With Cook County Jail's population again on the rise, officials weigh the reasons

Chicago Tribune

20-04-2025

Early in the morning outside Cook County Jail, a group of new detainees stepped out of a Chicago police wagon and walked bleary-eyed into the bright sunlight before lining up inside against a brick wall.
Brought in from the police districts, the men were among the newest bookings to the jail, where they would wait until a judge ruled on whether they would be admitted or released while their charges were pending.
And the jail, busy during the early morning hours as police brought in overnight arrestees and deputies shuttled detainees to court appearances, may only grow more bustling: After a decline following statewide bail reform — and years of reductions prior to that — the county's jail population has begun to tick up once again.
In an internal report obtained by the Tribune via a public records request, the Cook County sheriff's office found that the average daily jail population has risen by about 12% in recent months, reaching its highest level in eight months at the end of March. The report also found sharp increases in detention for some charge types for which State's Attorney Eileen O'Neill Burke has implemented policy changes.
Many factors can influence the ebb and flow of the jail's population, and experts pointed to a number of potential considerations when evaluating it, including arrest rates and judicial decision-making.
The sheriff's office's analysis, the report said, sought to understand the impact of the policies of Burke, who was ceremonially sworn in on Dec. 2.
Sheriff Tom Dart, in an interview with the Tribune, made clear that he supports policies that keep high-risk defendants incarcerated, but said he is concerned about how long inmates remain in jail as court cases move sluggishly through the system.
In 2023, the Tribune's Stalled Justice series documented how Cook County murder cases were taking longer than ever to conclude, and longer than in any other major court system that could be studied. Reporters uncovered multiple chokepoints that were stalling cases long before the pandemic, in a system overseen by judges who allowed cases to languish and court leaders who ignored repeated recommendations for fixes.
The county jail is meant to be a temporary waypoint for defendants until their case is finished, and lengthiness of proceedings can contribute to jail population levels.
In other quarters, the jail's spike raised questions about whether prosecutors were considering the nuance of cases amid Burke's more hardline detention policies than her predecessor Kim Foxx, who was elected in 2016 with a reform mandate on a wave of anger over the killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer.
But Yvette Loizon, chief of policy at the state's attorney's office, said that prosecutors are only one piece of the detention mechanism.
'When people want to lay the uptick in the jail population at our feet, that's a fundamental misapprehension of the process,' she said, adding that judges ultimately make the decision and defense attorneys can offer evidence that refutes or mitigates the need for jailing. 'I would submit that because we are doing a better job of presenting relevant and necessary and important information to the judiciary … judges have more information and better information upon which to make the decision.'
Chief Judge Timothy Evans' office declined to comment, saying that jail matters are under the purview of the sheriff's office.
Regardless of political viewpoints on detention, the rising jail numbers have not gone unnoticed by city and county stakeholders, as the phenomenon — especially if it continues into the traditionally more violent summer months — could come with complications such as cost increases and more difficulty with crowd management.
And though the new state's attorney is an obvious consideration when studying the recent influx, experts said the reasons are likely multifaceted.
'It's probably not a simple explanation,' said David Olson, co-director of Loyola University Chicago's Center for Criminal Justice Research.
By the numbers
Since the 2010s, the county's jail population has fallen significantly, cut nearly in half from typical average populations around 10,000 in that era. It started decreasing after Evans in 2017 reformed county policies around bail and was reduced further after the Pretrial Fairness Act in September 2023 eliminated cash bail in Illinois.
After the measure took effect, the jail numbers fell to under 5,000 for much of 2023 and 2024, reaching levels not seen since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when some lower-risk inmates were diverted from the jail for public health reasons.
When Burke took office in early December, the jail's population was around 5,200, having increased slightly at the end of Foxx's term, according to data from the sheriff's office. As of Friday, the population had grown to just over 5,600.
The sheriff's office plans to produce a monthly analysis with the goal of tracking the impact of Burke's policies on the jail, according to the first such report in March.
Among the findings of the April report:
Monthly admissions for people ordered detained had increased 47% as of the end of March, compared with admissions during the month prior to the start of Burke's term.
Admissions for domestic battery and felony retail theft-related offenses saw the largest increases, 81% and 32% respectively, compared with November of 2024.
Olson said the theft-related increase caught his eye because such charges are generally not an offense prosecutors are allowed to seek detention on, though defendants can be detained if there are other charges or violations involved.
'That there's a big increase in people coming in on a theft charge seems odd because theft offenses are not eligible for pretrial detention at the first stage,' he said. 'The fact that those have gone up so much suggests that it might be people who were on pretrial release that then got charged for a new crime that the state is now seeking to detain them.'
