Unbalanced Prison Populations:
​There are 76,000 people from Illinois behind bars. 41,000 in state facilities, 23,000 in local jails, and about 12,000 in federal and other facilities. Per 100,000 people in Illinois, the number of incarcerated people by race are as follows: 258 people are White, 472 are Hispanic, 2,128 are Black, and 821 are Native American/Alaska Native. These numbers are disturbing. What is even worse is the percentage of Illinoisans by race that are incarcerated. While 64% of Illinoisans are white, 30% of the prison population is white. 15% of the population in Illinois is Black, while 56% of those incarcerated are Black. 16% of the population is Latino, and 14% of the prison population is, and Native people are around 1% in both areas.


We will bring the fight for justice of ALL of the citizens of Illinois, to our state capitol and will make sure that we correct the laws ripping apart our communities and our society. The only way we succeed is by bringing people together, and lifting up all citizens. Working together, we are going to end the international embarrassment of having more people in jail America than any other country on earth. Instead of spending billions every year on jails and incarceration, we are going to invest in jobs and education for our young people. No more "war on drugs." No more keeping people in jail because they're too poor to afford cash bail. Real police department reform.

We fight to end cash bail. Current bond reforms don’t go far enough to help those who cannot afford any bail and are no threat to the public if released. HB 3347 to abolish monetary bail must be passed.

We fight to end all mandatory minimum sentencing. Mandatory minimums are minimum sentences that judges must impose for offenses without discretion, if a person is convicted. While, introduced to promote fairer, more uniform sentencing based on criminal activity rather than irrelevant factors such as race or a particular judge's strictness, the laws have created various unintended consequences. The laws make it easier for prosecutors to extract plea bargains from innocent suspects, and they take discretion away from judges, which can result in overly harsh penalties.

We must evaluate civil asset forfeiture in Illinois. In the summer of 2017, after protracted negotiations, the Illinois General Assembly passed a landmark bill to make Illinois’ forfeiture laws fairer and more transparent. However, the law still allows citizens to lose their property through forfeiture even if they’ve not been convicted of a crime. The scheme for allocating forfeited assets remains unchanged, meaning the same police department that seizes your money gets to keep it after the cash is forfeited. Additionally, “equitable sharing” arrangements with the federal government provide a loophole through which Illinois law enforcement agencies can avoid complying with the safeguards provided under state law.


Funding:

• We must change the way our system is funded to end the incentives that deepen inequalities.
• End discriminatory drug laws
• Re-establish the idea that drug addiction is a health crisis
• End “For Profit” policing

Pre-trial practices:
We need to end monetary bonds, which unfairly punish poor people much harsher than those with money. We must ensure pre-trial detention is used only to promote public safety. When someone breaks the law, they must be held to account, however charging a poor person money to be released when they do not have the funds could ruin any chance that they could be rehabilitated. It can cause undue stress on that person’s family, and could make a stable home unstable. While we need to make sure those who break the law are held accountable, we need to make sure it does not ruin their lives now, or in the future.


Sentencing:
Sentencing laws need to be proportionate to the crimes that are committed. When a person commits a crime, there should be repercussions, but these should be equal across all communities. The systemic practices which often unfairly target people of color and those less economically stable only create bigger problems. As an example, we need to ensure that violent criminals are punished more severely than those which are not violent. Drug crimes disproportionately effect poor communities and people of color. We need to ensure fair practices across all spectrum of people.
We need to address unfair sentencing and reduce prison population.

The cost of holding people in prison is a burden on the taxpayers of this state. The research is clear that holding non-violent offenders for long periods of time does not deter future crimes. We need to offer better
re-entry programs to help those who have been in the system for any length of time, and we need to help our fellow citizens when they fall off the path of success and make the decision to commit crimes. We need to find the causes of the actions and address those rather than lock away our fellow citizens for making poor judgment and making mistakes.


Accountability and Transparency:
Our country’s system of policing is plagued by a breakdown in trust between the police and the communities they’re supposed to protect. We need to develop programs at the community level to improve communication and trust between police and the people they serve. To help in this space, I believe we need to provide continuous professional development for our brave men and women in uniform. We need to help our officers with Conflict Resolution Training, Non-lethal training, and helping with de-escalation techniques that will help calm high intensity situations with the least trauma possible.

​
Re-entry:
Too often, formerly incarcerated individuals return to prison due to systemic factors that fail to set them up for success after their release. We need to ban the extension of probation or supervision for non-payment of debt. Creating a system with mandatory supervised release for low-risk individuals will allow our incarcerated citizens an opportunity to start over with a better opportunity for success. We also need to begin removing arrest records for minor offenses after enough time has passed. People make mistakes in life, but those mistakes should not haunt them forever because they do not have the money to expunge their records. If a person commits a crime, and reorients themselves, they should be rewarded with the removal of long past wrongdoings from their record.

Creating and implementing programs for successful re-entry is essential to getting repeat offenders out of the prison system for good. The percentage of recidivism is an embarrassment to the criminal justice system in our state and across the country. It is clear that locking people up for committing crimes does not in and of itself correct the behavior. We need to concentrate on the root causes of what leads people to commit crimes, and address those issues. This will create a pathway for people to become rehabilitated and have success after their release.

We believe we need to concentrate on using community service for minor crimes rather than prison/jail time. This will allow those who have been in the system to create a better network which will lead to opportunities for success. When you surround criminals with other criminals, and isolate them from those in the community who are finding success, we push those citizens into networks or negative thoughts and behaviors. We need to show our fellow citizens how successful they can be when given support and a network of people who have found success in their own communities. This will help create a network where they do not need to commit the crimes or exhibit the behaviors that got them into trouble in the first place.


Gun Violence:

• We need to treat gun violence as a public health issue by funding violence prevention programs and intervention services, and fighting for universal healthcare, which includes mental health treatment.
• Restrict the number of guns that can be purchased within a set time span.
• Ban bump stocks and expanded magazines.
• Enact a Lethal Violence Order of Protection, disqualifying domestic abusers from owning firearms, and implementing a system to report and track domestic violence incidents
• *See Gun control section for more information.

Violent offenders:
We believe that violent offenders need to be appropriately dealt with by the system. When a man assaults a woman, that man should be jailed and kept off of the streets until they are judged to be safe to return. When a person is raped, their attacker should not be able to roam free and possibly harm others. We should NEVER see a situation like Brock Turner who rapes a woman, and is given a lenient sentence because "one mistake should not effect the rest of his life" when his "mistake" has ruined someone else's life. Offenders that assault our children, elderly, disabled, or any of those most vulnerable among us, deserve to receive the harshest possible penalties if found guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

We believe that all people deserve to be assumed innocent until proven guilty, but we also need to ensure that we protect those around us that could be injured if we allow those violent offenders to be freed.

Volunteer

Register to Vote