Kane County sheriff says Illinois bail reform to blame for increase in jail population and arrest warrants
At Thursday's Kane County Board Committee of the Whole meeting, Kane County Sheriff Ron Hain said the state's new bail reform is to blame for recent public safety data that shows an increase in the county's jail population and arrest warrant entries.
According to the sheriff's presentation on Thursday, the average annual population at the Kane County Jail fell to 221 in 2024 (after the bail reform had taken effect), but has shot up to over 300 per day in 2025.
Hain attributed much of the uptick to the institution of the Pretrial Fairness Act in Illinois.
'All it has done is put more people back in jail,' Hain told the board on Thursday.
The Pretrial Fairness Act was several years in the making. In 2021, Gov. JB Pritzker signed into law the sweeping criminal justice reform legislation called the SAFE-T Act. Part of it, the Pretrial Fairness Act, eliminated cash bail. On Dec. 31, 2022, however – one day before it was set to take effect – the Illinois Supreme Court delayed its implementation to allow legal challenges over the legislation to be resolved.
After a nine-month delay and the Illinois Supreme Court ruling that the bail measure was constitutional, Illinois became the first state to eliminate cash bail. It took effect on Sept. 18, 2023.
Preliminary data from 2024 about the effects found that defendants were spending significantly less time in jail awaiting trial, with the number of people detained for more than three days after their initial hearing going down from 31% to 8% in the 21 counties analyzed, according to findings from Loyola University Chicago's Center for Criminal Justice Research. Warrants issued for failure to appear in court decreased from 17% to 15%, and pretrial jail populations decreased by about 14% in Cook County and other urban counties and by about 25% in rural counties studied. The one-year findings can be found at https://loyolaccj.org/pretrial-fairness-act.
But now, more than a year later, the Kane County sheriff is arguing that the law's intended goal has been unsuccessful in Kane County.
In addition to the recent uptick in annual average jail population, Hain said there has also been an increase in arrest warrant entries – up to 30-40 per day from 2024 to 2025, compared to an average of 5-10 from 2019 to 2023.
He said the Pretrial Fairness Act reduces the time those arrested spend going through the county's reentry process.
'It's just a constant revolving door now, of people in custody for seven or less days,' Hain said Thursday, expressing concern about recidivism.
On Thursday, Hain noted that housing more individuals in the jail also leads to increased costs for taxpayers. He said on Thursday that if the jail population continues in the direction it has been going, there could be an increase of around $2.5 million in costs, based on the average cost per person.
At the meeting, District 4 Kane County Board member Mavis Bates noted that the purpose of the SAFE-T Act and elimination of cash bail was to keep people out of jail, thereby reducing jail population.
Hain attributed the increase to more rigid guidelines for judges on deciding whether or not to detain an individual.
'Making nondetainable offenses – basically dictating what judges can and cannot decide – is hurtful,' Hain said at Thursday's meeting. 'Having those pretrial release conditions that people violate and don't quite understand in some cases is wrong. … The judges (before the Pretrial Fairness Act) had more autonomy, overall, in making these decisions when it comes to the charge at the time, their criminal history and the issues at hand.'
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