Chicago has always been my home. As a young girl I grew up in Cabrini Green. I’ve always known that our system needs to change, and I’ve spent my career fighting for children and families like the ones I grew up with. Over the past three years, I’ve focused on prosecuting violent crimes, not low-level offenses. We beat the NRA in court over their attacks on Cook County’s common-sense assault weapons ban, and our county has become a national model for reform.

I ran for for re-election because I want to fight every single day to continue the important work of reforming justice and making a fairer, safer system for Cook County.

We have seen the impact of an unfair criminal justice system. I’m running to reform the system and bring equity and fairness to a system that, for too long, has disenfranchised low-income people and communities of color, like the ones I grew up in. When I took office, I made a promise to bring reform to a system that made Cook County known as the “false confession capital” of the United States. We have done remarkable work, and we cannot stop now.

• In the last three years, we have worked to exonerate wrongful convictions of 80 individuals. 

• We have worked to enact bail reform and stop the overcrowding of our jails by prioritizing the detainment of those that pose a threat to our communities. 

• We have fought to reform how traffic offenses are prosecuted. We are no longer punishing people simply because they are poor and cannot afford to pay their tickets. 

We have made significant progress, but there is still work to do - Together, we are working to make Cook County a model of criminal justice reform.

Our system has treated violent criminals the same way we treated low-level offenders—this is wrong. We have harshly prosecuted things like marijuana offenses, creating a scarlet letter (and a criminal record) for too many to wear. Over the last three years, we’ve seen violent crime go down as well as incarceration rates - and our communities are safer because of it. 

This is no coincidence. Our criminal justice system has treated drug offenders, non-violent, and the mentally ill as if they are violent offenders. When I took office, we decided a change needed to take place.

• We prioritized violent crime and keeping our communities safe, rather than using resources to prosecute non-violent, low-level offenders.

• We increased the number of people directed to diversion programs, ensuring that people can get access to mental health treatment and substance abuse services.

• We created a Crime Strategies Taskforce, to partner prosecutors with law enforcement so that we are handling cases in the most effective way possible. 

As prosecutors, we must own our role in the War on Drugs and work to right those wrongs, especially on the heels of marijuana legalization in Illinois. I’m proud that we have started this by expunging the records of over a thousand low-level marijuana offenders. Now, we must continue this critical work together.