It has to be said, and public defender Olayemi Olurin minced no words in spreading the gospel. “There is no ‘Purge Law’ in Chicago,” she tweeted last month. “What there is, is a concerted effort to prevent landmark bail reform that’ll prevent countless Black and brown people from being held in jail without a trial for no other reason than they’re poor by spreading lies and copaganda to the public.”
It’s time for a real explainer on part of an Illinois law set to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2023. That law is the Illinois Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today (SAFE-T) Act, which Republicans have branded the ‘Purge Law’ to imply that, like in the 2013 film The Purge, the legislation would give criminals a free pass to wreak havoc.
In reality, it is one of the most inspiring criminal justice reform packages I’ve read in years. I highly recommend combing through the legislation. But if you don’t have time to read it all, follow the work of legal analysts like Olurin and journalists like Chicago native Sylvia Snowden, who attended the same high school and college as I did.
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“Listen to me,” Olurin said in a 4-minute, 52-second TikTok video she created. “It cannot be understated how significant of a role the media plays in quashing progressive movements and keeping more Black people in jail.”
She continued:
And it's frustrating because every time we say ‘the criminal system isn't broken; it's working as intended,’ these are the outlets and institutions that respond, ‘no, no, no, we still need to have faith in the system. We need reform, we need reform, we need reform.’ But then every time we actually get substantive progressive reform, here they go with campaigns like this filled with lies.
And please trust that it's not a coincidence that they're going to places like The Shade Room and Baller Alert with Black audiences to peddle these lies because what they want is for Black people to internalize propaganda and lies so that we don't support progressive initiatives that are designed to keep us out of jail.
Olurin made her case by providing much-needed context about the state of Cook County Jail, one of the country’s largest jails.
“You've probably heard about Rikers because Rikers is infamous, but less people realize that Rikers is a pretrial detention center, meaning the people incarcerated in Rikers have not been convicted of a crime,” the attorney said. “Last year, 16 people died in Rikers. This year, 13 people died in Rikers. And Rikers has already been declared a human rights crisis.”
“So what if I told you that the crisis happening at Cook County Jail was worse? Cook County Jail is the pretrial detention center in Chicago, Illinois, meaning the people incarcerated at Cook County Jail have not been convicted of a crime. They simply just don't have the money for bail.
And that’s an important point people need to understand about bail. Bail is not about public safety. Bail is about whether or not you can afford your freedom, period.”
Olurin went on to dispel several myths about the SAFE-T Act’s measures to correct that system of inequity through bail reform. “The first lie being circulated is that this bail reform will prevent police from being able to make arrests. False,” the attorney said. “Not only can police arrest whoever they want, like they've always been able to, all the bail reform law does is encourage them not to make low-level, completely low-level arrests that they could write tickets for.”
“And you want to know what else? (…) A law enforcement agency proposed that language.”
Olurin explained:
What this public safety act would do is it would get rid of the cash bail system. It doesn't mean that nobody goes to jail pretrial. It means that instead of whether or not you're free or you're in jail being determined based on how much money you have, instead, prosecutors would have three different options that they could (use to) keep you detained should they so choose to.
Prosecutors will have an option to present evidence to the judge showing that you are a threat to public safety or that you have engaged in some kind of willful flight from prosecution, or if you're simply charged with most felonies and they can have you detained pretrial.
The reality is that the majority, the vast majority of people in our criminal system are living well beneath the poverty line.
Legislation crafted to give poor people a fighting chance should be celebrated, but that just wouldn’t be the GOP way.
One of the Twitter users responding to Olurin’s video dismissed her as “someone who DOESN’T live in Chicago” who “has so much to say about our lives.”
So here’s the same message coming from an actual Chicago resident, Illinois House Rep. Marcus Evans Jr., who appeared on CAN TV last week:
"So if I asked you, ‘Should we allow dangerous rich people to be free and should we keep non-dangerous poor people in jail?’, most folks would agree. We have a system that produces that."
In order to change the way poor people are treated in the criminal justice system, we have to “create a system in which money does not matter, but severity of your crime matters,” Evans added.
“That's what the SAFE-T Act does, primarily," he said.
The legislation signed by democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who’s up for re-election this November, also:
• Requires more investments in officer training, mental health, and officer wellness.
• Expands training opportunities for officers, requires health and wellness services for officers, and protects officers from unjust lawsuits based on their reasonable actions.
• Sets statewide standards on use of force, crowd control responses, de-escalation, and arrest techniques.
• Requires the use of body-worn cameras by police departments statewide.
• Professionalizes policing through the creation of a more robust certification system and lays out clear standards and processes for decertification.
• Expands accountability across police departments by requiring the permanent retention of police misconduct records and removes the sworn affidavit requirement when filing police misconduct complaints.
• Requires police departments to develop plans to protect vulnerable people present during search warrant raids.
• Eliminates license suspensions for unpaid fines and fees due to red light camera and traffic offenses.
• Ends prison gerrymandering (the practice of counting an incarcerated person’s address as that of the prison instead of where they lived before incarceration, and)
• Expands services for crime victims.
Most right-wing con artists, however, have sought to minimize the law to only one portion of its measures—those that seek to move the state "from a system of pretrial detention that prioritizes wealth, to one that prioritizes public safety."
Most other elements of the law have already gone into effect, and the aspects pertaining to prison gerrymandering, are set to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2025.
State Rep. La Shawn Ford has been pushing for the reform for years. He told The Appeal last year that "counting bodies" does not give those incarcerated "the care that they need." It doesn’t help pay for schools, hospitals, or resources in the communities those incarcerated would likely return to, and Republicans know that.
“They don’t count them as people,” Ford said of those incarcerated. “They only count them as numbers for the sake of using them for apportionment.”
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