On Good Authority

              – 1 –
Cook County Day Reporting
Center serves as an
alternative to incarceration
On Good Authority
Vol. 5, No. 2
July 2001
On Good Authority is a periodic
briefing on trends and issues in
criminal justice program evaluation.
This report was written by staff Senior
Research Analyst Christine Martin. It is
a summary of a program evaluation of
the Cook County Sheriff’s Day
Reporting Center program, prepared
by Christine Martin, David E. Olson,
Ph.D., and Arthur J. Lurigio, Ph.D.
Copies of the evaluation are available
from the Authority’s Research and
Analysis Unit.
The Illinois Criminal Justice
Information Authority is a state
agency dedicated to improving the
administration of criminal justice in
Illinois. The basic functions of the
Authority are criminal justice research,
federal and state grants administration,
and information systems development
and support.
For more information, or for copies of
this or other publications, contact the
Authority at (312) 793-8550, or visit
our Web site at www.icjia.state.il.us.
The evaluation was supported by grant
#99-DB-BX-0017, awarded by the Bureau of
Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs,
U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view in
this document do not necessarily represent the
official position or policies of the U.S.
Department of Justice.
Printed by authority of the State of Illinois, July
2001. Printing order #01-240;
3,000 copies.
George H. Ryan
Governor
Peter B. Bensinger
Chairman
Candice M. Kane
Executive Director
ILLINOIS
CRIMINAL JUSTICE
INFORMATION AUTHORITY
Day Reporting Centers (DRCs) as
alternatives to traditional
incarceration made their U.S.
debut in Connecticut and Massachusetts.
At the beginning of the 1990s, 13 DRCs
were operational in the United States,
and by mid-1994 there were 114
programs in 22 states. Correctional
populations served by these centers
range from pretrial detainees to proba-tioners
to released and paroled prison-ers.
Day reporting centers have been in
operation long enough now to accommo-date
evaluations of program implementa-tion
and short-term effects, as well as
evaluations of long-term effects after
participants are discharged.
The Cook County Sheriff’s Office
has managed the Cook County Day
Reporting Center (CCDRC) since 1993,
providing an alternative to incarceration
for Cook County’s male pretrial defen-dants.
Annual process and outcome
evaluations of the CCDRC have been
conducted since 1996 and have consis-tently
shown that the program is highly
successful in increasing participants’
court appearance rates and decreasing
their arrest rates while they are in the
program. The Illinois Criminal Justice
Information Authority was asked by the
Cook County Sheriff’s Office to conduct
an evaluation of the program’s long-term
effects on discharged participants.
To assess the long-term impact of
the CCDRC program, the Authority
examined rearrest and reincarceration
rates of participants following their
discharge. Nearly 1,400 participants who
entered the program during 1995 were
tracked through the management
information system at the Cook County
Jail and the criminal history records
systems of the Chicago Police Depart-ment
and Illinois State Police between
1995 and 1998.
Based on the results of this evalua-tion,
Authority staff concluded that the
CCDRC has had a positive effect on
reducing post-release recidivism. This
On Good Authority summarizes the
results of the evaluation.
The CCDRC program
CCDRC participants are selected from
among pretrial defendants in the Elec-tronic
Monitoring program (EM), which
is a community-based supervision
program for nonviolent offenders run by
the Cook County Sheriff’s Office.
CCDRC participants are selected from
the EM program instead of the general
jail population to ensure that only
defendants who pose no threat to the
community are allowed to participate.
This is accomplished essentially by
screening CCDRC participants twice,
once for the EM program and then again
more stringently for the CCDRC. This
two-tiered screening is important
because CCDRC participants are
unsupervised during evenings and
weekends, even though they are techni-cally
in the custody of the Cook County
Department of Corrections.