A recent sweeping state criminal justice reform bill was intended to keep people out of jail if they could not afford bail.

But while Champaign County’s jail population numbers haven’t significantly decreased in the wake of the bill, the jail population began trending downwards in recent months compared to when it was enacted.

Public records show the total jail population, including out-of-county transfers, was typically between 290 and 260 from September 2023 through February this year. Since then, the population has been typically between 220 and 250.

However, the new law has exasperated the caseload for the already understaffed and underfunded public defenders who represent lower-income people who can’t afford attorneys. 

The Illinois Pretrial Fairness Act, also known as the SAFE-T Act, eliminated cash bail in the state unless a judge finds an accused person poses a high risk of willful flight or a specific threat to someone else.

However, the act has resulted in an enormous increase in work for the public defenders.

“The total amount of time that goes into preparing for arraignment court, arguing detention hearings, and then facilitating the appellate process is about tripled our workload with regards to initial appearances,” Chief Public Defender Elisabeth Pollock said. 

The workload has tripled, Pollock said, because public defenders must now prepare much more for detention hearings. Before the SAFE-T Act, public defenders just used to have to interview clients to develop arguments for bond. 

Now, public defenders receive discovery from the state in advance. So, defenders must craft arguments to keep their clients from being detained based not only on the client's circumstances but also on the facts of the case. 

While the public defender office’s workload has tripled, Pollock said they’re working with the same amount of staff they had before the SAFE-T Act went into effect. She’s planning to ask Champaign County for more money to fund additional staff this year but said the fiscal budget may not allow for it. 

“The county is in a certain fiscal position, which may or may not allow for those additional expenses to be authorized. So I don't know if I'm going to get them or not,” Pollock said. “I'm certainly going to ask for it. But I have no guarantees I'm gonna get it.”

Since the implementation of the SAFE-T Act in September 2023, the number of people in the Champaign County Jail has remained fairly stagnant, with occasional dips. However, Pollock noted that these small decreases are likely not direct results of the SAFE-T Act.

“I think that’s more because my office is at full staff, and so we're able to address clients' cases more quickly, and move cases more quickly,” Pollock said. 

Jail Superintendent Karee Voges agrees with Pollock. She said the small drop in the jail population is due to a fully staffed public defender’s office, which means cases are being heard more quickly.

“The public defender's office is fully staffed. We have more judges than we had before. Cases are getting heard. People are moving on,” Voges said. “That has been the overall effect for us.” 

According to a study from the University of Illinois of Chicago, felony defendants in counties with higher public defender and support staff caseloads are more likely to be detained pretrial, and felony defendants in counties with smaller support staff caseloads are given shorter sentences.

Illinois lawmakers have proposed more legislation to boost aid for public defenders throughout the state — including creating a new statewide office to provide public defenders with additional support. The state’s budget currently provides $10 million for statewide public defense support.

Illinois is just one of seven states nationwide without a state-level defense office. That means if someone has an issue with their public defender, there’s nowhere but the state bar association for them to complain. And it’s currently up to counties to set budgets for public defender’s offices and for judges to appoint — and remove — public defenders from their positions. 

Stephanie Kollman, policy director of the Children and Family Justice Center, emphasized the need for state oversight of the public defender system. Such oversight would manage complaints against public defenders and ensure adequate staffing in county offices to handle caseloads. "Right now, that’s just not happening," Kollman said.

“It's the job of the state of Illinois, to ensure that people's constitutional rights are being protected,” Kollman said. “And currently there's no state body to receive information about whether that's happening.” 

The Illinois Public Defender Stats map shows a much larger disparity between the number of positions counties budget for public defender’s offices and the number of positions offices need to handle their caseloads. The map resulted from research conducted by the Children and Family Justice Center and the Sociology Department at Northwestern University in 2022, which “collected, verified, and analyzed a large, statewide database that details how indigent defense resources are distributed across all 102 Illinois counties.”

While the public defender’s office is fully staffed, the map calculates that the office should have over double the number of attorneys they have to handle the number of cases. Kollman, who helped create the map, said this disparity has huge consequences for overworked public defenders and clients who rely on their attorneys. 

Kollman noted that while the budgets of prosecutors and public defenders are often compared on an equal footing, public defenders begin their cases at a disadvantage. She argues that public defenders need additional resources and support from across the state to provide their clients with the best possible defense.

And with the additional burden of pretrial release hearings, which determine whether a person will remain in custody or not, public defenders have even more arguments to prepare each day. 

“Prosecutors have a very long time to lead up and queue up their entire investigation, and public defenders have a few hours in many cases to put something together for that first pretrial release hearing,” Kollman said. “They need a lot more resources more quickly, to get to good answers, providing good solid information to the court about what a person's actual life circumstances are.” 

Farrah Anderson is an investigative reporting fellow with the Invisible Institute and Illinois Public Media. Follow her on Twitter @farrahsoa.