draft-Report.pdf, issued last week by Illinois Lt. Governor Juliana Stratton, which sets forth the Governor’s ambitious agenda to eliminate cash bail, divert low level drug offenses from the criminal justice system, and reduce the use of mandatory minimum sentences.

The Illinois legislative session will be gearing up soon with many specific proposals for justice reform.  We hope that you will consider kicking off the season by writing to your Representatives to ask for their support of House Bill 1615, which would limit the scope of prosecution for Felony Murder, which now results in convictions on very serious charges of those who did not participate in the criminal act in question.  If you don’t know the name of your Representative, you can find it here: https://www.illinoispolicy.org/maps/, and for your convenience here is a draft letter on this topic that you can modify and send. CLICK HERE.                                   

Please also take advantage of the new year to check out and subscribe to some of the regular reports on justice-related issues and opportunities, including the following:

• The Weekly Envisioning Justice Digest  of Illinois Humanities – https://envisioningjustice.org/– Sign up here  
• The Weekly News Report of the Illinois Justice Project – https://www.iljp.org/news
• The Week In Review from The Marshall Project – https://www.themarshallproject.org/
• Vera News of the Vera Institute of Justice – https://www.vera.org/
• The Weekly Crime Report of John Jay College of Law – subscribe at https://thecrimereport.org/register/
• The Newsletter of the Social Justice Resources Center– subscribe at: https://socialjusticeresourcecenter.org/
• The Newsletter of the Tutor Mentor Institute –  to subscribe Click here.