After visiting prisons, Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss said he came away with a clearer view of the racial disparities that persist in the criminal justice system. Biss, a Democratic candidate for Congress and former state lawmaker, said the country's high incarceration rate shows a willingness to lock people away instead of focusing on rehabilitation and second chances. (MEDILL TrialMonitors video by Miguel Tsang)
JUSTICE REFORM & LEGISLATORS: Click here for slides
By Kaprice Daniels, Zoe Otto, Siri Reddy and Miguel Tsang
At 17 years old, James Swansey was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Following a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, two resentencings and a grant of clemency, the Chicago native walked free in 2020 after nearly 30 years behind bars.
Now, Swansey is committed to using legislation to reform the system which incarcerated him.
“They literally told me that I was supposed to die as a child, and here it is: I’m in the Capitol, I’m advocating for individuals such as myself,” said Swansey, who was found guilty of two murders in 1992. “The system that we have is supposed to look towards [rehabilitation], and it doesn’t do that …. Ultimately, what my job is is to show legislators that they can change that and be different.”
Swansey works as the associate policy director for Restore Justice, an advocacy organization aiming to replace Illinois’ punitive criminal justice policies with more restorative laws. As a registered lobbyist, Swansey helped pass the state’s abolishment of juvenile life without parole — the very sentence he once carried.
With research conducted by the Prison Policy Initiative finding that 50,000 people from Illinois are behind bars and rates of pretrial detention are rising across the nation, lobbyists like Swansey use legislation as a mechanism to drive meaningful change in the system. Indeed, state lawmakers craft and vote on bills which influence the state’s criminal justice policy from the top.
Among the lawmakers spearheading justice reform legislation in Illinois is state Sen. Rachel Ventura. She pioneered the state’s first legislative internship program for incarcerated individuals, which she said she started in 2023 after meeting with a group of men at Stateville Correctional Center in 2022.
“It was really working with these individuals, [hearing] their real-life stories, that led me into the work of trying to reform the system so that it’s more about restorative justice and less about punishment,” said Ventura, who was sworn in for her second term in January 2025.
Ventura said three of her interns worked on legislation reforming the structure and procedures of Illinois’ Prisoner Review Board. The bill they helped on passed last June.
Bringing legislators like Ventura to carceral facilities can be a difficult task, however. Advocate Katrina Baugh said she found herself abruptly banned from all prisons in Illinois after she brought 20 state legislators to meet incarcerated individuals at Stateville in 2018.
Baugh said the ban revealed to her how influential legislators can be to making real change within the criminal legal system — that bringing fewer than two dozen to a prison posed a threat “enough to get [her] banned for life.”
“This is an opaque system with no accountability, and they like it that way,” Baugh said. “The people who operate the system benefit from the fear that comes from a lack of knowledge … They are not eager to have outside eyes looking in.”
Justice Hasa Kingo said visits to correctional and detention facilities have shaped his judicial perspective by revealing the realities people face after a court order is issued. The New York State Supreme Court justice believes such visits should be encouraged, if not required, because they help judges make more informed decisions. (MEDILL TrialMonitors on April 30, 2026)
Now senior policy director for nonprofit Families Against Mandatory Minimums, commonly known as FAMM, Baugh played a major role in defending and implementing Illinois’ Pretrial Fairness Act. The PFA, which went into effect in 2023, aimed to modernize pretrial decision-making practices across the state.
Along with expanding eligibility for pretrial release, the PFA made Illinois the first state in the nation to fully eliminate cash bail for all criminal cases.
“[I hoped] to end the practice of holding people hostage or holding people ransom pretrial because we did not have a safe system,” said state Sen. Robert Peters, a legislator instrumental in the passage of the act. “We had a system based off of money, and a system based off of money is an unjust, unfair, unsafe system.”
Peters said a great deal of momentum to pass the act came during protests in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 killing in Minneapolis, with Peters calling it a “transformational period” for justice reform.
Research conducted by Loyola University Chicago’s Center for Criminal Justice shows that pretrial jail populations in Illinois are down as a whole following the PFA. The total number of people under some form of pretrial correctional control in Illinois has risen by 17%, however, and Cook County jail populations are higher than before the passage of the act.
“The legislature changing the law doesn’t always change what happens on the ground,” explained Patrick Griffin, the center’s deputy director. “It’s very common to find that laws either haven’t changed anything, or haven’t resulted in what the legislation intended.”-
Much of this discrepancy is structural, Griffin said — the system is run by many players with their own authority and motives, such that carceral practices can’t just be changed with “the stroke of a pen.”
Political risk deepens the problem. Legislators worry about reelection, and voters are often wary of anything that can be cast as soft on crime, Griffin explained.
Even so, advocates like Baugh remain committed to using legislative pathways to address systemic failures in the system. After all, Baugh said, the often life-or-death nature of criminal justice reform makes the stakes of a legislator’s vote unlike any other.
“You don’t have more authority over anyone else’s life than when you are making laws about incarceration,” Baugh said. “That is the entirety of a person’s life that is within your decisionmaking power.”
