Beyond the Statewide Average: What Illinois’s County-Level Data Actually Shows About the SAFE-T Act

Two years after Illinois became the first state to fully eliminate cash bail, reform proponents have settled on a small set of talking points. The catastrophic predictions did not materialize. Statewide failure-to-appear warrant rates remained around 5%. Cook County's chief judge reports that 89% of pretrial releases conclude without new charges. Statewide crime trends have not spiked.

Each of these statements is, taken at face value, accurate. Each is also misleading.

The empirical case does not require denying any of those numbers. It requires reading them at the unit of analysis where the policy actually changed something — the county level — and adding the data points reform-aligned commentary has consistently chosen to omit.

The Selection Bias Beneath the Headline

Cook County is the dominant Illinois jurisdiction in any statewide aggregate. It is also the worst possible jurisdiction to use as the test case for the SAFE-T Act's effects.

Beginning in 2017, six full years before the SAFE-T Act took effect, Cook County under General Order 18.8A had already substantially eliminated cash bail for most defendants. By the time the SAFE-T Act formally abolished cash bail statewide in September 2023, Cook County had spent six years operating on a system that closely resembled what the SAFE-T Act mandated. Comparing Cook County's pre-2023 outcomes to its post-2023 outcomes does not measure the SAFE-T Act. It measures whether the County's six-year-old quasi-cashless system continued to perform similarly after formal codification.

The honest test is the opposite: counties that, prior to September 2023, still relied on cash bail as a primary release mechanism. Those counties — most of Illinois's 102 counties — experienced the actual policy change. Their data is what should be examined. Reform-aligned commentary has, with rare exceptions, declined to examine it.

What McHenry County Actually Reported

McHenry County, a collar county outside Chicago that made extensive use of cash bail before September 2023, has produced one of the most detailed county-level reviews of the SAFE-T Act's effects. The findings contradict the statewide narrative across every metric the County tracked.

Pretrial re-offense rate rose from 7.8% before the SAFE-T Act to 10.1% after — a 30% increase in the rate at which pretrial-released defendants were charged with new crimes.

Failure-to-appear processing. In a comparable six-month window before the SAFE-T Act, McHenry County issued 1,055 FTA warrants and 1,433 FTA summonses. After the SAFE-T Act took effect, the County issued 616 FTA warrants and 8,845 FTA summonses — a 517% increase in summons volume. The court was not handling fewer non-appearances. It was handling them differently, with a vastly heavier administrative load. Each summons represents court time, prosecutorial time, judicial time, and unrecovered process service costs that, before reform, were absorbed by the bonding company that posted the bond.

Victim restitution collected through the McHenry County court system fell from $342,160 before the SAFE-T Act to $254,411 after — a 25.6% decline. Bail-funded restitution mechanisms that previously contributed to victim recovery dried up when the bail was eliminated.

Jail population. Reform proponents predicted that eliminating cash bail would substantially reduce jail populations. McHenry County's jail population on September 17, 2023 was 204 detainees. One year later it was 216 detainees — higher, not lower.

Most damaging to the reform predicate: McHenry County's own analysis noted that under the cash bail system reform abolished, 97% of defendants charged with crimes had already been released pretrial. The premise that cash bail was producing mass pretrial detention of defendants who could not afford to post — the central moral argument for the SAFE-T Act — was not supported by McHenry County's pre-reform record.

The Independent Methodology Audit

The most important academic finding on the SAFE-T Act has received almost no attention in mainstream commentary. Professor Paul Cassell of the University of Utah College of Law and Professor Richard Fowles of the University of Utah Department of Economics conducted an independent audit of the Cook County Chief Judge's pretrial-release reports. Their finding: the official Cook County reports undercounted new crimes committed by defendants on pretrial release by 29%.

The methodology that produced the widely-cited "89% no new charges" figure systematically excluded a substantial fraction of the new offenses that were actually occurring. When the Cassell and Fowles undercount correction is applied, Cook County's actual pretrial re-offense rate is materially higher than the figure reform-aligned commentary has popularized — closer to, though still below, the 10.1% McHenry County rate.

The Statewide / Local Application Gap

There is a separate methodological problem with treating Illinois as a single SAFE-T Act jurisdiction. Illinois Policy Institute analysis of first-year implementation found that Cook County prosecutors petitioned for pretrial detention in only 19% of eligible cases, while the statewide average was 60%. The same statute, in the same state, in the same year, produced detention petition rates that varied by a factor of more than three.

When Cook County's outcomes are then aggregated with the rest of Illinois — and the resulting statewide figures are presented as evidence that "the SAFE-T Act" produced certain results — the actual signal is being overwhelmed by Cook County's distinct prosecutorial culture, not by the policy itself.

Why the Statewide Aggregate Was Always Misleading

Put the pieces together:

• Cook County dominates the statewide aggregate but had already moved away from cash bail before September 2023, making it a structurally inappropriate test case for the SAFE-T Act's effects.
• The Cook County data that is cited has been independently audited and found to undercount new crimes by 29%.
• Cook County's prosecutorial application of the SAFE-T Act diverges from the rest of the state by a factor of three on detention petition rates, meaning Cook County outcomes do not generalize to other counties.
• Counties that actually relied on cash bail before September 2023 report rising re-offense rates, exploding FTA summons volumes, declining victim restitution, and unchanged or rising jail populations.
• The reform-cited "5% FTA" figure measures warrants issued, not failures to appear, in a system whose judges are explicitly instructed to suppress that metric.

The statewide aggregate that reform-aligned commentary cites is the product of these layered measurement choices. It does not falsify the evidence summarized above. It conceals it.

Conclusion: An Honest Read

The SAFE-T Act has not produced the catastrophic statewide crime spike that some critics predicted. That much is fair to say.

The SAFE-T Act has also not produced the outcomes reform-aligned commentary continues to claim it produced. The data showing rising pretrial re-offense rates, exploding FTA summons volumes, declining victim restitution, unchanged jail populations, and a 29% undercount in the Cook County reports that anchor the favorable narrative are part of the record.

Other states considering similar legislation should look at all of the data, not the parts of it that have been curated for advocacy purposes. The strongest empirical case for retaining commercial surety as one tool in a multi-tool pretrial system is no longer hypothetical. It is being made, every month, by the Illinois counties that lost the tool and are now reporting the consequences.

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Sources

• McHenry County, Illinois, SAFE-T Act Report by the Numbers (2024).
• Paul Cassell & Richard Fowles, University of Utah, audit of Cook County Chief Judge pretrial-release reports.
• Illinois Policy Institute, SAFE-T Act Year 1: Fewer Cook County Defendants Detained, Downstate Illinois Adjusts.
• Cook County Circuit Court General Order 18.8A (2017).
• Eric Helland & Alexander Tabarrok, The Fugitive, 47 J.L. & Econ. 93 (2004).
• Capitol News Illinois, interviews with Loyola CCJ co-director David Olson (July 2024).
• Better Government Association, State Courts Lag on Electronic Monitoring Data Required by SAFE-T Act (March 2025).