With thousands of children in the care of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, and terrifying documentation of mistreatment and neglect, U.S. District Court Judge Jorge Alonso approved an agreed interim plan presented by the Department and the ACLU of Illinois to help insure the safety and quality of care for wards of the state while longer-term reforms are pursued.

Specifically, the interim plan identifies independent monitors from the University of Illinois Chicago’s Department of Psychiatry, who will oversee a review of the residential treatment centers housing wards of the state.  The monitors will evaluate each program’s conditions and services and recommend alternatives for children should the centers be found unacceptable. After many years of a successful independent monitoring program, DCFS abandon this process in favor of internal reviewers -- a process that was an abject failure.  As recent media reports have made clear, thousands of children either missing or mistreated as a result of inadequate oversight.  The independent monitors will begin their work even as the ACLU meets with the new acting director of DCFS, George Sheldon, to devise other policies to improve operations within the agency.

“We want experts to help shape the long-term strategy of the DCFS,” ACLU of Illinois Associate Legal Director Benjamin Wolf told the court

This effort is complicated by the fact that Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner recently outlined significant cuts to DCFS as a part of his budget proposal. In spite of these fiscal challenges, the ACLU of Illinois is insisting on additional reforms that will meet the needs of the children who rely on DCFS services and placements, as well as safeguards to prevent mistreatment from taking place again. What is critical, in the ACLU's view, is that these changes are implemented under court supervision, in order to hold the State accountable.

The parties will return to court on March 26^th. 
Coverage from the federal court hearing:

• Chicago Tribune
• WBEZ
• Associated Press

As part of an ongoing legal battle to reform the Illinois Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS), a federal judge ordered an evaluation of agency facilities, the Chicago Tribune reports. Independent monitors will be sent into the most troubled facilities in order to protect the youth that are housed there.

The Chicago Tribune's investigative series, "Harsh Treatment" exposed how many of the children under DCFS' care endure assault and abuse in facilities that lack adequate staff and services. The ACLU of Illinois has monitored DCFS under a consent decree aimed at reforming the agency, despite a revolving door of leadership within the Department. This week's ruling comes as a result of the ACLU going back to court in an effort to jump-start reforms. The Chicago Tribune spoke with ACLU of Illinois associate legal director Ben Wolf:

"As (we) know from the Tribune, some of (the centers) have been permitted to deteriorate quite a bit in recent years," said Ben Wolf, the ACLU chapter's associate legal director. "The first steps are to start to look at the most troubled residential treatment centers and to figure out if we need to close them, if we can provide technical assistance to fix them and, if we can't, where the kids will go."

Read the entire article.

In These Times has an ongoing investigative series called "We Surveil and Protect" that looks at the surveillance activities of the Chicago Police Department (CPD). This article highlights inconsistencies in the data released by the CPD regarding police use of automatic license plate readers (ALPRs). ALPRs are cameras mounted on the dashboards of police cars and are used to scan the license plates of every car in its vicinity, regardless of whether or not the driver is suspected of criminal activity. The data scanned by the ALPR are stored in a database, and can be shared with other law enforcement agencies across state lines. The power of the CPD to surveil citizens is completely unregulated, which is why the ACLU of Illinois has worked with State Senator Daniel Biss to draft a bill - Senate Bill 1753 - that would place modest regulations on the use of ALPRs in Illinois. In These Times reports:

Illinois, like 39 other states, does not have any state-imposed regulations. And, according to the ACLU, police departments are loathe to create any internal policies that would restrict their ALPR programs. How widely ALPR data is shared between police departments, federal agencies and the private databases that sell that information to anyone willing to pay, is unknown.

Read the entire article.