For Immediate Release: Thursday, January 17, 2019
Contact: Kristi Sanford, 773-456-4024, kristi@thepeopleslobbyusa.org or
Sarah Staudt, 312-988-6564, sarahstaudt@chicagoappleseed.org
Chicago, Cook County, IL — In her campaign for Cook County State’s Attorney, Kim Foxx promised a new era of transparency and a “data-driven strategy” to decrease incarceration rates and to begin correcting the longstanding racism and punitiveness of our local criminal justice system. Using data released by Foxx’s office, advocates for criminal justice reform assert Foxx could more fully utilize her power in order to live up to those campaign promises in a new report called “Exercising Full Powers: Recommendations to Kim Foxx on Addressing Systemic Racism in the Cook County Criminal Justice System”. The report is authored by The People’s Lobby, Reclaim Chicago and the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice.
Using Foxx’s own data, the report evaluates her progress on reducing incarceration rates and other hardships exacerbated by people facing charges and pre-trial detention in the criminal justice system, including poverty, joblessness and loss of social services.
“We commend Foxx on the progress she’s made in the last two years, and we urge her to exercise her full range of discretionary powers in pursuit of reform,” says Rev. Charles Straight of The People’s Lobby. “We recognize that Foxx is only one of the leaders with a responsibility to reduce incarceration, and we urge Chief Judge Timothy Evans to fully enforce his bond court reforms and Chicago Police to stop arresting and charging people unnecessarily for drug offenses and other felonies that would be dealt with more effectively without incarceration.
The report evaluates Foxx on four specific strategies:
- Reducing felony charging and ending the “war on drugs”:
An important measure of State’s Attorney Foxx’s use of prosecutorial discretion to reduce incarceration is the number of felonies charged and the number of felonies rejected in felony review. In most felony cases, police recommend felony charges that prosecutors then are given the opportunity to review and decide either to approve or not approve. The major exception to this is drug cases, in which the State’s Attorney’s Office allows police to file charges directly without felony review.
Top recommendation for Foxx: Set department-wide priority on addressing the problem of overcharging and of reducing the overall number of felony charges. In addition, rather than allowing Chicago Police to set narcotics charges alone, State’s Attorney Foxx should reinstate felony review for narcotics charges, with the highest priority on scrutinizing Class X Drug charges.
- Ending Pretrial Detention of the Poor: Right now, about 2,000 people are incarcerated before trial simply because they are too poor to pay the money bond determined by a judge. The stated purpose of a money bond is to ensure people attend their court dates, but the real-world result is the incarceration of legally innocent people, many of whom will never be convicted.
Top recommendation for Foxx: Direct Bond Court prosecutors to request I-Bonds in an increased number of cases and speak out publicly for improved implementation of General Order 18.8a.
- Increase transparency and accountability for prosecutorial processes and outcomes: Foxx has released the largest amount data of any State’s Attorney in Cook County history and allows an unprecedented amount of access to information about what’s going on in the court system. Foxx has also created an internal data team, and her office ran a free training for criminal justice reformers to educate them about the data sets and how to interpret them. Foxx is showing a genuine desire to show the inner workings of her office, warts and all.
Top recommendation for Foxx: Work with the juvenile courts to allow researchers access to anonymized juvenile court data. No data from juvenile courts is currently available to experts or the public.
- Address the large amount of overcharging of people accused of gun possession offenses
Top recommendation for Foxx: Improve scrutiny and oversight of gun offense charging decisions in felony review process.
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