- Pritzker Fellows
- Former Fellows
- Tom Dart
Tom Dart
Cook County Sheriff
Fall 2015 Pritzker Fellow
Seminar Series: “Systemic Injustice: The Crushing Impact of America’s Criminal Justice System”
Biography
As Cook County Sheriff, Tom Dart has brought an aggressive, yet innovative approach to law enforcement. A former prosecutor and state legislator, Sheriff Dart has long fought to protect the most vulnerable members of our society.
As a prosecutor, he helped initiate a massive public corruption investigation in the poverty-stricken village of Ford Heights, which led to the indictments of multiple police officers.
As a state legislator, Dart sponsored hundreds of bills that demanded accountability from state officials, while also showing a willingness to take on state bureaucracy. He re-wrote child welfare bills, wrote the state’s Sexually Violent Predators Commitment Act and led the state’s first-ever study connecting homelessness and prostitution.
Since becoming Sheriff in 2006, he has introduced sweeping changes at the Cook County Jail, the nation’s largest single site jail, aggressively re-structured the Sheriff’s Police force, and improved operations of the Court Services Department.
At the Cook County Department of Corrections, the Sheriff oversees a population of over 12,000 that includes inmates both housed on-site and ordered to alternative programs such as electronic monitoring. From addressing concerns surrounding general overcrowding and a growing mental health population to developing environmentally sustainable initiatives for inmates, Sheriff Dart has been hailed as hailed for his progressive reforms to improve and maintain the safety and security of all those housed and employed at the Cook County Jail. There are approximately 2,500-3,000 people with diagnosed mental illness housed in the jail on any given day, making it the largest mental health facility in the country. Sheriff Dart firmly believes that a service provider is a far more productive setting than a jail for those with mental illness. In 2013, he launched the Office of Mental Health Policy & Advocacy, which operates a 24-hour Care Line for mentally ill ex-inmates and families of current mentally ill inmates, while screening all pre-bond detainees for mental illness. Sheriff Dart has received many awards from national and local mental health advocacy organizations for his push to end what has become a de facto criminalization of mental illness.
Under Sheriff Dart’s direction, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office began the expansion of its jail garden, the harvest of honey from on-site bee hives, the construction of a chicken coop, and the growth of an urban aquaponics system. These projects offer inmates the opportunity to gain valuable and marketable skills that can be utilized upon release, with the produce bringing in revenue and turning a profit for county taxpayers. Under Sheriff Dart’s direction, Cook County Sheriff’s Police assign specialized gang units to curb suburban gang activity through their focus on aggressive regional tactical work, supporting smaller suburban police departments unable to handle the crime rates on their own. He has also prioritized gang intelligence procedures from within Cook County Jail, which serves to prevent further gang conflict and bring justice to victims of gang violence.
In recent years, Sheriff Dart has increasingly focused his attention on the plight of Cook County’s most impoverished suburbs. As suburban police departments increasingly cut budget and staff despite upticks crime and narcotics activity in their communities, the Sheriff has invested resources to pick up the slack and ensure all Cook County citizens receive a proper level of police protection. Dart also reformed the way Sheriff’s Police handle prostitution arrests – steering prostitutes toward rehabilitative services through the Sheriff’s Women’s Justice Program rather than jail. Sheriff Dart also launched a national campaign to target the “johns” who solicit sex and highlight their roles as catalysts for the sex trade. Since its first operation in 2011, the “National Day of Johns Arrests” has grown to include 51 law enforcement nationwide partners who have combined for 1,832 johns arrests. The Child Exploitation Unit, also founded under Dart, actively pursues child pornography and human trafficking cases; such work provided the foundation for his federal lawsuit against the website Craigslist, which ultimately led to the removal of the Adult Services section previously listed on their website. Sheriff Dart has since turned his attention to Backpage.com, now the most prominent conduit for online sex ads, shining a light on the company’s facilitation of the sex trade while pushing for policy and legal strategies to protect the website’s victims.
Sheriff Dart also overhauled the county’s approach to foreclosure evictions – ensuring that evictees receive proper notice before being put out on the street and offering on-site social services geared towards families with school-age children, the elderly, and individuals suffering from mental illness. Sheriff Dart gained national prominence in 2009 for placing a moratorium on evictions after banks admitted to robo-signing foreclosure documents.
In 2009, Time magazine named Sheriff Dart one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, thanks to his groundbreaking efforts.
He and his wife Patricia live on Chicago’s South Side and are the proud parents of five young children.
Seminars
“Systemic Injustice: The Crushing Impact of America’s Criminal Justice System”
Our nation’s jails hold more than 730,000 people on any given day, with over 10,500 in custody here in Cook County. The majority are persons of color and are awaiting trial on crimes ranging from criminal trespass and retail theft to murder and sexual assault. In the Cook County Jail and in jails across the country, the brutal injustice of America’s criminal justice system rages on - breaking lives, breaking communities and consuming tax dollars at a shameless and reckless pace. This series will explore the uncomfortable realities of our criminal justice system and examine how and whether meaningful and sustainable reform is possible - and, importantly, whether justice ever prevails.