During a swearing-in speech last year, Burke announced that prosecutors would automatically ask judges to order defendants detained while awaiting trial if they faced certain charges. By contrast, Foxx's office had said it reviewed each case individually before making a decision about whether to seek detention.
Burke also reversed a policy by Foxx that raised the threshold to charge retail theft as a felony to $1,000, reverting back to the legal bar of $300. She also has ordered prosecutors to seek prison sentences in more gun cases.
Impact on the ground
On Wednesday morning, inmates lined up to wait for buses to take them to court appearances in courthouses across Cook County. In all, about 500 were ushered out, to return later in the afternoon.
Cook County Jail sits on one of the largest single-site complexes in the country, though some of it is unused amid the population shrinkages over the years.
Dart said the population increase is 'very manageable' noting the unused space, but he said that staffing shortages might mean personnel challenges if the trend continues. He called for better court case management to allow for more timely resolutions for cases.
'I want violent people off the street so if that number is 5,100, fine, if it's 5,700, fine, if it's 6,000 fine … whatever that number is, that's what my job is, that's what the jail is for,' Dart said. 'That other overriding thing, length of stay, that just factors in because it causes so many additional problems and there's no reason for it.'
Other stakeholders said they noted the increase with some alarm.
Sharlyn Grace, senior policy adviser at the Cook County public defender's office, said the city has not experienced rising crime levels to correspond with the increasing jail population.
'I think it does raise a lot of questions about public safety and what the impact is going to be because we know many people who are subject to pretrial detention will come home,' she said. 'Research shows that detaining people is going to lead to less employment, less stable housing … a higher likelihood of re-arrest.'
Matthew McLoughlin, campaign coordinator for the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice, said Burke's detention policy is contrary to the spirit of reforms to the county's pretrial system, adding that the group believes it's the primary driver of the jail's spike.
'I would say the blanket detention policies that she's put forward since taking office … are not in line with the goals of the Pretrial Fairness Act,' he said. 'It was really designed to make sure court stakeholders were taking time with each individual case.'
Loizon, though, said line prosecutors are presenting judges with a 'very thorough and fulsome explanation of the details of the crime.'
'We're not walking away from our detention policy and the state's attorney's office absolutely owns the fact that we are ensuring our ASAs are presenting all the information that they can present so that a judge can make an informed decision based on the relevant facts,' Loizon said. 'We absolutely own that piece of it because that is a priority for us.'
Slow-moving justice
The longest-waiting detainee in Cook County — Augustin Toscano — has been jailed more than 14 years without a trial, since midway through the first Obama administration.
He's awaiting trial on allegations he was part of a drug and robbery crew blamed for more than a dozen slayings from 2009 to 2011. His wait offers a case study of how Cook County's system can get gummed up, with court records showing yearslong waits to gather and share evidence, then yearslong, slow-motion arguments over what evidence can be shown at trial, with delays also blamed on the pandemic, the case judge's own arrest on a gun charge and both sides blaming the other for stall tactics. Toscano also dismissed his attorney to argue on his own behalf.
'Literally there is no case that gets better as it gets older,' Dart said.
The length of stay for inmates at the jail has long been a prime issue for the sheriff, who noted it again now in light of rising jail numbers.
'Theoretically if cases were moving through the system more readily, then additional people coming would not be much of a notice because we'd be moving people out just as well,' he said.
The Cook County state's attorney's office hasn't recently updated its disposition data, which the Tribune previously used to calculate how long murder cases were taking. (The courts don't publish their own data.) But in looking at daily jail logs published by the Cook County sheriff's office, the data suggests progress in some measures but not in others — and shows Cook County still struggles far more to take cases to trial than the busier New York City court system.
Some national advocates call for detainees to wait no more than a year for a trial. As of the most recent data, the county jail housed nearly 1,800 people waiting at least a year. That's down from roughly 2,000 two years ago, but still about 400 higher than the number in New York City's system waiting at least a year for a trial, according to a Tribune analysis of both systems' jail data.
The county struggles even more with longer waits. Nearly 190 people have been waiting at least five years for a trial in Cook County — about 50 less than two years ago. But that's still dramatically higher than in New York City, which only had 18 detainees waiting that long, at last count.
And Cook County still grapples with perhaps the most notorious statistic: the number jailed at least a decade without trial. In the spring of 2021, there were six people waiting in jail for at least 10 years. By April 2023, that figure had doubled. And two years later, it's even higher, with 15 detainees now waiting at least that long for a trial. New York City, by comparison, has no one waiting a decade. At worst, the longest-waiting inmate in New York City's system has been there 7 ½ years.
In Toscano's case, he's asked a judge to throw out the charges because of how long the case has taken, blaming both prosecutors and his former attorney, arguing that it's now practically impossible for him to track down witnesses from so long ago.
No trial date has been set.