Since the 1970’s, the steep increase in Illinois’ incarcerated population has been driven primarily not by any rise in crime, but by the drastic escalation in the length of sentences imposed by elected officials. As a result, more people spend more of their lives incarcerated than at any point in our state’s history.

Today’s excessively long prison stays are the result of punitive sentencing laws enacted over the past several decades in Springfield. Year after year, Illinois’ huge investments in the prison system - more than $1.5 billion annually - are misspent warehousing people in harmful conditions for needlessly long periods of time. At the same time, tens of thousands of Illinois residents are required by law to live under surveillance by corrections agents for years after their release, resulting in far too many people being sent back to prison.

Perhaps no single policy has caused the length of prison stays to balloon more than so-called “truth in sentencing” laws, which place arbitrary restrictions on people’s ability to earn time off their sentences. Previously, people sentenced to prison in Illinois could earn sentence credit for good behavior and participation in programs. Most people were even eligible to reduce their sentence by as much as 50%, which allowed them to return to their families or back to work quicker.

But in 1998, the Illinois General Assembly passed a law that severely restricted the amount of sentence credit that people convicted of certain crimes were allowed to earn and prohibited people convicted of murder from receiving any sentence credit at all. At the time, many legislators believed that judges would counterbalance the new laws by adjusting sentences downward, and therefore, the length of prison stays would not increase dramatically.

That simply did not happen. In fact, there was only a small decline in the sentences imposed by courts, which was far outstripped by the new law’s requirement that people serve a much greater percentage of their sentence. The net effect of truth in sentencing in Illinois was to keep people in prison far longer for the same crimes.

Illinois’ move toward so-called “truth in sentencing” and similar laws was grounded in a mistaken belief that locking up people for longer periods of time would make communities safer. But research has shown that idea to be incorrect. Increased incarceration has a marginal and diminishing effect on decreasing community crime, but instead comes at a heavier social and economic cost that can even cause crime to increase.

Overly long sentences isolate individuals from their families and leave them unprepared to successfully re-integrate into their communities. Beyond the harm to incarcerated people themselves, long-term imprisonment shatters families and forces children to grow up without parents, grandparents, caregivers, and more. These punishing policies overwhelmingly impact families who live in segregated, low-income urban neighborhoods already reeling from decades of disinvestment, and exacerbate the social problems that lead people to commit crimes in the first place.

To decrease these kinds of assaults on low-income and communities of color in Illinois, legislators in our state must roll back “truth in sentencing” laws to reduce the excessive length of prison stays, while also incentivizing incarcerated people to follow rules and take advantage of prison programs that can help prepare them for successful reentry. This includes:

• People currently required to serve 75% of the sentence imposed should be eligible to reduce length of stay to 50% - the same as incarcerated people not subject to truth in sentencing laws.
• Those mandated by law to serve at least 85% of their sentences should be eligible to reduce the time served to around 72% of the sentence.
• People convicted of murder--currently required to serve 100% of the prison sentence imposed by the court--should be eligible to earn sentence credit resulting in a length of stay of 75% of the sentence.

Illinois must also reduce the length of post-release supervision which, according to a 2019 John Howard Association report,“does not appear to measurably improve public safety, either by preventing or detecting crime through surveillance or by providing rehabilitative support to people leaving prison to assist in reentry and reduce recidivism.”

Currently, everyone released from prison must remain under supervision by the Department of Corrections for a lengthy period of “mandatory supervised release” (MSR) before their sentence will be fully discharged. The length of supervision is determined according to the crime for which the individual was incarcerated—not an individualized assessment of whether the person actually needs to be supervised.

While on MSR, a person must comply with a long list of conditions, which may include allowing parole agents to inspect and search their residence whenever they want, abstaining from alcohol and drugs, and avoiding contact with certain people or places. A person on this kind of supervision may even be ordered to wear an electronic monitoring shackle that effectively incarcerates them in their own home, despite evidence that electronic surveillance has “minimal effect on reducing recidivism and changing criminal behavior.”

If a person is found to have violated any condition of their release, they may be summarily returned to prison on a “technical violation.” In 2019 alone, over 9,000 individuals on MSR—57% of whom were Black — were sent back to prison on technical violations. Illinois would benefit from:

• Shortening the period of MSR to 18 months for people released from prison for higher-level offenses (Class X, 1 and 2 felonies).
• Eliminating this supervision for people released from prison for most lower-level crimes (Class 3 and 4 felonies), unless the Prisoner Review Board specifically determines, based on a validated risk and needs assessment tool, that it is necessary for the person to serve an MSR term.
• Limiting this supervision to 1 year for individuals who were convicted of Class 3 felonies, and 6 months for those convicted of Class 4 felonies.

Illinois needs to stop using expensive and ineffective surveillance tools that set people up to fail. It is time to give up the false promises of “truth in sentencing” laws, and focus instead on meeting the housing, education, and employment needs of formerly incarcerated people and their communities.

What is Contact Tracing?

Contact Tracing works backwards from someone testing positive for COVID-19 to identify anyone they may have come in contact with, possibly exposing them to the disease.

Why is it important?

Contact Tracing is a public health tool that can help slow down the spread of COVID-19 by warning people if they’ve been exposed, even if they aren’t showing any symptoms.

Even though the tool offers public health benefits, it may also cause significant risks to civil rights and liberties.

How does it work?

There are a couple of different ways for contact tracing to work. One is known as the manual approach and the others are called tech assisted contact tracing models (TACT). 

Manual Contact Tracing

Tech-Assisted Contact Tracing

TACT models go through the same steps as a manual approach - except this time with a smart phone instead of human callers. There are two categories of TACT models based on the type of data collected:

Will I need to download an app?