Who do you think fills America’s jails? Murderers and rapists? Drug users? Yes, but also poor people who stole food because they were hungry and then could not make bail. They are disproportionately people of color. They are, increasingly, the mentally ill, who no longer can find treatment as states and cities shutter mental health clinics. Our nation’s jails hold more than 730,000 people on any given day. Cook County Jail is the nation’s largest single-site jail with 8,500 inmates. The United States dwarfs the developed world with its incarceration rate. Why? What can be done? In our otherwise politically divided country, a bi-partisan consensus is emerging that we lock up too high a percentage of our population - including people we don’t need to be protected from. How can police, prosecutors, judges and the other players in our criminal justice system change what we do?
Here are some of the people in our jail right now: a woman imprisoned four months for stealing two plums and three candy bars because she was pregnant and hungry; a man has been there six months for stealing six tubes of toothpaste. Law enforcement is structured to punish those who break the rules - don’t pay bills, miss their court dates, violate their parole. But is there a more efficient way for society to deal with non-violent petty criminals instead of jailing them? Whether it’s $1,000 or $1,000,000, poor people can’t pay bond so they will spend months in jail - even for small, non-violent crimes. When are non-cash bonds or home electronic monitoring appropriate? How are the sheriff, prosecutors and public defenders cooperating to fast-track non-violent, small-time offenders out of the jail? What about better communication and new legislation to put deadlines on adjudicating cases so the accused don’t languish for months in jail before their cases are even heard? What role can the judiciary play?
As America closes its mental health facilities, jails have become mental institutions and must rethink their mission. Since the 1960s, the number of beds in Illinois' state-run psychiatric hospitals has decreased to fewer than 1,500 from 35,000. The city closed half of its mental health treatment centers in recent years. A third of our detainees now self-identify as mentally ill. So, in addition to the violent criminals America’s jails must house, they now find themselves filling with the mentally ill. Correctional Officers at Cook County Jail now get training in handling the mentally ill. For the first time in a major American jail, a clinical psychologist, Dr. Nneka Jones, has been named jail director. We have established a Mental Health Transition Center to prepare the mentally ill to succeed in society once they get out instead of returning to jail. If states and cities close mental health treatment centers, perhaps jails must open their own.
A chance to go behind the bars to see how America’s largest jail population is managed. We’ll hear first-hand from the mouths of correctional officers, mental health professionals and the detainees themselves what’s working in our criminal justice system; what’s fair and unfair; and what needs to be fixed. Students can see the living arrangements devised over the years to handle minimum- and maximum-security detainees and the programs in place to provide them a path out.
Is prostitution a “victimless” crime? Young women lured into the sex trade by abusive pimps will tell you that it’s not. Traditionally, law enforcement’s approach to prostitution has been arresting women caught up in the sex trade. Now law enforcement has learned it is more effective to go after the pimps and Johns that drive the trade. They try ever more sophisticated approaches, moving online where the Internet gives them anonymity, and well-intentioned federal laws such as the Communications Decency Act allow sex traffickers to hide behind the protections of “free speech.” Law enforcement agencies around the country tried for years to slow the increasing use of internet-based sex trafficking of women and underage girls facilitated by Backpage.com and other sites and only recently began having some success. They convinced Visa and Mastercard to stop allowing the use of their cards on internet sites to facilitate sex trafficking. You will hear from the mother of one runaway from Washington State lured into the sex trade and her difficult road back.
Special Guest: Mother of a Teen Trafficked on Backpage.com
One fall day, a 14-year-old girl was walking home after a basketball practice in her small town when a man suddenly overpowered her and dragged her to a nearby creek. He raped and punched her and then repeatedly shoved her head in the cold water, trying to kill her. She played dead and he ran off. Yet, the injustice didn’t stop. Because she was assaulted in one of the poorest towns in Illinois, the part-time, minimum-wage police force didn’t take even the most basic steps to catch the rapist, and he went on to commit additional heinous crimes. We’ve seen the headlines of thousands of rape cases going uninvestigated in cities from Detroit to New Orleans, and the same injustice in suburban Chicago communities such as Robbins and Harvey. Today’s discussion will explore how this nationwide horror is not just the product of bad policing but perhaps more disturbingly - and all too often - is the result of no policing. We will look at how poor communities are inextricably tied to injustices that range from unpunished crimes to abandoned homes that multiply like an unchecked cancer.
Tom Dart started his career as a prosecutor in Illinois. He helped initiate a massive public corruption investigation in the poverty-stricken village of Ford Heights, which led to the indictments of multiple police officers. As an Illinois state legislator, Dart re-wrote child welfare bills, wrote the state’s Sexually Violent Predators Commitment Act and led the state’s first-ever study connecting homelessness and prostitution. As Sheriff, he has been able to put his concerns into action, changing the way police treat sex crimes, protect children and handle arrestees with mental health issues. This session will explore different paths into law enforcement, politics and public service.
Congress, state legislatures and city councils can be the source of helpful legislation that steers violent offenders to prison and non-violent offenders toward rehabilitation. But government bodies have also been the source of disastrous demagogue-driven laws that filled jails and prisons with non-violent, low-level drug users all in the name of seeming “tough on crime.” Police, prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges and legislators all have a duty to work together to fix America’s broken justice system. In pockets around the country, we see movement in the right direction. Crises such as innocent men being freed after years on Death Row helped drive some of the reforms in Illinois and led to the abolition of the Death Penalty. Elected officials and civic groups of the left and right are driving a national movement to reserve prison and jail space for those who need it instead of the small-time, non-violent offenders whose families need them at home.