Study: Cook criminal justice system overwhelmed

By Michael Higgins |Tribune staff reporter

9:00 AM CST, December 13, 2007

Huge numbers of nonviolent drug offenders and mentally ill defendants have overwhelmed Cook County's criminal justice system, requiring new infusions of government spending to address the problem, a criminal justice advocacy group said in a report made public today.

Criminal court judges must grapple with excessive caseloads of more than 800 new cases a year, while public defenders can't turn down work no matter how busy they may be, the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice said in the report.

"A system operating beyond capacity and without the tools it needs for rehabilitation and treatment has a profoundly devastating effect on our community, businesses, and families, while destroying lives in the process," Malcolm Rich, executive director of the group's Criminal Justice Project, said in a statement.

The group spent two years studying the county's criminal courts and its main building at 26th Street and California Avenue. It conducted more than 100 interviews and watched 160 hours of court proceedings.

The county's top criminal justice leaders – Presiding Criminal Court Judge Paul Biebel, State's Attorney Richard Devine and Public Defender Edwin Burnette – cooperated in the effort and provided data.

They are expected to discuss the report at a public forum at noon at Chicago-Kent College of Law.

The report argues for more staffing to reduce caseloads, improved treatment for drug offenders and more programs specifically geared toward mentally ill defendants.

It also recommends that legislators be required to estimate the cost of any new crime legislation and that a new, independent commission help the Cook County Board make criminal justice budgeting decisions.

"It is our hope that these recommendations serve as a model for bringing about real change in a system that is long overdue," Rich said.

Many of the report's recommendations would require new spending at a time when both the county and state are struggling with budget problems. The report argues for more funds for adult probation, four new drug courts and expanded mental health courts.

But other suggestions, such as improving how court personnel treat the public, won't require more funds, said Daniel Coyne, a defense attorney and Chicago-Kent law professor who worked on the report.

He argued that other recommendations, such as using drug treatment programs to steer more offenders out of the system, are designed to save money in the long run.

"If I invest a dollar today to avoid spending two dollars tomorrow, it's a net gain," Coyne said.

mjhiggins@tribune.com

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Cook County blacks hit hard in drug war

Study finds racial bias in sentencing

By Darnell Little |Tribune staff reporter

December 4, 2007

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African-Americans in Cook County were imprisoned for drug offenses at 58 times the rate of white people -- the seventh-worst racial disparity among large counties nationwide, according to a new report.

The Justice Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank advocating alternatives to prison for social problems, was set to release a study Tuesday detailing the different treatment white and black drug offenders receive under the criminal justice system. The institute found that nationwide, African-Americans are imprisoned for drugs at 10 times the rate of white people.

Cook County also ranked high for its overall rate of drug imprisonment, the authors said. In 2002, the year selected for study, more than 166 out of every 100,000 people went to prison for a drug offense in Cook County, the ninth highest rate in the nation.

A Tribune investigation last summer also found a high disparity between the treatment of black and white drug offenders, and detailed how new drug laws -- such as those targeting dealers arrested near churches, schools, parks and public housing -- disproportionately affect predominantly black neighborhoods.

The new paper, titled "The Vortex: The Concentrated Racial Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive Counties," argues that there is little relationship between a county's drug imprisonment rate and the rate of illegal drug use in the county.

Instead, high rates of imprisonment typically indicate counties with larger proportions of African-Americans, higher unemployment and poverty rates, and larger judicial system budgets.

Part of this is due to increased police attention in urban areas, where drugs are bought and sold in open-air drug markets. In suburbs, where overall crime rates are lower and drug sales and usage more often take place behind closed doors, police are less likely to notice or take action.

The end result is that though there are nearly 20 million illicit drug users in the U.S., the drug laws are selectively enforced primarily on minorities and the poor, said Jason Ziedenberg, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute and a co-author of the report.

"A huge subset of the population is involved in some level of drug offending on any given day," Ziedenberg said. "But policing practices enforce laws in a pattern that impacts one part of the population different than it impacts another part of the population."

Ziedenberg stresses that not only does research show that blacks and whites use illegal drugs at similar rates, but blacks and whites also sell drugs at similar rates.

"We've got a media culture that puts out an image of what a drug dealer looks like," Ziedenberg said. "Most people buy drugs from somebody of the same color. And since the vast majority of drug users in the United States are white, the majority of drug dealers are also white."

The report notes that between 1995 and 2003, the number of people held in state and federal prisons for drug offenses increased 21 percent.

However, the report states that little evidence exists to suggest that the increase in drug incarcerations has had any effect on the rates of illegal drug use.

Traditional methods for processing drug cases and rigorous sentencing policies are largely ineffective and very expensive, especially the use of prison as a solution to the drug problem, said Loyola University criminologist Arthur Lurigio.

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