Make It Make Sense: Illinois’s public defense crisis

In my defense

Illinois is facing a public defense crisis.

That was the message from lawyers, lawmakers, policy advocates, and organizers who converged at the Northwestern Pritzker Law’s downtown campus on March 24 for a daylong summit on the future of public defense.

The event, hosted by Northwestern’s Children and Family Justice Center and the Illinois Justice Project, was organized ostensibly to support a bill moving through the General Assembly that would create a statewide public defender agency. Numerous speakers highlighted the need for substantive structural change to address funding disparities, conflicts of interest, and an overall dearth of data about public defense in Illinois. 

Public defenders are county-level officials. But the leader of each office is appointed rather than elected like their counterpart at the State’s Attorney’s Office. In Cook County, the chief public defender is chosen by the board president. In every other county, the chief judge oversees the office. This creates a “huge opportunity for political interference, judicial interference, [and] fiscal interference,” says Todd Nelson, the former Adams County chief public defender. The setup also creates vast disparities between underfunded, understaffed public defender offices and better-resourced prosecutors’ offices, which also have independent control of their budgets.

The Funded Advocacy and Independent Representation (FAIR) Act would create a statewide agency to level the playing field, ensuring public defense is robust no matter where in Illinois you’re arrested, says Elisabeth Pollock, chief public defender of Champaign County. 

On March 19, a state house committee voted to advance the FAIR Act to the full chamber.

Bill proposed to ease housing banishment laws

I’ve written before about how housing banishment laws in Illinois create a cycle of homelessness and incarceration. People convicted of sex offenses are prohibited from living within 500 feet of playgrounds and schools. Day cares, in particular, pose a problem—anyone can open one in their home at any time. This means that even people who manage to find a place to stay still live in precarity.

Layer all the restrictions on a map, and you’ll see that legal housing in Chicago, like most of the state, is virtually nonexistent. A bill under consideration by the General Assembly aims to change that. It would shrink housing banishment zones from 500 feet to 250 feet and prevent people from being forced to move once they find legal housing. 

There’s no evidence that housing banishment laws or public conviction registries actually keep anyone safe, but that didn’t stop the Illinois Sheriffs’ Association from pulling a page out of the ole hate-and-fear playbook. The organization registered its opposition to the bill on its social media pages and found sympathetic ears among local media. An angry online army has since filled the social media comment sections of the legislation’s sponsors, including senate majority leader Kimberly Lightford, with racist and sexist attacks. 

People need stable housing to live; the current system provides the opposite.  

The bill is in legislative purgatory (the senate’s assignments committee). March 21 was the deadline for bills to pass out of committee, but in Springfield, it ain’t over till it’s over. 

Army Corps scraps plans for toxic sludge dump

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has scrapped a plan to expand a toxic sludge dump site in Calumet Harbor after years of fighting with community members.

In 1984, the Army Corps constructed a 45-acre site, called a confined disposal facility, to store polluted sediment dredged from the Calumet River and the Calumet-Saganashkee Channel. The General Assembly signed off on the plan with the understanding that, once full, the dump would be capped off and turned over to the Chicago Parks District.

In 2020, the Army Corps instead proposed a 22-foot expansion that would keep the dump in use for another two decades. Community groups, including the Alliance of the Southeast (ASE) and Friends of the Parks, and southeast-side residents, already battered by heavy industrial pollution, vowed to fight it.

The dredged sediment contains deadly pollutants like arsenic, lead, manganese, and mercury.

Earlier this month, the community’s fight finally paid off. The Army Corps announced on March 11 that it was dropping plans to expand the toxic dump. “This is a big win for environmental justice neighborhoods like ours,” said ASE executive director Amalia NietoGomez in a press release. “We are very excited that the U.S. Army Corps finally did the right thing by withdrawing its plans for another toxic dump on top of the existing one, but it shouldn’t have to take a lawsuit to get them to do so.”