By Stephanie Gadlin
A pendulum swings back and forth.
Despite years of momentum toward reforming the justice system and improving safety in predominantly Black and Latino U.S. cities, President Donald Trump is accelerating a federal rollback that advocates warn could revive the Prison-Industrial Complex 2.0.
Michelle Alexander, in The New Jim Crow, defines the prison-industrial complex as a system of mass incarceration that functions as a modern racial caste: it disproportionately controls and marginalizes Black communities under the guise of criminal justice.
Borne out of the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic and illegal gun trafficking—fueled in part by domestic and foreign policies under Republican President Ronald Reagan—the prison-industrial complex expanded rapidly after Democratic President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act on Sept. 13, 1994. It remains the largest crime bill in U.S. history.
The “Clinton Crime Bill,” supported by members of the Congressional Black Caucus, poured more than $30 billion into the criminal justice system. It funded 100,000 new police officers, expanded the death penalty, created dozens of new federal crimes, and offered billions in incentives for states to adopt harsher sentencing laws, including “three strikes” rules and mandatory minimums. One of the bill’s most controversial provisions was the “Truth in Sentencing” grants (which encouraged states to require people to serve at least 85 percent of their terms in exchange for federal prison construction money).
By 1998, Illinois had enacted its own Truth in Sentencing law, ensuring violent offenders served nearly their full terms. This extended prison stays and swelled the state’s incarcerated population. With federal dollars available, Illinois built or expanded downstate prisons in towns like Lawrence and Pinckneyville. These facilities, filled mostly with inmates from Chicago, were sold as economic engines for struggling, majority-white rural areas.
By the turn of the century, Illinois’ prison population had doubled, and Cook County Jail had become one of the largest single-site jails in the nation. Black Chicagoans, about a third of the city’s population, made up the overwhelming majority of those incarcerated.
Reform advocates eventually chipped away at the bill’s impact. The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, signed by Democratic President Barack Obama, reduced the long-criticized crack-to-powder cocaine sentencing disparity. Later, Trump signed the First Step Act in 2018, which expanded sentencing relief, broadened compassionate release, and created new rehabilitation credits.
The About-Face and Current Federal Assault
This week, President Trump, now a convicted felon, shifted his stance on fair treatment during and after incarceration. He reaffirmed plans to send federal troops into Chicago and Baltimore, which he called “hell holes,” to combat violent crime and illegal immigration.
As of Crusader press time, no soldiers, ICE agents or federal officers had yet been deployed. His announcement followed an unusually violent Labor Day weekend in Chicago, where 50 people were shot and eight killed in 37 incidents between Friday and Monday.
Gov. JB Pritzker and Attorney General Kwame Raoul vowed legal action to protect Illinois residents. Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle also said she was prepared to sue.
“We need (federal) help stopping guns, not soldiers in our neighborhoods,” said Mayor Brandon Johnson, who has consistently framed violence as a symptom of systemic inequities. He pointed to the steady flow of illegal weapons from “red states” like Indiana and Mississippi as central to Chicago’s gun crisis.
Trump also escalated his offensive against bail reform by signing an Aug. 25 executive order threatening to strip federal funds from jurisdictions that eliminated money bail. “No cash. Come back in a couple of months, we’ll give you a trial. You never see the person again,” he said at the signing.
Illinois became the first state to fully eliminate cash bail under the Pretrial Fairness Act, part of the SAFE-T Act (Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today). Pritzker signed it into law in February 2021, but after court challenges, it took effect on Sept. 18, 2023.
The White House has also pulled funding from Community Violence Intervention (CVI) programs, which rely on outreach workers and neighborhood-based services to prevent shootings and defuse conflicts. In recent years, federal support—including through the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act—channeled hundreds of millions into CVI nationwide. Illinois earmarked $16 million in its 2026 budget, while Cook County and Chicago committed tens of millions annually based on expectations of continued federal backing.
Advocates argue Trump’s actions amount to defunding reform while reinvesting in punishment, breathing life back into the prison-industrial complex.
Wanda Bertram, a strategist at the Prison Policy Initiative, urged municipalities to resist Trump’s threats and instead invest in community services. His attacks on bail reform, she said, send a troubling message.
“I think it’s a real shame, and it throws into jeopardy some of the most important criminal justice reforms that cities and states have implemented in recent years,” she told the Crusader. “Criminal legal system reformers are always facing an uphill battle because we live in a culture that raises up police and prisons as the primary solution to social disorder. We’re always trying to combat that and show that, in fact, more incarceration can make cities and states less safe.”
Bertram added: “Cashless bail is a quick and dirty phrase. The reforms that have taken place in many cities and states distinguish between people presumed to be a risk (based on a risk assessment tool or the charges they face) and people who are not. Bail reform asserts that we cannot determine someone’s threat to society by the amount of money they can post to go free.”
Data backs her up. In Illinois, the 2023 abolition of cash bail led to sharp declines in the Cook County Jail population without a spike in crime, according to county data. Nearly nine in 10 people released returned to court and were not rearrested. New Jersey saw similar results after its 2017 reforms, and Washington, D.C., has operated for decades without cash bail, with most defendants appearing for court and avoiding new violent charges.
The racial and economic disparities remain stark. Black Americans make up about 13 percent of the population but nearly 37 percent of those incarcerated. Latinos are also overrepresented. In Cook County Jail, more than 70 percent of detainees are Black, most from neighborhoods with median incomes far below the county average. Before reform, hundreds of detainees sat in Cook County Jail each day on bails of $1,000 or less.
