Feds, Cook County reach final pact on jail

The federal government and Cook County have finalized an agreement to improve conditions at the county jail on Chicago's West Side.

The agreed order, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Chicago, calls on the county to hire more than 600 new corrections officers: 448 this year and another 174 by next April. It also sets new procedures to monitor the use of force by staff, violence between inmates, medical and mental-health care and fire safety and sanitation.

Compliance will be monitored by four independent, but county-paid monitors.

"The agreement anticipates that the parties will achieve substantial compliance with all provisions within four years," according to a release put out by the U.S. attorney's office and the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, but it could end beforehand with 18 consecutive months of compliance.

Most of the stipulations have been released as they've been agreed upon over the last several months, and the agreement has been cheered by Sheriff Tom Dart and county commissioners, as it also rolls in the decades-old Duran decree on overcrowding at the jail and sets a foreseeable timetable for compliance.

"We are pleased that with the cooperation of Sheriff Dart and the county, we have achieved a rigorous, comprehensive agreement that will remedy the unconstitutional conditions that were found at the Cook County Jail," said U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. "Inmates are entitled to conditions of confinement that pass constitutional muster."

"From the day I took office in December 2006, one of my top goals was to reach this major milestone," Dart responded. "My next goal is to build on all that we've done so far at the jail so that, after 18 months of compliance by my office, we will be able to publicly announce that decades of costly federal oversight at the Cook County Jail have finally come to an end."

The agreement resolves a federal investigation into jail conditions begun in 2007 and concluded the following year.

The jail remains the largest single-site county jail in the nation, with a daily population of more than 8,500 inmates housed in multiple buildings.