The recent attack on the Blue Line is heartbreaking, and my heart goes out to the victim and her family. As we search for answers, we must resist the urge to use a single, deeply tragic case to drive sweeping rollbacks of the Pretrial Fairness Act — a reform that has been working as intended for thousands of Illinois residents.
Opponents of the reform offer one solution: Prevent an act of violence by incarcerating thousands of legally innocent people, costing them their jobs, homes, stability and future. We tried that approach for decades, and the results were clear: Mass incarceration didn’t make us safer. In fact, it made our communities more fractured and less stable. We saw mothers separated from their children, workers stripped from jobs that kept their families afloat and families pushed into crisis. Horrible tragedies like the Blue Line attack happened even as we locked up thousands of people.
Expanding the carceral state exacerbated, not eliminated, the very harms it claimed to solve. And while we don’t have a crystal ball, it is very likely that the new system, which gives judges more time and information to make release and detention decisions, has prevented tragedies such as this one from happening.
Nothing about this incident suggests that a return to a system that relies on money bond would have prevented it. This theory posited by opponents of money bond criminalizes the poor and quite literally imprisons the vulnerable. In fact, the old system allowed people with means to buy their freedom — sometimes leading to devastating outcomes. But those individualized harms were never enough for critics to question money bond. It is only now, when systematically marginalized people finally have a fairer process, that these tragedies are suddenly treated as justification to undo reform.
Rolling back the Pretrial Fairness Act would not make Illinois safer. It would make communities more susceptible to dehumanizing systems that punish poverty, destabilize families and undermine community safety. What Lawrence Reed’s case truly reveals is a decadeslong failure to support people with serious mental health needs. His 70-plus prior cases tell us far more about gaps in supervision and care than about the Pretrial Fairness Act itself. Turning this incident into political fodder in an attempt to undo the Pretrial Fairness Act is as cynical as it is dangerous.
If legislators want to act, they should invest in treatment, housing and community-based support — not exploit a tragedy to resurrect the failed policies of the past.
— Don Abram and Stephen J. Thurston, Chicago
Human error at fault
Thank you for the editorial “Blue Line horror brings day of reckoning for SAFE-T Act and hapless electronic monitoring in Cook County” (Nov. 25). It is understandable blaming a new law for a horrific crime. But Lawrence Reed’s encounters with the criminal justice system go back 30 years, according to the Tribune’s own reporting on the case. And that is well before the SAFE-T Act was even considered, let alone enacted. We have systems in place that score the flight risk and the danger to society of each defendant. We do not know what transpired in the courtroom during that fateful hearing.
And electronic monitoring is a problem as a program. But the number of detainees on that program have not increased much since the passage of the SAFE-T Act. Yes, the chief judge should have used the sheriff’s officers or the Chicago Police Department to help him with violations of curfew by those on electronic monitoring. That is human error.
Blaming reform for the human errors within the system is not right. The editorial makes it seem as if criminal justice reform is the cause of crime in Cook County. Numbers would tell another story. Crime is down in most categories.
What was left out of this editorial is a symptom of what is left out of most criminal justice issues: getting help for those with mental illness. We have failed as a society on this issue. The SAFE-T Act addresses it, but it takes the stakeholders to enact it.
Reed told the judge that he belonged in jail. That sentence speaks volumes.
— Jan Goldberg, Riverside
Disabled disregarded
Thank you for covering the important issue regarding how people with disabilities are often disregarded by our country’s health care and long-term care systems (“‘You’re going to wish that doesn’t happen to you,'” Nov. 23). I am a 69-year-old woman with a significant disability who has been a disability rights advocate for over 45 years. During those years, I came to learn how disabled people are routinely placed in nursing homes, most often against their choice.
The pipeline from hospitals into nursing homes is wider than the guardianship problem. Many people with disabilities are coerced by hospital staff to go into nursing homes even when we are perfectly capable of living autonomously.
Hospitals emphasize safety and possible risks of residents leaving facilities, but they do not respect people’s right to make choices about where and how to live. Once admitted into a nursing facility, people with disabilities become trapped in institutions with minimal support and resources to get out and live independently or in community-based settings.
Even without a guardian, hospital social workers or discharge planners steer people into long-term care facilities as a default practice. This problem is more than just guardianship; it’s systematic. Our long-term care and health care systems need to steer away from placing people in institutions that do not prioritize people’s individual needs. People with disabilities need to have safer options than just institutionalization.
Community-based services, housing assistance and peer support need to be supported and encouraged. People with disabilities deserve to have the freedom of choice.
I hope only for real policy changes, better oversight of guardianship abuses and protections for people with disabilities who want to return to or stay in their communities.
— Pam Heavens, UCP-Center for Disability Services, Joliet
Leverage for the CTA?
Lester L. Barclay, chairman of the Chicago Transit Board, writes that he is concerned the CTA may have given up too much in the current legislative deal to avert a fiscal cliff (“Transit funding was secured, but the CTA paid a price,” Nov. 21). The CTA got into its current mess on its own and needed the other partners to help set the ship right. But now, before the ink is even dry, there is hand-wringing and maneuvering to try to get better leverage for the CTA.
This kind of thinking will doom this deal in short order.
— Keith Gray, Homer Glen
What theater gives us
Yes, yes and yes to supporting Chicago’s entertainment district (“Chicago’s downtown entertainment district has never been more fragile or essential,” Nov. 28). Yes for the benefit to the city, but live performances also offer great benefits to the audience. It is so different than experiencing it on a screen. Actually being there when the musicians are playing, the singers are singing and the actors are acting … is priceless.
Please take your family; come downtown and see a show. Those memories will stay with you far longer than tangible gifts.
— Susan Stevens, Chicago
No-nonsense curfew
It’s time to enact (and enforce) a no-nonsense downtown Chicago curfew. A 14-year-old boy was shot and killed recently amid a mass Loop gathering. Parents are not keeping watch over their young children and are letting them run wild on the streets. Curfew violators should be held until a relative or guardian comes to claim them and pays a hefty fine for their release.
— Michael Oakes, Chicago
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