Introduction: The Safe-T Act’s Broken Promise
When Illinois eliminated money bail in 2023, the reform crowd promised a fairer, safer, smarter system. Fewer people in jail. No more “wealth-based detention.” A data-driven utopia guided by risk assessment tools. Three years later, the numbers coming out of Cook County tell a very different story, and it is one every legislator, judge, and taxpayer in this country needs to hear. In this piece, Eric Granof digs into a new court watcher report out of Cook County showing judges ordering detention in nearly 74% of the cases where prosecutors sought it, and detaining nearly 60% of defendants the county’s own algorithm scored as low risk. Read that again. The very tool that was supposed to replace judicial discretion is being overruled by the judges who have to live with its consequences.
This is exactly what those of us who have spent our careers in the surety bail profession said would happen. When you strip financially secured release out of the system, you leave judges with a binary choice: turn a defendant loose or lock him up. There is no middle ground, no accountability mechanism, no third party with skin in the game making sure that defendant shows up for court. Granof connects the dots from Cook County back to the federal Bail Reform Act of 1984, where the same experiment produced the same result, and to states like Texas and California that looked at this model and rejected it. The Safe-T Act was sold as the end of pretrial detention as we know it. Instead, Illinois got more detention, not less. Read the full article below.
Eric Granof