Mark Levin, chief policy counsel at the Council on Criminal Justice, told the Crusader that states may have no choice but to challenge Trump’s directives in court. “If grants are pulled using factors that aren’t authorized in statute by Congress, that’s grounds for litigation,” he said. “The Supreme Court has said you can only leverage funds that are directly related to the policy. Essentially, the federal government is trying to coerce states to do something against their own laws.”
Levin added that only a small percentage of pretrial defendants are rearrested for violent crimes, noting that supportive services after release are key to reducing recidivism.
Yet Trump’s rhetoric continues to frame pretrial defendants as “violent criminals” poised to reoffend as soon as they are released. He has emphasized support for crime victims, saying too little attention has been paid to justice for them.
Lisel Petis, policy director of criminal justice and civil liberties at the R-Street Institute, said Trump’s approach is both legally shaky and misguided. “Criminal justice policy is largely controlled by the states, and the 10th Amendment prevents the federal government from dictating how states run their bail systems,” she said. “Since the president can’t directly require states to keep or bring back cash bail, it appears he intends to leverage the power of the purse—through federal funding—instead.”
Petis pointed out that under Illinois’ old bail system, 60 percent of defendants were released without cash, only 3 percent were held without the chance to post bail, and the rest were released if they could pay. Since the Pretrial Fairness Act abolished cash bail, a study across 22 counties found that 9 percent were held without release, while the rest were freed with conditions tied to safety and court appearance. “Available data from Illinois shows most individuals released without cash bail have returned to court and remained arrest-free while awaiting trial. Early results show pretrial crime rates have not increased, suggesting judges can effectively assess risk without relying on financial conditions,” she said.
Big-City Violent Crime Falling
Major cities singled out by Trump, including Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, are reporting notable declines in key violent crime measures this year. By contrast, places like Memphis and several Texas cities have posted higher rates, bucking the national trend.
The FBI’s preliminary 2024 report showed violent crime overall fell an estimated 4.5 percent, including a 14.9 percent decline in murders year over year.
In Chicago, the numbers are even sharper. By mid-2025, homicides were down 33 percent and shootings fell 38 percent compared with 2024. Johnson has called it “historic reductions,” crediting investments in communities and public safety reforms. He reopened shuttered mental health clinics, expanded youth employment, increased support for CVI programs, and authorized police to strengthen prevention efforts.
In Baltimore, Mayor Brandon Scott has countered Trump’s threats with statistics. “Baltimore is safer today than it has been in half a century,” he said this week, pointing to historically low summer homicide totals and consistent reductions in shootings since 2023.
New York has seen similar progress. Police data show homicides and shootings dropped for three straight years, capped by a 15.5 percent decrease in December 2024, the steepest monthly decline since early 2021.
Los Angeles, long a symbol of urban crime, reported a 14 percent drop in homicides in 2024. By summer 2025, the city, under Mayor Karen Bass, was on track for its lowest homicide total in nearly six decades. “This progress is the direct result of community-based interventions and targeted policing,” Bass said in March.
Not all cities follow the trend. Memphis continues to rank near the top of big-city homicide rates, and Houston has been an outlier in 2025, with homicides running higher through the spring even as most large cities saw declines. Yet Trump has not threatened federal action there. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a close ally, has faced no such demands, underscoring the partisan politics at play.
On Aug. 11, Trump invoked Section 740 of the D.C. Home Rule Act, declaring a “crime emergency” and federalizing the Metropolitan Police Department. He deployed roughly 800 National Guard troops, effectively sidelining local control in the name of crime reduction. Now he wants to expand the strategy to other cities—all of them led by African American mayors.
Meanwhile, correctional construction is booming with suburban and rural communities having the fastest growth. Hundreds of projects are underway nationwide. Alabama is building a $1.25 billion mega-prison in Elmore County, a 335-acre complex with 54 buildings and space for 4,000 inmates. Officials say the facility will include medical, mental health and vocational services, but critics call it an expensive expansion of the old carceral model.
Plans for a new $500 million medium security federal prison, complete with a minimum security camp, is currently underway in Letcher County, eastern Kentucky. The Federal Bureau of Prisons plans to acquire approximately 500 acres for the site, which is expected to house around 1,408 adults.
In Cuyahoga County, Ohio officials are working to replace its aging downtown jail with a new, four-story, L-shaped facility, estimated to cost over $1 billion. This 1,900-bed project is designed with efficiency in mind—including space for sheriff’s operations. In Franklin County, Arkansas, a $825 million proposal for a 3,000-bed state prison has drawn controversy. The D. Ray James Correctional Institution in Georgia is expanding with nearly $50 million channeled into upgrading the Folkston ICE Processing Center. It is designed to accommodate over 3,000 detainees. The controversial “Alligator Alcatraz” a $450 million immigration detention camp in Florida Everglades opened briefly this year before it was halted by court order.
Civil rights champion Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. often intoned: “Poverty is a driving factor in mass incarceration. In prison or in jail people receive three meals a day, a bed to sleep in, supervised recreation, access to schools and libraries and they can even learn a skill. In the community they can’t find work, feed themselves or their families and can be arrested for standing on street corners. This is backwards thinking and morally wrong.”
Stephanie Gadlin is an award-winning author and investigative journalist whose work blends historical analysis, data reporting, and cultural commentary. She specializes in uncovering the intersections of Black culture, public health, environmental justice, systemic racism, and economic inequality—covering stories from the United States to Africa and the Caribbean. For confidential tips, please contact: [email protected].
