Lisa Madigan, Illinois Attorney General  

Q:                    Can you describe your job? 

AG:                 As the Attorney General for the state of Illinois, I'm the lawyer for the state and therefore the people of the state. That means I run one of the largest law firms in Illinois. I have approximately 450 lawyers and we work throughout the state in every legal area: civil, appellate, criminal. I'm not your frontline criminal prosecutor, which most people don't realize. We have state's attorneys elected from each of the 102 counties to do that. Something you should know is that I'm different from the U.S. Attorney General in the sense the U.S. Attorney General is appointed by the President, by the chief executive. Here in Illinois and in 40 other states, the attorney general is independently elected which is one of the reasons why we are the lawyer for the people of the state as opposed to the governor or the president's lawyer. 

Q:                    Can you talk a little bit about your path to your current position?

AG:                 I have served as an elected official for nearly 20 years. In fact, I won my first election over 20 years ago.

Q:                    Wow.

AG:                 My background is that I spent time as a high school teacher in South Africa after I graduated from college. When I came home to Chicago, I took a job that included pioneering community policing strategies on the west side of Chicago in the Austin community. Because of those two experiences, I decided to go to law school. I was in private practice for four and a half years and decided to run for office. That was over 20 years ago, and I have been in elected office ever since. I spent one term in the Illinois State Senate and then I ran for attorney general and have run for attorney general now four times. I am in the last year of my fourth and final term. 

Q:                    Is it significant that your work is in Chicago?

AG:                 In Illinois, most people live in Cook and the collar counties so most of the cases are filed in the Chicago area. It does make me unusual among the constitutional officers of the state because for most of them, their home base is in Springfield, the capital of the state. Nonetheless we have two offices in Springfield, and I have another main office in Carbondale in southern Illinois.

Q:                    For you what does criminal justice reform look like?

AG:                 This is a great question. Because right now my office is dealing with two large pieces of criminal justice reform: Chicago police reform and reforming how law enforcement and other parts of the criminal justice system respond to sexual assault. 

Q:                    Can you explain them a little more?

AG:                 In terms of sexual assault, there are unfortunately a very large number of people who will experience either being raped or attempted being raped at some point in their lifetimes. That number for women is about one in five or six. For men, it's one in 33. If you are LGBTQ, those numbers are significantly higher. If you are someone living with a disability, those numbers are high. When you look at the overall population you realize that we must do more to prevent sexual assault from happening in the first place. But when you look at the numbers of people who are sexually assaulted and then report that to law enforcement, you can see that more must be done because the number of people that report their crimes to authorities is somewhere, at best, between 5 and 20 percent.

Q:                    Wow.

AG                  One of the reasons we need to do more for survivors of sexual assault is because we must increase the number of people who are comfortable coming forward and saying what's happened to them. If we don't, not only does that individual become stunted in terms of their ability to heal and move on with their life, but from a community safety perspective, we're also not able to identify those perpetrators who are often committing multiple crimes. And so, you need to be able to have somebody who will cooperate with law enforcement to prosecute somebody and if people aren't coming forward to authorities in the first place, that's not going to happen. Several years ago, I looked up and said this is crazy. So, we just started at the beginning and looked from start to finish: what's the process, who are the stakeholders, brought everybody together, and spent the better part of a year trying to understand what the problems were that prevented victims from reporting their crimes and how to fix them. One of the big pieces and the big changes we made were requirements for law enforcement to receive victim-centered and trauma-informed training to work with sexual assault survivors when they came forward. We received a $900,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to make sure that officers and anyone who could be the first point of contact in the law enforcement system with someone who has been sexually assaulted is trained on how to properly have those conversations, treat the individual, get the information and evidence they need. The hope is that this will significantly change people's willingness to come forward and to participate with law enforcement. I'm very excited about that. There is another piece that we just had a press conference about recently. We've been trying to get Illinois hospitals to have trained sexual assault nurse examiners, so that when a sexual assault survivor ends up in the emergency room, a medical professional knows psychologically how to deal with the person as well as how to collect evidence appropriately and sensitively. The hospitals have been difficult for years. We've trained a little over 1,500 nurses with 40 hours of classroom training, but they also need clinical training, and the hospitals haven't been willing to provide it, in spite of claiming they will. I've given up on trying to get them to voluntarily do this, and so recently the End Violence Against Women International conference took place in Chicago and we went over to the Hilton and held a big press conference with nationally leading experts to work on that. That is the kind of the legislation I'm working on right now in terms of criminal justice reform. 

