January is Poverty Awareness Month in America, so it is an appropriate time to look at the early implementation of Illinois’ Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA), which eliminated cash bail for all criminal cases. It became effective on September 18, 2023, three years after its passage. Part of the impetus for the law was to eliminate […]| Safety and Justice Challenge
Illinois’ chronic underfunding of public defense is a civil rights crisis. In jurisdictions across the state, public defenders are tasked with overwhelming caseloads and are often deprived of the resources required to provide quality defense. Funding disparities between the prosecutor’s and public defender’s budgets exist in every county. These dynamics disproportionately impact rural, Black, and […]| Coalition to End Money Bond