Kane County jail reforms shrink number of inmates, end long incarcerations

The number of people locked up in Kane County's jail shrank by a third over the past few years, saving millions of local tax dollars per year. But leaders of the county's justice system say reforms they are putting in place are more about keeping people out of the jail and making sure detainees aren't there any longer than necessary.

As of Thursday morning, the county's jail population stood at 372 people. That's 32% less than the daily average population of 550 from three years ago.

"That's an astounding figure to me," said Kane County Sheriff Ron Hain in announcing the numbers to county board members Thursday.

Part of the change is a move toward placing more people accused of nonviolent crimes on electronic home monitoring than in years past.

In any given month, up to 70 people are awaiting trial or serving time. The county put electronic home monitoring on hiatus in late 2017 over cost and staffing concerns. Hain brought it back in 2019 in what has proved to be a more cost-effective method for the county that allows many of the people being monitored to retain their jobs.

It costs $62 a day to house someone in jail. The county charges people being monitored $10 per day for the monitoring devices - more than recouping the $3.75 it costs the county.

Also shrinking the population is a systemwide effort to expedite cases involving people who have been in jail longer than a year.

When chief judge Clint Hull made that a priority, 107 people in the jail had been awaiting a trial or disposition for longer than a year. That number is now down to 70, a 35% reduction.

Hull told county board members he places a high priority on "not incarcerating people longer than they need to be."

"We have this population there that we need to focus on so that we can get the cases resolved," Hull said. "Either guilty or not guilty, but we need to move forward."

There are eight people in the jail who have been incarcerated there for more than three years, Hull said. Those cases involve murder or predatory sexual assault, which involve extensive evidence discovery processes. That's one of the prime areas the county's system can improve, he said.

He cited problems with the county's computers not working well with the many different systems local police departments have. That can often delay getting police reports, which can run thousands of pages long, over to the state's attorney's office and, subsequently, to defense attorneys.

That process must become smoother and faster, Hull said.

When there were delays, judges bumped those cases back four or five months. Those cases now get more frequent court dates.

"We have to remove those obstacles," Hull said. "Some of these cases, it's a result of us not being able to do that as efficiently as we want. I hate to hear a case is being continued another few months because we need to get discovery. I'm not pointing the finger at anybody, but when you analyze these cases, a lot of times that's where the hang-up is."

The push to keep people out of jail in the first place and reduce the amount of time people spend incarcerated resulted in $2.4 million in savings for 2021, Hain said. That's on top of the $1.6 million in savings last year.