The Safe-T Act’s Broken Promise: When “Ending Money Bail” Leads to More Detention

When Illinois passed the Pretrial Fairness Act (Safe-T Act) and fully eliminated money bail in 2023, reformers promised a bold new era of pretrial justice. No longer would people be held in “cages” simply because they could not afford cash bail, they said. Instead, a data-driven, risk-assessment-based system would release the vast majority of defendants while only detaining the truly dangerous, ushering in a criminal justice utopia that was fairer, safer, and smarter. Two years later, an article in the July 16^th edition of the Union Bulletin, discusses a new report from court watchers in Cook County and reveals how far reality has diverged from that vision.

According to the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice’s analysis of one month of detention hearings in Cook County’s Leighton Criminal Court Building, judges ordered detention in nearly 74% of cases where prosecutors sought it. Even more telling, judges detained nearly 60% of defendants who received a low-risk score on the county’s Public Safety Assessment (PSA) tool, an algorithmic instrument designed to help guide release decisions. These outcomes occurred despite the law’s presumption of release and its directive that detention should be used only when a defendant poses a clear danger to the community or is a flight risk. The report also found that more than two-thirds of detention petitions involved gun possession cases (not firing) and that the vast majority of those targeted for detention were Black or Latino.

This pattern exposes a fundamental flaw in the “no money bail” model. When financially secured release is removed as an option, judges are left with a stark binary choice: release the defendant or detain them pretrial. In practice, many judges appear to be choosing detention more often, especially when they see the same individuals repeatedly appearing before them with low algorithmic risk scores that do not match the judge’s experience-based assessment of the defendant’s actual risk. The result is not fewer people in jail, but a reversal of Cook County’s earlier progress in reducing its jail population.

This trend mirrors what has happened at the federal level. When Congress passed the Bail Reform Act of 1984, it dramatically expanded the use of risk assessments and non-financial conditions of release while limiting traditional money bail. What followed was a sharp rise in pretrial detention rates. Before the Act, only a small percentage of federal defendants were detained pretrial. Today, federal pretrial detention rates routinely exceed 60–70% in many districts, with some years seeing even higher figures. The federal system, which relies heavily on risk assessment tools and pretrial services, has become a system of detention rather than a system of liberty. Judges, faced with the limitations of algorithmic scores that often fail to capture real-world risk (especially for repeat offenders), increasingly default to detention when they believe public safety or court appearance is at stake.

Risk assessment tools, at their core, are poor substitutes for judicial discretion. They rely on limited, often outdated data points and cannot fully account for the nuances a seasoned judge observes, prior failures to appear, the defendant’s demeanor, the strength of the case, or patterns of behavior across multiple court appearances. When a judge sees the same person cycling through the system with a persistently low risk score that does not match reality, the rational response is to detain. This is precisely why states like Texas and California rejected heavy reliance on these tools for core bail decisions. Texas strengthened its traditional surety bail system and passed laws giving judges more tools to detain dangerous defendants in specific circumstances. California voters overwhelmingly rejected Proposition 25 in 2020, which would have replaced cash bail with a risk-assessment regime.

Illinois residents were promised a transformative reform that would reduce unnecessary incarceration, eliminate wealth-based detention, and make communities safer. Instead, Cook County is seeing higher detention rates for many categories of cases, persistent public safety concerns, and a system that still struggles with repeat offenders. The “utopia” has not arrived. What has emerged is a system where removing the middle option of financially secured release has pushed judges toward more detention, the very outcome reformers claimed they were trying to avoid.

The Safe-T Act and similar reforms across the country demonstrate a hard lesson: good intentions and algorithmic tools cannot replace the balanced incentives and judicial discretion provided by a well-functioning surety bail system. When financially secured release is taken off the table, the promise of fewer people in jail often gives way to the reality of more detention, more backlogs, and continued frustration for victims and communities alike. Illinois, like other jurisdictions that have gone down this path, must now confront whether the experiment has delivered on its promises, or whether it is time to restore proven tools that have historically balanced liberty and accountability.