The ACT Initiative Is Bringing Best Practices to Cook County’s Criminal Courts

In 2013, Chicago Appleseed helped the Circuit Court of Cook County design and establish the Access to Community Treatment (ACT) Court, an Adult Redeploy Illinois program. Like all ARI initiatives, the ACT Court was designed to divert people charged with nonviolent crimes from the Illinois prison sys...

Supreme Court Commission Offers Chance For Real and Substantial Reform

Co-written with Malcolm Rich, Executive Director, Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice Two major events will affect the future of criminal justice in Cook County: One is the Illinois Supreme Court’s second meeting bringing together the heads of critical departments to discuss improvements in informat...

How Illinois Supreme Court Intervention Can Help Cook County

How Illinois Supreme Court Intervention Can Help Cook County In response to President Preckwinkle’s letter to the Illinois Supreme Court, Chief Justice Thomas Kilbride has answered, proposing a meeting of the major criminal justice stakeholders and a conference of regional and national experts to d...

Policy Brief: Community Courts in Cook County

Today we release a two-part policy brief discussing an alternative prosecution strategy called community-based justice. Part I makes the case for community-base justice by comparing Cook County’s current misdemeanor justice system--which adjudicates over 150,000 misdemeanors annually (pdf)--with com...
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