The Pretrial Fairness Act, also known as the cashless bail system, implemented in September 2023, resulted in an increase in the Kane County jail population from people not showing up to court, according to a news release from Sheriff Ron Hain.

When Hain took office in 2018, the jail population ranged in the 550s per day. But with innovative programming, he said he reduced the detainee population to an all-time low of 229 by the end of 2022, according to the release.

As of Sept. 18, the jail’s population rose to 401 detainees – according to the Loyola Chicago Center for Criminal Justice, which tracked the results of the cashless bail system.

The increase in Kane’s jail population was caused by people who don’t show up for court and have to be arrested on failure-to-appear warrants, according to Hain’s release.

“Most of the uptick is caused by people simply not appearing in court under the new parameters and having failure to appear warrants issued for them,” Hain said in the release.

“Previously, we would enter 5-10 fta [failure-to-appear] warrants per day. Now we’re averaging 30-40 per day,” Hain wrote in an email.

“Many legislators continue to get their intent wrong just by reading headlines and taking action without consulting those that do the job on a daily basis,” Hain said in the release.

“Considering that each detainee costs our taxpayers a minimum of $75 per day, per person, this has a dramatic impact on our budget at a time when Kane County is already facing financial concerns,” Hain said in the release. “We have also had to hire many new officers and ship detainees off to other county jails just to offset the rapid increase in jail population, increasing our expenses even further.”

Ben Ruddell, director of criminal justice policy for the ACLU of Illinois, disputed Hain’s assertions.

Before the Pretrial Fairness Act was implemented, sheriffs and other opponents of reform tried to convince the public that the Act would force them to release people who should be jailed, causing violence to skyrocket, according to Ruddell’s email.

“These alarmist prognostications never came to pass; in fact, crime has decreased across the State since the Act took effect,” according to Ruddell’s email. “Sheriff Hain wants us to believe that the Pretrial Fairness Act is somehow to blame for increasing the number of people jailed in Kane County. That claim is equally dubious.”

The Pretrial Fairness Act expands the discretion of courts, prosecutors and law enforcement to release people while they await trial, according to Ruddell’s email.

If Hain’s accusations were accurate, jail populations would have risen across the state, Ruddell said.

While Kane and some other counties have seen an uptick, numerous other counties have seen their jail populations decrease substantially, according to Ruddell’s email.

“The Act is working as intended to ensure that pretrial detention decisions are not dependent on one’s wealth, but rather on questions of public safety,” Ruddell wrote. “We are seeing that play out without the dystopian predictions we heard from so many in law enforcement who fought tooth and nail to preserve the unjust and ineffective money bail system.”

Ruddell also dismissed Hain’s assertion that sheriffs were not consulted prior to its passage, as “little more than warmed-over grievances heard since the Act was implemented two years ago.”

“The reality is that ending cash bail had been discussed – and suggested through legislation introduced in numerous sessions – for many years,” according to Ruddell’s email.

“The Sheriffs and other law enforcement organizations were party to those discussions,” according to Ruddell’s email. “It is not that the Sheriffs were not consulted; they simply were not granted a veto to keep people detained pretrial based on wealth, rather than public safety.”

Hain disputed the ACLU’s take on the Kane jail population, saying his information came from the data as collected by the Loyola Chicago Center for Criminal Justice.

“It’s raw data,” Hain said in a text. “i have nothing [to] gain from putting out information.”

Hain’s programs that led to the reduction in the jail population included vocational training, substance abuse treatment and job placement.

Hain said in the release that his programs have reduced recidivism by nearly half, to 18%.