The Better Government Association and DuPage County–based nonprofit Radical Hospitality Ministries are suing the Illinois state judiciary for failing to comply with a legal obligation to collect and publish data about people awaiting trial. 

The Pretrial Fairness Act requires the judicial branch to collect data—including the ethnicity, gender, charges, case outcomes, and rearrests—on people facing trial. The information, advocates say, would equip Illinois with the necessary tools to support the state’s pretrial population and monitor whether the law is reducing racial inequality as intended.

The Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts (AOIC) is the state court system’s clerical arm, and the Office of Statewide Pretrial Services (OSPS) is the five-year old state agency tasked with supervising people released pretrial across 84 counties. Together, these bodies are responsible for meeting the obligation to collect and publish information. 

OSPS does maintain a public dashboard that includes the number of ongoing misdemeanor and felony investigations, the seriousness of crimes, the percentage of people eligible for detention under the law, and the number of people on electronic monitoring in most of the state’s 102 counties. But it lacks required information such as the percentage of people who appear in court, the outcomes of trial verdicts, and the demographics of people detained pretrial in county jails. The OSPS dashboard is divided by judicial circuit rather than county, contains data back to 2023, and can only be viewed in real time, meaning there is no way to know how often it’s updated. 

A handful of larger counties—including Cook, DuPage, Lake, and Kane—have released their own dashboards. But the information presented in those is likewise incomplete, and ultimately the law tasks OSPS, not individual counties, with compiling and releasing public information about Illinois’s pretrial population.

“It is not living up to the mandate that is set forth in the [Pretrial Fairness Act],” says Sophia Van Pelt, senior policy analyst at the Better Government Association. “The fact that [larger counties are] doing it on their own is really nice, but they’re not the entity that is mandated to do this.”

OSPS and the AOIC have not responded to the Reader’s requests for comment. 

The Pretrial Fairness Act required the AOIC and the newly created Pretrial Practices Data Oversight Board to begin collecting data by July 1, 2022. 

“They, as far as I can tell, blew past that deadline,” Van Pelt says.

In fall 2023, Illinois became the first state in the country to abolish cash bail via the Pretrial Fairness Act. After the law took effect, thousands of Illinois residents could now await trial  at home instead of behind bars. Under the former system, two-thirds of people considered legally innocent were jailed solely because they couldn’t afford to pay bail. 

The lack of data about the state’s pretrial population has made it difficult for many service providers, such as Radical Hospitality Ministries, to adequately provision programming. The organization noticed many of its clients struggled with transportation to court and has begun coordinating rides for people who need them. But the lack of county- or statewide data makes it difficult to assess whether the program is successful, says Radical Hospitality Ministries cofounder and operations director James Baugh. “The lack of full transparency significantly impacted our organization’s efforts to put together an effective program,” Baugh says.  

Matthew McLoughlin, campaign coordinator for the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice, says the data that is available shows the statewide number of people incarcerated pretrial has dropped since the law took effect, and Illinois has also seen a decrease in violent and property crimes. But McLoughlin still has questions about the Pretrial Fairness Act’s impact on race and class inequality that can’t be answered without the granular information the law requires. “Illinois did a bold thing by ending the use of money bail. But we need to also make sure that communities are fully benefiting from the law,” Mcloughlin says. “We really believe that this data collection and publication system will help ensure that that happens.”

David Olson, a Loyola University Chicago criminal justice professor and board member of the Illinois Pretrial Practices Data Oversight Board, says there are several reasons why the task of centralizing information across more than one hundred county court systems is difficult. To start, the data is spread across police, jails, courts, and pretrial supervision agencies. In some other states, demographic data about everyone under pretrial supervision is collected by one agency. 

Furthermore, Olson says the data isn’t formatted consistently. Clerks usually record the information as court notes, which provide a narrative summary of what happened in the courtroom. The summary might name who had a detention hearing, what the outcome of the hearing was, and who might have had a warrant issued for their failure to appear. But the data is in varying forms of completeness. For example, some clerks of the circuit court don’t collect information about demographic characteristics.

Lastly, the sheer variety of IT vendors used by sheriffs offices across the state to input information makes data hard to streamline. Olson says that most smaller jurisdictions are not collecting information researchers might find valuable because their case-management system doesn’t accommodate it. 

The Pretrial Practices Data Oversight Board issued a preliminary report in July 2022 that predicted substantial costs for the technological overhaul, however the Pretrial Fairness Act did not identify a funding source for expenses. Advocates say the AOIC should have requested funding from lawmakers instead of throwing up its hands. 

On top of that, many Illinois sheriffs opposed the law and filed lawsuits (that they later lost) alleging that the Pretrial Fairness Act is unconstitutional. Consequently, Olson says they’re not exactly handing the data over when asked. “When the law was passed and I read the requirements,” Olson says, “I thought, how in the world are they going to ever be able to collect all that information?” He says the law expects the state to aggregate information that doesn’t exist. 

Advocates agree that collecting the data is a difficult task, but, they say, the law at minimum asks the Pretrial Practices Data Oversight Board to come up with a plan of action. The board’s 2022 update is insufficient, they say. 

Jessica Wang, legal fellow at the MacArthur Justice Center, is one of the lawyers representing the Better Government Association and Radical Hospitality Ministries in their lawsuit. “If there are actually obstacles to you being able to fulfill your mandatory legal responsibilities under the law, the law still requires you to come up with a strategy to overcome those obstacles,” Wang says of the state’s lack of compliance with data transparency mandates. “It just seems like [AOIC and OSPS] have just thrown up their hands and been like, ‘We give up, though we’re going to decide what we want to publish and what we don’t want to publish.’” Wang says the required data would help advocates ensure the law is being applied equally in every jurisdiction. 

It’s possible that the AOIC has completed more thorough analysis than is publicly available, but the state’s judicial branch is exempt from the state Freedom of Information Act. The public also doesn’t know how often the oversight board meets, or what its plans are. “This law is supposed to grant some access where otherwise there would be none,” Van Pelt says. “By not following the law, the public is almost doubly in the dark.”

McLoughlin reiterates that he and other advocates knew data collection wouldn’t be easy, but they don’t think it’s impossible. “Every single day, across our state and across our country, different government agencies have to communicate with each other and share information. We figure out ways to do that,” he says. “If we’re taking away people’s freedom and putting them in cages, we have to be able to marshal the resources to actually monitor and document what we’re doing.”

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