Letter to the Editor of the Daily Law Bulletin

Our letter to the editor which ran in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin on August 19, 2016 is reproduced below. Court costs, fines, fees: New approach needed now By Steven E. Art, Matthew McClellan Daniels, Erika M. Washington and Malcolm C. Rich The Collaboration for Justice is the joint social just...
August 22, 2016

Advocates Call for an End to the Presumptive Shackling of Juveniles in Court

The Illinois Justice Project has submitted a proposed proposed rule to the state Supreme Court Rules Committee to reform the practice of shackling children appearing in juvenile court. The Committee referred the proposed rule to the Juvenile Justice Committee of the Judicial Conference in order to s...
August 18, 2016

Field Testing in Drug Arrests

Earlier this month, both The New York Times and The Marshall Project ran excellent stories on how a roadside field tests for drugs can return false positives that send innocent people to jail or even cause them to plead guilty when they did not possess drugs. The articles highlighted alarming uses o...
July 13, 2016

Chicago Appleseed at NACM 2016 presenting on Criminal Justice Reform

At this year's National Association of Case Management (NACM) conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (July 10-14) Ali Abid, Senior Criminal Justice Policy Analyst at Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice and Peter Coolsen, Court Administrator for the Criminal Division of the Circuit Court of Cook Count...
July 11, 2016

New Book Looks at Racial Injustice in the Cook County Courts

On May 11th, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve spoke at University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration about her new book, Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court. (Stanford Law Books). Before a packed auditorium, Van Cleve, a Temple University criminal justic...
June 8, 2016