LITTLE VILLAGE — While strolling through the jail, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart had a short chat with an inmate that led to a realization — poor crooks, especially petty thieves and trespassers, get stuck in jail for far too long because our criminal justice system favors the rich.
“In the low level divisions, I walk through and ask some of them what they’re in for, how long they’ve been here and how we’re treating them. And they usually tell the truth,” Dart said.
One inmate told the sheriff he had been locked up for 200 days on a shoplifting charge.
“I thought maybe he had a violent background, but he said, ‘No.’ We did some background on him and there was nothing there, no record of violence,” Dart said. “How is this guy here on a goofy retail theft charge for 200 days when he doesn’t have any violence on his record?"
More research found hundreds of other non-violent small-time crooks — a hungry pregnant woman stealing plums and candy from a grocery store and a guy repeatedly trespassing (sitting) in the ABC7 lobby on State Street, among them — had spent months in jail awaiting trial on misdemeanor charges.
Their extended stays behind bars, which cost Cook County hundreds of thousands of dollars, reflects a harsh reality: Chicago is divided into two cities — one enjoyed by the wealthy and powerful and the other home to the poor and forgotten.
Then you see that the divide between rich and poor neighborhoods extends into Cook County’s misdemeanor courtrooms, too, when a 61-year-old serial shoplifter with no violent record gets caught stealing 10 packs of bacon worth less than $100 from a grocery store but couldn’t afford to pay a few hundred dollars in bail.
“When you require some of these people who are poor and don’t have any family to come up with $500 or $750 bond, it might as well be a billion dollars,” Dart said.
In that case, the alleged thief remained locked up for a month before the case ultimately got dropped because no one from the store showed up in court.
Every day someone spends in jail costs taxpayers $143 — typically more than the value of what the average accused shoplifter steals.
It's one of more than 20 that Dart’s office posted online as examples of “unjust incarceration" due to "crimes of survival."
Here are a few:
• A man got busted stealing a can of Budweiser and spent 21 days in jail before getting released on probation.
• A 51-year-old homeless man arrested for stealing toothpaste and breath mints spent 308 days in jail — at a cost of $44,044 to taxpayers — because he didn't have an address to qualify for electronic home monitoring.
• A 46-year-old arrested stealing six bottles of shampoo worth $30 from a department store spent more than 240 days in jail awaiting trial. His incarceration cost taxpayers more than $34,000.
“This is the most stark example of Chicago’s economic divide. If these people had any type of means at all, they wouldn’t be there,” Dart said.
“They’re here because they are poor. That’s not what the system is about. And unless something changed with the Legislature since I left there, I don’t think part of the criminal justice system is to punish people for their lack of wealth. … And keeping them there is thoughtlessness at its worst.”
That’s what inspired Dart to team with state Rep. Michael Zalewski and state Sen. Bill Cunningham to craft legislation launching a program nicknamed the “Rocket Docket,” which requires cases against people charged with retail theft and criminal trespassing who haven't been convicted of a violent crime in the last 10 years to be released from jail if their cases haven't been adjudicated in 30 days, tops.
“I didn’t want a silly task force or a resolution. We needed hard deadlines and a drop-dead date to dispose of these cases,” Dart said.
The Rocket Docket program — which was approved by the General Assembly, signed into law by Gov. Bruce Rauner on Friday and went into effect immediately — requires eligible inmates to be released under electronic monitoring or a personal recognizance bond that allows them to deal with their pending case while they're out on the street.
Currently, about 300 inmates qualify to be released under the new program. The average time each of those petty criminals spends locked up is 59 days — and the longest serving among them has been in jail for about 270 days. Dart has a staffer keeping track of all those cases and plans to release inmates who qualify under the Legislature-approved program.
While the program will save taxpayers money, the heart of the new law aims to make the justice system more fair for poor people.
“The situation is real people are sitting in this place [Cook County Jail] that shouldn’t be here,” Dart said. “And the real outrage is the ones who are being victimized don’t realize it because [getting locked up] becomes their normal. They’re lost in an uncaring system.”
Ultimately, Dart hopes to expand the program to include other non-violent offenses — minor drug possession, for instance — but he didn’t want to push for that at first.
The goal, Dart says, is to show lawmakers who might be wary about being seen as “soft on crime” that there are ways to be fair and treat the poor, even the ones who might be crooks, fairly.
“If the State of Illinois says these are such horrific crimes that we need to prosecute all we’re saying is we have to do it quickly,” Dart said.
“In this job I get to speak for people who don’t have a voice. If it was you or me our family and friends would scrape together the money [for bail] or demand that our case be handled right now. For these people, there are various reasons and things that have occurred that they don’t have a job or family anymore.
“We can have the debate in society the merits of a case about whether or not to prosecute in the first place. But we can’t have that debate when there are people literally warehoused in this place [jail] for literally no reason.”
For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here:
