Daily Herald opinion: Time, still, will tell: Loyola study reinforces arguments that justice reform deserves chance to show its promise

Two weeks ago, supporters and opponents of Illinois' 2023 criminal justice reforms offered somewhat predictably mixed interpretations of the fairness of the new system after its first year in force. This week, experts at Loyola University issued a report that puts meat on the bones of this debate — and still supports a position that essentially states, “Criminal justice was not upended by the Pretrial Fairness Act, but there's more to come.”

Although some critics complain that the new law has put unnecessary burdens on law enforcement, Loyola's assessment at the end of the first year in a four-year project is that it has not led to the disregard and lawlessness that many opponents predicted.

There are some important asterisks, our Charles Keeshan and Susan Sarkauskas reported Friday, but the early data from Loyola’s Center For Criminal Justice shows defendants are showing up for trial at least as reliably as before, jail populations are declining and crime has decreased.

The authors emphasize that data from just the project’s first year is too limited to draw long-term conclusions and that some surface impressions could be misleading.

Crime, for instance, declined markedly between the first six months of 2023 and the same period in 2024 — 11% overall, with violent crimes down 7% and property crime down 14%. But that should not be taken to suggest a correlation between reduced crime and the Pretrial Fairness Act. Crime is down everywhere, so it's also reasonable to suspect that those numbers could have been even better without the act.

Said center Co-Director David Olson, “Some advocates may make the argument that crime is down (because of the Pretrial Fairness Act), but we’re not at that point. But we did put that out there to allay the rhetoric that this (law) would cause crime to go through the roof.”

Or, put another way, time will tell.

What is undisputable is that, so far, the predicted nightmare scenarios many reform opponents imagined have not come to pass, and this worthy experiment deserves continued scrutiny. For, while the remedies envisioned by the SAFE-T Act of which Pretrial Fairness was a key component, may deserve discussion, the circumstances that inspired it — expensive, crowded jails, bail bonds out of reach of many defendants and a system that tended to disproportionately incarcerate suspects with limited resources and people of color — were not in question.

Loyola’s early findings suggest that, whatever fine points remain to be worked out, the basic strategies of the state’s criminal justice reform are sound and deserve the chance to show their long-term potential. The results of from this first year of study provide promising implications. They will be even more telling in 2025.