During a court hearing on a recent afternoon, Cook County Judge Shauna Boliker looked at the 18-year-old woman before her and told her she was significantly concerned by her behavior.

The woman was accused of threatening to kill an acquaintance who worked security at a South Side housing complex, then later tussling with him with a weapon in her bag, according to prosecutors.

Still, Boliker noted that this was her first arrest, which the law requires her to take into account. The woman’s public defender pointed out that Cook County Jail can be a traumatic and destabilizing place for people, especially a young woman just starting her life.

“I hate to keep going around in circles, but this is really troubling,” Boliker said.

In the end, the judge denied prosecutors’ request to keep the woman jailed, but ordered that she be placed on electronic monitoring.

The woman now joins more than 5,500 others in Illinois who are being electronically monitored while they await trial, according to figures from the Illinois Supreme Court, which described the population as growing.

Since officials expanded electronic monitoring to many new parts of the state starting around 2023, more of Illinois has access to the technology than ever before, even as it is a frequent lightning rod in ongoing conversations about how best to keep the public safe and create a fairer criminal justice system — especially when high-profile offenses are allegedly committed by people who were being monitored.

The consistent flare-ups beg the question: Does electronic monitoring work?

“If electronic monitoring is supposed to be utilized, it should be under extremely limited circumstances with critical safeguards in place,” said Claudine Constant, director of Beyond Jails Initiative for the Vera Institute of Justice.

Experts who study the criminal justice system say the technology should be reserved for narrow circumstances, such as people accused of some domestic violence offenses who are barred from approaching certain areas.

Some, though, question whether it is a good investment for communities, arguing it lacks evidence that it furthers public safety goals and can be beset by technological problems, such as false alerts.

And because much of state and local electronic monitoring is overseen by the judiciary, which is exempt from public records laws, journalists and members of the public have few avenues to review how the programs are working, though the Cook County Office of the Chief Judge and the Illinois Supreme Court have released some data or have committed to releasing more this summer.

“It makes me nervous to roll out this intrusive technology and have it run by the agency that is not subject to a lot of meaningful oversight,” said Jonathan Manes, senior counsel for the MacArthur Justice Center’s Illinois office.

Who should be on it?

On April 25, Alphanso Talley allegedly robbed a dollar store, then was taken to a hospital after he told police, upon his arrest, he swallowed some drugs.

There, according to police and prosecutors, he shot and killed Chicago police Officer John Bartholomew and injured another officer.

Talley had been on electronic monitoring, but his device had shut off about seven weeks before the shooting. A Cook County judge had issued a warrant, but it was more than 48 hours after the alleged violation, in contravention to a new policy called for by Chief Judge Charles Beach, which says that “major violations” will be sent to be heard by a judge within 24 hours on both weekdays and weekends.

It is incidents like these that cause officials to probe how systems like electronic monitoring are working, though the public response at times has caused frustration for those who advocated for the Pretrial Fairness Act and other measures of reform.

They say the tragedies are often politicized, ignoring data that indicate most people released while awaiting trial comply with conditions and don’t commit new crimes.

According to records from the chief judge’s office, people placed on electronic monitoring have been accused of a wide range of offenses including drug crimes, gun violations, assault, retail theft and attempted murder. It’s a result often criticized by people on both ends of the criminal justice system.

State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke has been a frequent critic of what she sees as the inclusion of dangerous offenses, while her counterparts in the public defender’s office question why someone accused of retail theft would require such restrictions.

“The cases that we have broad concern about are those where judges are putting violent offenders who have demonstrated they are dangerous to the public on electronic monitoring as a mechanism to find a middle ground on public safety,” said Yvette Loizon, chief of policy at the state’s attorney’s office. “There is no middle ground when it comes to that.”

Matthew McLoughlin, campaign coordinator for Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice, though, pointed out that most people who go into the criminal justice system will eventually come back into the community, arguing that incarceration can be destabilizing for that eventual re-entry.

“I know we’ve heard some elected and law enforcement folks saying they don’t think these people with higher-level cases should be on EM,” he said. “We would argue that’s actually the specific population that should be made available to … and people with lower level charges should be able to freely move about the community.”

McLoughlin said he sees electronic monitoring as a better alternative to being jailed, though he said it can still be harmful for people who have not yet been convicted of a crime but need to maintain a job and take care of their needs.

Sharlyn Grace, deputy public defender for policy for the Cook County public defender’s office, said there is a lot of pressure on judges who are reviewing circumstances of a case and making a determination about whether someone should be detained, adding that many “attacks on electronic monitoring are designed to ensure that more people are detained in jail.”

