CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

---

• In Illinois, Black people constituted 15% of state residents, but 49% of people in jail and 56% of people in prison.
• Since 1970, the total jail population has increased 259%. In 2015, pretrial detainees constituted 71% of the total jail population in Illinois.
• Each year, at least 173,000 different people are booked into local jails in Illinois.

• More than 70% of youths incarcerated by the Department of Juvenile Justice are Black, though Black children make up only 15% of the population in Illinois.
• In Illinois, Black youth are still far more likely to be incarcerated than white or Latino youth and make up nearly two-thirds of all incarcerated juveniles. That percentage has in fact increased since 2007, when Black youth made up only 56 percent of incarcerated youth.

Since 1980, the number of women in jail in Illinois has increased 407%, and the number of women in prison has increased 1,015%.

The majority of the victims of homicide in Chicago are young, Black men.

• Chicago police released a report that revealed that shootings and murders jumped by more than 50% in 2020.
• In 2020, there were 769 murders compared to the 495 murders tallied in 2019.

42 percent of women and 26 percent of men have experienced intimate partner violence in Illinois.

• A recent study suggested the rate of domestic violence among women veterans in Illinois is close to 29 percent (past-year incidence), which is higher than that experienced by the general population of women (24 percent).

• Today in Illinois, nearly 200,000 children—or one in every 20—have had a parent in jail or prison.
• In Illinois alone, there were approximately ninety thousand minor children affected by a parent’s incarceration—most of these parents are nonviolent offenders, currently serving an average sentence of eighty months in prison facilities over one hundred miles from where their children live.