Today is Mother’s Day. Across the State of Illinois, many of us will contact our own mother – perhaps via Zoom this year – and others will remember mothers no longer with us. Like every year, we will discuss how much we love mothers and how important they are to our individual lives and to our society. 

The value of mothers has never been more clear than 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic has added a lot of new parental responsibilities that have disproportionately fallen on mothers. But words are not enough to express our appreciation - we must act.  

Illinois should pass the Healthy Workplace Act – a bill that would benefit mothers across the state by allowing them to earn up to five paid sick days a year.

More than 40 percent of workers nationally – and over 80 percent of low-wage workers – do not get a single paid sick day. While recent efforts led to legislative changes that created access to paid sick for hundreds of thousands of workers in Chicago and Cook County, there are 1.5 million Illinois workers outside Cook County who still have no right to a single paid sick day.

Access to paid sick leave is an issue that is extremely important for working mothers. Workers who earn lower wages or work part-time – both of which are more likely to be women – typically have less access to paid sick days. Women of color are less likely than white women to have access to paid sick days. This means that enacting paid sick leave policies will disproportionately benefit women and specifically women of color. 

At the same time, over half of working mothers do not have a single sick day that they can use to care for a sick child, while nearly 20 percent have been disciplined for taking time off to care for a child or family member. Mothers are ten times more likely than fathers to take time off to care for a sick child. Having access to paid sick days would help mothers care for their families and themselves. 

Illinois mothers deserve better support caring for their families than we are currently giving them. They deserve paid sick time no matter where they live or how much money they make.

This week, the ACLU released a new update to a 2013 report on the cost of cannabis enforcement across the United States, both in terms of costs and the impact on individual lives. Unsurprisingly, the report shows that the war on cannabis rages on: nationally, law enforcement made more than 6.1 million cannabis-related arrests from 2010 to 2018 - more arrests than for all violent crimes combined. These arrests eat up an enormous amount of resources from law enforcement and the criminal legal system and fall most heavily on people of color.  

While extreme racial disparities persist in cannabis arrests all across the country, Illinois’ record is particularly poor. While people of different races use and sell drugs at similar rates, people of color are much more likely than whites to be arrested, convicted, incarcerated, and harshly sentenced for drug offenses. Black residents of Illinois were seven times more likely than whites to be arrested for cannabis possession before the State regulated purchase and possession. Illinois had the third highest rate of bias in cannabis arrests in the United States, surpassed only by Montana and Kentucky. 

It is no longer debatable that the War on Drugs has been a dismal failure, ravaging communities of color and diverting resources from public health, including substance abuse treatment.  Illinois took a big step forward last year with its new law legalizing cannabis for adult use - but it was only one step. A person can still be arrested, fined, or lose their housing, job or vehicle for a cannabis violation. This new report makes clear that we must continue to monitor data to ensure that residual cannabis enforcement is not conducted in a discriminatory fashion.  
 
It is time to take the next step. Harsh laws about the possession of other drugs has the same disproportionate impact on minority communities and entangles hundreds of thousands of people in the criminal legal system every year at a tremendous cost. Black communities continue to bear the overwhelming brunt of enforcement of Illinois’ antiquated drug laws, and are hardest-hit by overdose fatalities. 

Despite decades of responding to drug use with increasingly harsh punishments, Illinois is still experiencing unprecedented numbers of fatal overdoses and a growing need for access to addiction treatment. It is clear that felony convictions don’t stop people from using or selling drugs, they only limit people’s opportunities for employment and education.

Illinois’ current level of incarceration is unsustainable, especially in the time of a massive public health crisis. This is why we must continue working to reduce criminal penalties for drug offenses. By reclassifying small-scale drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor, we can free up resources currently wasted on imprisonment to help people access health services in the communities where they live.

Illinois jails are dangerous and overcrowded, a reality clearer now that we are facing the COVID-19 pandemic. These facilities are no place to send people who need treatment for health needs. It is time for Illinois to start treating addiction as a critical public health issue and stop incarcerating people for drug possession.