Without electronic monitoring, some experts posit that the number of people held in jail would increase. Cook County Jail has already seen a population increase during the past year after years of decline.

“I think there is an unfair and impossible expectation that judges will always know what is going to happen in the future,” Grace said.

Questions about outcomes

Amid debates about its usage, studies of the technology have questioned its efficacy: A 2022 review of electronic monitoring in Cook County by the Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts, which took place before the implementation of the Pretrial Fairness Act, found that whether someone was ordered to be monitored did not have an impact on whether they appeared in court or were rearrested.

“Put simply, placing an individual on EM did not make them statistically more likely to appear in court or statistically less likely to be arrested pretrial,” the report found.

The review also found recurrent equipment failures and false alarms with the technology.

“I think this is a situation where people, like with many things in law enforcement, we’d like for there to be a technological solution to our problem but this isn’t it,” Manes said.

Constant, of the Vera Institute of Justice, said other methods have been shown to be effective to ensure people come to count, like a simple text message reminder.

“Overall it can really drain municipalities without the right protections in place,” she said.

Warrants

In recent weeks, particular attention has been drawn to how to handle cases in which a defendant is deemed “AWOL” from their electronic monitoring program.

In May, Beach’s office released data around warrants issued for people on electronic monitoring that showed around 8% of cases were in warrant status, a figure that has doubled since earlier this year when the office tightened protocols around when a warrant should be issued for a potential violation.

Loizon, with the state’s attorney’s office, said Cook County stakeholders have “worked diligently with Judge Beach to fine-tune the process,” noting that Burke has been calling for changes for months.

Still, Loizon said, when a warrant is issued, it doesn’t mean police agencies necessarily go out and pick the individual up proactively. More commonly, officers will come across the warrant in the system during a traffic stop or other types of interactions.

The Illinois Supreme Court has convened a task force that will seek to address system improvements in the arrest warrant process. The task force includes Beach, along with judges throughout the state, researchers and other stakeholders, and it will submit a report with findings to the high court.

Among topics are the types of cases referred for electronic monitoring, practices around warrants and other policies around alleged violations.

Grace, with the public defender’s office, said that circumstances around an electronic monitoring client accused of a violation can be more nuanced than the public realizes, sometimes resulting from false alerts or regular daily problems, like a bus that was late.

“One of the things we are currently working through is how those violations can and should be distinguished,” she said.

She noted that efforts to get alleged violations in front of a judge quickly can mean that the matter is heard over the weekend in front of a jurist that doesn’t have the full background and context of the case.

By the numbers

In a major shift in Cook County pretrial justice, Sheriff Tom Dart in 2025 stopped accepting new electronic monitoring defendants, moving all oversight of the county’s monitored population to the Office of the Chief Judge, which had previously led its own parallel programs.

More than a year later, the sheriff’s office is monitoring just over 200 defendants, according to records from the office, down from around 1,500 people in March of 2025 before making the change.

As of June 13, there were more than 2,800 people on two programs run by the Office of the Chief Judge.

Statewide, in counties overseen by Illinois’ Office of Statewide Pretrial Services, just under 2,500 people have active cases with GPS conditions, according to figures published by the office.

McLoughlin, with the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice, said though there has been growth in electronic monitoring in Illinois, concerns about an “explosion” of usage following the Pretrial Fairness Act have not come to pass.

But even though some numbers are available, the state has been slow to roll out fulsome data on electronic monitoring and other pretrial matters. According to the Pretrial Fairness Act, the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts is supposed to collect and publish data to help evaluate the performance of the measure, but it has yet to do so.

The Better Government Association, a nonprofit news and civic organization, and Radical Hospital Ministries, a group that provides re-entry and pretrial support services, has filed a lawsuit against the AOIC, Office of Statewide Pretrial Services and other local courts and agencies alleging they have failed in their obligation to gather the “overwhelming majority” of pretrial data required by law.

“Defendants are intentionally flouting a legislative mandate to ensure that the new pretrial criminal legal system operates with full transparency,” the suit, filed in Cook County, alleges. “As a result, the public is largely in the dark about the outcomes of the historic change enacted by the PFA.”

The Illinois Supreme Court has said the AOIC would publish some data on July 1.

Beach declined an interview with the Tribune, but his office in May began releasing more data on electronic monitoring, particularly around warrants issued for people who have gone AWOL on electronic monitoring, saying that “transparency is not optional.”