State of Illinois Circuit Court of Cook County

Cook County, Illinois (Cook) is a member of the second cohort of jurisdictions selected to participate in the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) Network, the centerpiece of the Foundation’s strategy to address overincarceration by reducing jail misuse and overuse. Under previous awards, Cook developed, refined, and implemented a series of policy, practice, and system alignment changes aimed at reducing local incarceration and racial and ethnic disparities in jail usage. This award enables Cook to continue to deepen its reform efforts, with the aim of achieving further reductions in local incarceration, targeting racial and ethnic disparities, and contributing momentum toward criminal justice systems reform nationally, to build on and secure progress achieved during previous rounds of implementation funding in reducing jail populations, increasing fairness, and advancing racial equity, while sustaining local system reform momentum.

Cook County is one of twenty jurisdictions originally selected to participate in the Safety and Justice Challenge Network, the centerpiece of the Foundation’s strategy to address overincarceration by reducing jail misuse and overuse. Under previous awards, Cook County developed, refined, and implemented a series of policy, practice, and system alignment changes aimed at reducing local incarceration and disparities in jail usage. This award enables Cook County to continue and deepen its reform efforts, with the aim of achieving further reductions in local incarceration, targeting racial and ethnic disparities, and contributing momentum toward criminal justice systems reform nationally.

Cook County is one of twenty jurisdictions originally selected to participate in the Safety and Justice Challenge Network, the centerpiece of the Foundation’s strategy to address over-incarceration by reducing jail misuse and overuse. Under its previous award, Cook County refined its approach and strategies, and made significant progress on the implementation of its reforms. This two-year award enables Cook County to make comprehensive policy, practice and system alignment changes aimed at safely reducing local incarceration and disparities in jail usage. The aim is to demonstrate more effective, fairer, and equitable responses to crime and social disorder, creating momentum toward criminal justice systems reform nationally.

Following a national competition in 2015, twenty jurisdictions were selected for inclusion in the Safety and Justice Challenge Network, the centerpiece of the Foundation’s strategy to address over-incarceration by reducing jail misuse and overuse. A previous award enabled these sites to assess local drivers of jail incarceration and develop plans to address them. Resulting plans were reviewed with the help of an expert panel, and eleven Core Sites were selected for implementation funding, with the remaining nine partner site jurisdictions to receive smaller awards enabling them to continue to participate in the Challenge Network. Partner sites will use their awards to refine and strengthen their plans for targeting drivers of local incarceration, begin implementation where possible, and continue to share what they learn with other Network sites.

Twenty jurisdictions have been selected, following a nationwide competition, to participate in the Safety and Justice Challenge Network of sites committed to finding ways to safely and sustainably reduce unnecessary jail incarceration. The Safety and Justice Challenge Network is at the core of the Foundation’s initiative to reduce over-incarceration by changing the way America thinks about and uses jails. Awards to these jurisdictions support their participation in a structured data analysis and planning process aimed at assessing drivers of local incarceration and developing multi-stakeholder action plans to address them.