News
Updates from the National Association of Bail Agents
The SAFE-T Act at Two Years: What the Data Says, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters
Illinois’s SAFE-T Act did not produce the catastrophe critics predicted. It also has not produced the unalloyed success proponents claim. Two years of partial, mixed data — and one major missing comparison.
Beyond the Statewide Average: What Illinois’s County-Level Data Actually Shows About the SAFE-T Act
The Illinois SAFE-T Act's favorable headline numbers rest on Cook County data — a jurisdiction that had already moved away from cash bail six years before the law. Counties that actually relied on cash bail tell a different story: rising re-offense rates, exploding FTA summons volume, and declining victim restitution.
Who Pays When the Bondsman Is Gone? The Cost-Shift Nobody Talks About
Bail reform's fiscal argument compares jail beds before reform to jail beds after. It almost never accounts for the cost of the replacement system — government-staffed pretrial agencies, electronic monitoring contracts, and expanded judicial calendars. That system is not free. It is not even cheap.