The Cook County Sheriff’s Office is ending its decades-old electronic monitoring (EM) program, giving the Chief Judge’s Office sole responsibility for managing its cases.

Defendants ordered by a judge to be supervised with EM — or GPS tracking through an ankle bracelet — will be put under the authority of the Adult Probation Department at the Chief Judge’s Office.

The change means the department will have to scale up its staff, training and equipment. As the Chief Judge’s Office prepares, questions remain about whether there are enough resources to take on a growing caseload.

Chief Judge Tim Evans said his office could need 150 full-time employees to oversee the program. While the Adult Probation Department got an additional $6.3 million for electronic monitoring when the Cook County budget passed in November, Evans said that’s not enough.

“We’re anticipating that in about six months, we will have about 900 more people to keep an eye on,” Evans said. “That’s an average of about five per day, and 150 per month. But the first day, it was 35.”

Anders Lindall, spokesperson for AFSCME Council 31, the union representing workers in the Adult Probation Department, raised concerns about the heavier workload the department’s limited staff is facing.

“As of April 1, they’ll begin to take responsibility for new participants in the county’s pretrial EM program previously handled by the Sheriff’s office,” Lindall said in a statement. “Our union has made clear to the Chief Judge that this significant increase in responsibilities will require new hiring, new investment in the tools staff need to do the job, and the funding to pay for it. AFSCME will also push to ensure that union members have the training and support they need to handle this new population effectively and safely.”

The sheriff’s program started in 1989 as a middle ground between putting arrested people in jail and letting them go free as they await trial. It was also an effort to reduce overcrowding at Cook County Jail. But in December, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart announced the program would be cut short because he couldn’t run it safely anymore.

The sheriff’s office will phase out the program over the next year. Until then, it will still oversee cases currently under the program and stop accepting new participants.

The sheriff’s office said in a statement that it “is committed to supporting the Office of the Chief Judge in the operation of their EM program by providing any law enforcement services it may need to ensure public safety going forward.”

The Adult Probation Department has been running its own separate EM program for 14 years. But it doesn’t have the same authority as the sheriff. It can’t arrest or detain anyone who violates the rules of the program; judges can only order arrests. If a violation were to happen, such as a defendant cutting off their ankle monitor, response time could be longer. However, Evans said his team will be working with officials like the Cook County state’s attorney to speed up the process.

“We can work with the sheriff and other law enforcement officials to take action immediately to prevent that person from leaving the jurisdiction,” Evans said. “We will be working with all of the parties that are involved in this, including the sheriff, to see if we can make certain that we can expedite that process.”

The transition comes amid debate about how electronic monitoring can balance public safety and the rights of the accused. Some advocates are praising the change after raising concerns about the rules for the sheriff’s program. The Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice said in a statement that people on EM under the sheriff faced “arbitrary restrictions” that led to people losing their jobs and being prevented from accessing grocery stores or the laundromat.

Evans said a big difference between his program and the sheriff’s program is its rules on defendants’ movement.

“We permitted people to keep their jobs in most instances; we permitted people to go to their doctor’s appointments,” Evans said. “We permitted people to go to the grocery store, to go to church. We were far more humane in the way we approached it, and we will continue to do that. But the judge can decide whether to keep someone 24/7 or whether to give them a schedule that permits them to keep these services. Most of the time our judges permit this flexibility. But we want to keep the public safe at the same time we provide this humanitarian approach.”

Evans said he thinks his office can manage the big undertaking, but working with fewer resources brings challenges.

“The problem is that nobody knows what the future holds,” Evans said. “Our judges are not clairvoyant. All they can do is use the evidence that comes in before them to decide whether somebody should be detained pretrial or freed into the community pretrial.”

Note: This story was updated with a comment from AFSCME Local 31.

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