In his wood-paneled office on the 5th floor of City Hall, with a small army of reporters watching, Mayor Richard Daley basked in some of the glory of President Clinton’s crime bill victory.
During a conference call, the president praised mayors from coast to coast for their lobbying efforts, and Daley and his colleagues laid on the compliments for the Democrat in the Oval Office.
Then, Daley hung up the phone and fielded a question about the number of new police officers the $30.2 billion crime bill will generate for Chicago.
“We don’t know,” said the mayor.
That little scene Friday at City Hall goes a long way toward summarizing what the crime bill means for Chicago and other cities in Illinois and across the country. While it’s a great political victory for Clinton, Daley and others, the bill’s impact on the streets still is impossible to gauge.
So vague is its language and so complicated are its methods for distributing money that few mayors have any idea what it will do to combat crime.
The numbers in the bill, though, certainly sound impressive.
The U.S. Justice Department boasts that Illinois, Chicago and communities throughout the state could get an estimated $1 billion in federal money, including $466 million to build more prisons, $360 million to hire 4,100 new cops, and more than $65 million to expand crime prevention progams like drug rehabilitation and job training.
The state also would get money for programs for “at-risk” kids, prosecuting the cases of battered women and narcotics courts.
But many experts are unsure the U.S. Congress, facing its own budget crisis, will actually appropriate the full $30.2 billion as promised during the next half-decade.
Terri Moreland, director of the State of Illinois Office in Washington, said it’s premature to say how much federal crime money will be coming to Illinois. “That’s like counting your chickens before they hatch,” she said. “Every year the money has to be appropriated by Congress.”
She called the Department of Justice estimates “hyperbole.”
Whatever the figures turn out to be, the money will come with strings attached: States and local communities will have to kick in a portion of their own money. When the federal money runs out after six years, states and local communities will have to do all the heavy financial lifting themselves.
Lawmakers and other experts say it’s tough to turn down federal money for any program, especially those linked to the politically charged issues of crime and punishment.
But they are fearful that accepting the federal money now on big ticket items such as building new prisons could force states and local communities to shell out more money in the long run-something that could leave lawmakers in the awkward position of telling the feds to keep their cash.
“The requirement for matching funds is where the problem is going to be,” said Republican state Sen. Marty Butler, the former mayor of Park Ridge.
“It will mean raising taxes or cutting other programs to raise the money, and that will be the moment of truth. There is a lot of publicity given to bills like this, but six years from now, when our cities and the state may be in worse financial shape, we’ll have these prisons built and will face even higher local costs,” Butler said.
More Top Picks Best Amazon Prime Day Grill Deals 2026
Mike Mahoney, president of the John Howard Association, a Chicago-based prison watchdog group, even went so far as to say Illinois should reject the federal money for prisons.
“It would be foolish for Illinois to go after the prison money because in the long run it will cost them money,” he said. “There are so many conditions attached.”
Officials at the Illinois Department of Corrections say they must scrutinize the bill closely before trying to take advantage of some of its provisions.
“We will have to make it clear what the costs might be to the taxpayer,” said Nic Howell, corrections spokesman. “If this thing goes through and you get funding for five or six years, those beds are not going to go away. After five or six years, state taxpayers will have to fund those prisons forever.”
Even if Chicago and other communities get their full share, most experts say the crime bill will have little impact on reducing crime primarily because crime is linked to fundamental problems such as poverty, broken families and other social and economic factors that are not directly addressed in the legislation.
“There is no strong evidence that adding some police officers or building more prisons will have a dramatic effect on crime,” said Arthur Lurigio, a Loyola University criminal justice professor. “If you put more police officers in one area, crime is just dispersed to another area. Crime is determined by social, economic and demographic factors.”
Chicago Police Supt. Matt Rodriguez, seated next to Daley in his office, also pointed out the key role demographics play in crime, citing the predicted growth in the population of young males in the next 10 years. He used those figures as a way of praising the crime bill, saying it was preventive medicine.
In fact, there was no lack of support for the bill-perhaps because it offers a smorgasbord of programs, with a little bit of everything for everyone.
Many community leaders and other experts singled out the bill’s provisions that put more cops on the street and target crime prevention through such programs as midnight sports leagues and after-school academic and other activities.
“For the most part, I’m really glad it passed for the prevention piece,” said Leola Spann, president of the Northwest Austin Council, a community organization on the West Side. “I think that’s the key to some of the youth violence.”
Daley also praised the bill, citing not only funding for crime-prevention programs but the opportunity for Chicago to put more police officers on the street.
But Daley and other city officials were still trying to figure out what’s in the bill and how many new cops Chicago could afford to hire. Paul Vallas, the city budget director, said the bill could allow Chicago to hire an additional 300 to 400 cops-a far cry from the 1,000 cops City Hall had been saying could be funded by the crime bill.
While Daley and Rodriguez stressed that getting new officers was their priority, Rodriguez also mentioned the possibility that some of the money could go to funding police overtime or paying officers who work on their days off.
“How we ultimately spend the money has yet to be decided,” said one City Hall official.
State officials were equally cautious when it came to discussing whether the state would shell out matching funds for prison construction.
One major problem is that one-half of the estimated $466 million in prison funds for which the state could qualify is conditioned on the state meeting certain requirements for locking up violent offenders, including the option of passing a “truth-in-sentencing” law that requires second-time violent offenders to serve 85 percent of their prison sentences.
Most Illinois inmates now serve an average of 45 percent of their prison sentence primarily because they get a day-for-a-day good time credit for each day spent in the system.
Several “truth-in-sentencing” bills were introduced in the state legislature this year, but none of them passed because Illinois Department of Corrections officials warned that such legislation could cost the state billions of dollars in additional expenditures during the next decade.
“We are approaching this with optimism, because we would like to get the money,” said James Montana, chief legal counsel to Gov. Jim Edgar, referring to the federal prison grants. “But we are also approaching it cautiously because we want to be sure that the benefits, either in public safety or money, outweigh the costs.”
A large portion of the $30.2 billion is allocated to states and local communities on a 75-25 ratio: The federal government will pay for 75 percent of a program if the state and local communities kick in 25 percent of the cost.
The funds are allocated by the U.S. Department of Justice based on population, the quality of the application, and the crime rate of a community. The higher a community’s crime rate, the better chance it has to get its hands on the federal matching funds.
The share of the cost that state and local communities must shell out increases each year-the law doesn’t spell out exactly how much-until the federal money runs out after six years.
And where will the money come from then?
“Crime Bill II,” said one wishful official at City Hall.