By David Olsen, Patrick Griffin, Lucy Einstein, Molly Halladay-Glynn, and Bella Lira ·
During the early 1990s, violent crime in the United States reached its highest levels since the Federal Bureau of Investigation started keeping records.
One significant policy response at the federal level was the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994—popularly known as the “1994 Crime Bill”—which expanded funding for law enforcement, stiffened federal penalties for violent crimes, banned assault weapons, and made a host of other changes aimed at addressing and reducing violence. One of the most consequential components of the Crime Bill established the Violent Offender Incarceration and Truth-in-Sentencing (VOI/TIS) Incentive Formula Grants Program, which not only provided massive federal funding for new and expanded state prison construction, but set aside much of it for states that toughened up and reformed their criminal sentencing laws by adopting “Truth in Sentencing.”
Truth in Sentencing (TIS) laws mandate that those sentenced to prison for certain serious crimes actually remain imprisoned for all or a substantial portion of the court-specified sentence, no matter what early release or “good time credit” mechanisms might otherwise be employed to promote good discipline and encourage rehabilitative efforts in prison.
Illinois was one of many states that responded to the new federal funding incentives set up by the Crime Bill, enacting TIS legislation and eventually receiving a total of $124 million through the VOI/TIS grant program from 1996 through 2001. Illinois’ original TIS scheme required that 100% of a court-imposed sentence be served following conviction for First Degree Murder, 85% for a range of other serious offenses, and 85% for specified offenses when they result in great bodily harm. TIS in Illinois was expanded to cover other offenses in 2005, 2007, and 2010.
The Legacy of Truth-In-Sentencing in Illinois
The dramatic wave of violent crime that prompted the original 1994 Crime Bill receded long ago, but the effects of the incentives created by the Crime Bill remain to this day. Many of these lasting effects were documented in a 2009 Loyola University analysis of the first ten years of Truth in Sentencing, which found among other things that TIS had greatly increased the time required to be served in prison under court-imposed sentences but did not have any significant influence on the extent and nature of disciplinary incidents in Illinois’ prisons. In fact, people subject to TIS had patterns of disciplinary infractions similar to those not subject to TIS.
Now a new study conducted by the Center for Criminal Justice at Loyola, analyzing Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) data through December 31, 2024, updates and expands on the 2009 report, illuminating the ways that a quarter of a century of TIS has profoundly shaped the current population of Illinois prisons.
Chicago: Loyola University, Center for Criminal Justice, 2025. 11p,