Right now, the state is rolling out a voluntary manual contact tracing process. But that doesn’t mean a tech approach won’t be adopted in the future. 

Your work and school may also have different requirements. If you are asked to download an app, ask questions to help figure out how it may impact your privacy rights.

What happens to my information?

Since contact tracing is a public health tool, any information collected during the process should only be used for public health purposes. It should never make its way into the hands of another government agency.

What does contact tracing have to do with your rights?

The process of contact tracing relies on collecting your personal information in order to determine where you've been and who you may have exposed. Since contact tracers need to know if you've tested positive or are showing symptoms, your medical information is also being shared.

You have privacy rights attached to all of this data, making it sensitive and valuable. Any entity, including the government, must respect those rights.

How can my privacy be protected during contact tracing?

All contact tracing models should be developed and implemented with a privacy-first approach. This means that protecting your privacy needs to be a top priority when an entity is considering the use of contact tracing. The information collected should be:

• minimal
• never shared with anyone else
• only used for the limited purpose of slowing down the spread of COVID-19

What if I have more questions?

For public health questions visit: www.dph.illinois.gov/covid19/contact-tracing

For ways to protect your privacy: https://www.aclu-il.org/en/campaigns/protecting-privacy-during-covid-19

Interested in a training? Email acluofillinois@aclu-il.org

Right now, mandatory minimum sentencing laws are extremely punitive to people in Illinois and routinely deny judges in our state the flexibility to craft individualized sentences. Even a man convicted of a nonviolent crime like selling drugs can be required to spend the rest of his life in prison, not because the judge determined that was a fair sentence, but because of a law passed by legislators who knew nothing about the circumstances of the case or his potential for rehabilitation.

While the Illinois Constitution provides that “all penalties shall be determined both according to the seriousness of the offense and with the objective of restoring the offender to useful citizenship,” mandatory minimum sentences and penalty enhancements leave judges no recourse but to sentence an individual to a long prison term, even if they believe that probation or a shorter term of incarceration would be a more just outcome.

In Illinois, all prison-eligible crimes are categorized within one of six felony classes, each of which carries a minimum and maximum prison sentence. For instance, a Class 4 felony is the lowest-level class with a one-year minimum prison sentence and three-year maximum; both the minimums and maximums grow progressively longer for Class 3, 2, and 1 felonies, respectively. It is important to note that first-degree murder is in its own class, with a minimum sentence of at least 20 years and a maximum of 60 years, or up to natural life if certain aggravating factors apply.

For a broad array of crimes, Illinois law provides mandatory minimum sentences, meaning the law specifically mandates imprisonment and prohibits consideration of any alternative to incarceration. Some examples of crimes carrying mandatory minimums in Illinois are residential burglary (which typically involves the unlawful entry into an unoccupied residence) and delivery of 3 grams or more of heroin.

These mandatory minimum sentencing laws rob judges of discretion in two ways: by forcing them to sentence people to prison rather than probation, and by forcing them to sentence people for unnecessarily long terms of incarceration. Evidence shows that the average sentences imposed by judges tend to be closer to the minimum sentence than the maximum, and judges have said they often feel constrained by those minimums.

At a recent hearing in the Illinois Senate Criminal Law Committee, retired Judge Donald Bernardi testified that “in discussions I’ve had with judges … we have often discussed the inability to go below a minimum. Judges would comment ‘I wish I could have given him probation.’ I mean that’s something I actually have heard quite a bit. I have never heard a judge complain ‘I wish I could have given the guy more time.’”

Illinois law also includes harmful mandatory penalty enhancements that require judges to tack on additional years—and sometimes decades—to a person’s sentence under certain circumstances. The severity and rigidity of these draconian sentencing enhancements make Illinois an extreme outlier compared to other states.

For instance, in 1999 the General Assembly passed a law requiring judges to add 15, 20, or even 25 years to a person’s sentence if they possessed or discharged a firearm during the crime. Illinois’ firearm enhancements are the most extreme of any state in terms of length, and are rigidly mandatory in comparison to other states’ laws. While in 2015 the legislature amended the law to allow judges the option not to apply the firearm enhancements to juvenile defendants, no such option exists for an adult defendant.

Illinois also still has destructive and ineffective “three strikes” laws on the books that impose lengthy mandatory prison sentences - and in some cases natural life imprisonment without the possibility of parole- if a person has certain prior convictions. Short of the death penalty, life imprisonment is the harshest imaginable punishment. If Illinois is to continue condemning people to die in prison, then lawmakers must ensure that this drastic sanction is never imposed mechanically, and only for the most serious violent crimes. A drug offense should never carry a life sentence, no matter what past convictions a person may have.

These laws also come with large racial disparities embedded into their enforcement - according to an analysis by the Illinois Sentencing Policy Advisory Council, 70% of the people admitted to prison who were eligible for “three strikes” sentencing were Black. For all but 27% of these individuals, at least one of their three convictions were for a non-forcible felony.

To empower judges to construct just sentences for individuals based on all the evidence before the court, Illinois must enact the following reforms to its sentencing laws:

• Allow judges more flexibility to determine the length of prison sentences by reducing the minimum sentence for most classes of offenses.
• Eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for residential burglary and certain drug law violations and give judges the discretion to determine whether a sentence of probation may be appropriate for these crimes.
• Roll back mandatory sentencing enhancements that require judges to add 15 - 25 years to a person’s sentence if they possessed or discharged a firearm during the crime.
• Limit “three strikes” sentencing to cases where all three convictions are for serious violent offenses

Every crime is different, and every individual charged with an offense is different. Judges, not the legislature, should be responsible for determining individual sentences for people found guilty of crimes. It is time for Illinois legislators to do away with harmful minimum sentencing laws and give judges the flexibility they need to better serve their communities.