The top officials in Kane County’s justice system welcomed efforts to reform criminal sentencing policies to keep nonviolent offenders from clogging state prisons Thursday. But they also sounded a warning bell that what’s good for justice may not be so good for taxpayers.
Gov. Bruce Rauner began a push to reduce the state’s prison population by 25 percent over the next decade with the creation of the criminal justice reform commission in early 2016. Last month, the commission produced a final set of recommendations for making that goal a reality. The measures are expected to come forward in individual pieces of legislation, some of which already received bipartisan support last year.
Kane County officials hosted a special meeting to contemplate “responsible integrated justice.” The meeting, for county board members, provided an overview of the entire criminal justice process, including all the employees and their functions. The meeting came as a county officials prepare to commission a study of all mandated versus nonmandated services in preparation for another lean fiscal year.
Sheriff Don Kramer has pushed his own plan to reduce the county’s jail population. About 25 percent of inmates on any given day have an underlying mental illness. Treating the illnesses would go a long way toward making sure those inmates don’t become repeat offenders, Kramer said.
“They just keep coming back if we don’t do something about it,” Kramer said. “A lot of these people have nothing to live for because they don’t have jobs and they don’t have housing.”
Kramer has a $100,000 pilot program in mind that would help inmates find employment, housing and transportation to and from mental health services.
Reducing the county’s jail population may come just in time for an influx of new inmates that currently get sentenced to state facilities. Right now, any criminal conviction involving incarceration of up to a year is served in county jails. Rauner’s push for sentencing may result in jail sentences as long as two years being served locally.
“It costs us $72 a day to keep a person in Kane County (jail),” Kramer said. “So if that passes, we are going to have a little bit of a problem.”
Kane County State’s Attorney Joe McMahon spoke in support of at least some of the reform proposals.
McMahon said he supports ending the requirement that someone found guilty of a second class 2 felony within 10 years of an original class 2 felony conviction must be sentenced a minimum of three years in prison. He explained that a person convicted of burglary for stealing beer out of a garage fits that class 2 felony requirement.
“I don’t know that that’s the best way to spend our resources, to send that person to prison for three years,” McMahon said. “Sending that person to prison doesn’t make any person in this room any more safe.”
McMahon also favors rewording the law involving enhanced penalty zones, such as schools and parks. He believes it’s not enough to hand out more jail time just because someone was caught with drugs in a school zone.
“If you’re going to a school zone and you’re trying to sell drugs to that school population, that ought to be an enhanced penalty,” McMahon said. “But if somebody happens to be driving through a school zone with a large amount of drugs, just passing by on their way to the next town, I don’t think that enhanced penalty really ought to apply.”
McMahon does not support a blanket reduction in the severity of drug crime classification and penalties. For instance, making low-level cocaine cases misdemeanors instead of felonies may not carry enough weight with a defendant to force them into the drug treatment that can solve an underlying problem. McMahon said the county already sees that with the lessening of penalties associated with marijuana.
“They’ll just decide to take the misdemeanor conviction,” McMahon said. “They don’t want to go through the six months of treatment and random drug tests and counseling. They don’t really want to change their behavior. It’s a bad way to get somebody into treatment; I recognize that. But I don’t know how else to get them into treatment.”
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