March 11--Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart says the local justice system should expedite cases of those charged with minor offenses, citing cases such as that of an alleged candy bar thief jailed for months before being released to drug treatment.
At a Tuesday news conference at the county jail, Dart told reporters the system is "not set up to care" about detainees in jail on minor offenses who sometimes wait for months as their cases wind their way through the court system.
One man spent 114 days in jail, which the sheriff's office runs, allegedly for stealing packs of Snickers bars--at a cost to taxpayers of more than $16,000, according to Dart, who used the case as one example of "the outrageous amounts of money we spend incarcerating the wrong people."
"Are we putting him on a rigorous program to get him off of Snickers bars?" Dart said. "This is stupidity of the highest order."
The culprit, Dart said, is a system that rewards "benign neglect" rather than actively looking for ways to get low-level defendants out of jail--leading not just to mass incarceration but "unjust incarceration."
"Society says, 'We'll just stick them in there for now,'" Dart said. "Why are they here? Why are they here this long? ... It's indicative of a system that's not set up to care."
Beginning next week and continuing weekly, county officials will identify five to 10 cases "where we feel people [should] not be there," Dart said, and meet with public defenders and county prosecutors to brainstorm ways to fast track those cases through the court system.
Dart also announced plans to propose legislation in Springfield instituting a "rocket docket" for cases of retail theft and criminal trespassing. The county would be given 30 days to work out those cases, and if they could not be resolved in that time, defendants would be released on recognizance bonds or electronic monitoring.
If approved by lawmakers, the "rocket docket" could be a model for low-level drug cases, Dart said.
The sheriff also plans to propose to county judges a diversion program for mentally ill defendants.
"We need to save our venom, our resources, for violent people," he said.
Dart has dubbed the Cook County Jail, near 26th Street and California Avenue, the largest mental health facility in the country. It currently houses 8,500 detainees; its capacity is about 11,000, he said.
The typical resident of Cook County Jail is a black man from Chicago in his early 30s.
It costs $143 to house one detainee for one day. Jail population traditionally spikes in the summer months, and Dart said this year would be no different, though he does not anticipate overcrowding issues.
In other recent attempts to keep jail population down, the county has released more and more defendants awaiting trial; in 2014 nearly half of defendants were allowed to go home between court dates rather than pay bail--up from 21 percent in 2011.
mcrepeau@redeyechicago.com
Chicago Tribune contributed.
