A new bill is trying to raise the age for juveniles held in detention pretrail. | Adobe Stock
A new bill is trying to raise the age for juveniles held in detention pretrail. | Adobe Stock
Criminal justice reform groups across Illinois want lawmakers to pass a bill that keeps teens out of detention centers before trial.
The move comes after a Juvenile Justice Initiative report found that more than four times as many kids in Illinois are detained pretrial.
"The cost to taxpayers and harm to the youth and their families and communities is profound, and the racial disparities in pretrial detention reflect the statewide lack of uniformity in access to justice, to treatment and to individualized consideration that is essential to a just and safe society," the Juvenile Justice Initiative report said.
Anne E. Casey Foundation Juvenile Justice Strategy Group director Nate Balis said that while the number of court cases involving kids who end up in detention are down nationally, pretrial child detention in Illinois has increased, particularly among ethnic minorities, Patch.com reported.
"We've done a better job at reducing the number of young people in post-dispositional placement than we have in pretrial detention," Balis said, Patch reported.
Balis and other groups are pushing a Senate bill that seeks to have the minimum age for pretrial detention changed from 10 to 13, to make that happen.
Loyola Law School Center for Criminal Justice program manager Lisa Jacobs said making a difference for the kids involved needs to be a process.
"Some things that we can do better just to further reduce the use of detention, particularly pretrial is to focus on those crisis-resolution kind of strategies, and those kinds of approaches that really allow law enforcement to hand off cases for crisis de-escalation," Jacobs said, the Patch.com site reported.
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