The other big issue is dealing with Chicago police reform. The aftermath of the Laquan McDonald shooting brought to the forefront the fact that there were people, African-American people who were being shot and killed by the Chicago police department. I called on the U.S. Department of Justice, at the time headed up by Loretta Lynch, to conduct a civil rights pattern and practice investigation of the Chicago Police Department and they agreed. The results of that came out in January 2017, not long before Donald Trump was inaugurated as President. With that came a wholesale change in the United States Department of Justice and its leadership. Jeff Sessions, once he became the Attorney General, backed away from what is normally the work that the Justice Department takes on to make changes in police jurisdictions where they've done an investigation and found systemic problems. They normally negotiate with that jurisdiction in what's known as a consent decree, which is a legal term for a court order that delineates changes that need to be made to bring that police department into compliance with both best practices and making sure the police are following the laws and policing constitutionally. Because the Department of Justice backed away and said we're not going to do anything, I ultimately sued the city of Chicago and stepped into the shoes of the U.S. Justice Department. At this point, we are working with the city of Chicago and the police department as well as a police accountability task force to negotiate a consent decree to remedy the problems that were found in the Department of Justice investigation. Those are the two largest criminal justice reform issues that we're handling out of the office right now.

Q:                    You answered this a little but what has stood in your way?

AG:                 Change is difficult for a lot of people a lot of the time. I would say that people get very set in their ways about how they do something. And that's probably the most difficult aspect of it. When you're in government, the other thing you end up seeing is resource constraints. Many people will look up and say, well yes it would be great if we trained police, but we simply don't have the money to do that. So, there are some significant resource constraints, but overall I think it's just resistance to change. 

Q:                    Is there someone you've met or someone you've worked with that has been particularly influential in shaping your view on the system?

AG:                 The people that I have found most compelling are the survivors of violent crimes. There is a wonderful group of college-aged women – many who are now out of college – who had been sexually assaulted, and when they went to their university administrators to report the crime, they either weren't believed, or they weren't taken seriously. They became these tremendous activists and they educated themselves about the law. They demanded that their universities or colleges respond appropriately to them, and make accommodations for them, and deal with these problems the way they should have in the first place. Sitting down and talking with them about their experiences has been so important and now we have a great law that I will expand on. I think it might be the only law in the country that requires Illinois universities and colleges to respond to survivors of sexual assault effectively and in a timely way. When we were pushing the law, we ended up doing a series of summits across the state of Illinois. We did one in Chicago at University of Illinois Chicago, we did one in Bloomington at Illinois State University, we did one down in southern Illinois at Southern Illinois University to talk about sexual assault on campus. We opened each summit with a survivor, a wonderful woman named Julia Dixon. She grew up in Ohio, went to one of the Ohio public universities, and the second week of her freshman year she was raped in her room. She went to the university and she told them, and they said back to her, well we're not going to do anything until the rape kit comes back. That took a year and a half.  So, one of the things she had asked them to do was super simple. There was a policy that said you can't take food out of the cafeteria and she did not want to bump into the guy who raped her. The university suggested that instead she eat early or late – instead of allowing her to bring the food to another location. And so, of course, what she ended up doing was not eating, and she became sick. She then visits the campus health services and they say that not only is she physically not well, but she has post-traumatic stress syndrome by this point. She wasn't going to her classes, her grades plummeted, and she lost her scholarship. To her credit, she stayed in school and graduated. But for a lot of people who experience this, don't have that success story. Having her, not in an angry way but just a very logical way, explain what had happened to her, brought everybody in the room to this level of understanding. There are such simple things the university could have and should have done to allow her to continue to get her education and not have to bump into this guy. They didn't do it, and if you would just treat people humanely, so much of the difficulties that people experience would be eliminated. Listening to her and then bringing all the stakeholders together - university administrators as well as students and survivors and campus police and Title IX coordinators and the health services and local law enforcement and prosecutors - we could draft and pass a strong and unique bill. It says that colleges and universities, no matter where they are in the state, no matter if they're public or private, two-year or four-year, they must have a comprehensive policy about how to prevent and then respond to sexual assault or any other type of physical violence that happens, like stalking, and they must educate people on it. They must make sure that people can report and that they can report anonymously and confidentially and electronically, and the school will respond to them if they report within 12 hours and let them know about the accommodations that might be available to them. The school will also make sure they have a confidential advisor so that somebody can help figure out what to do next because I learned from talking to survivors, sometimes you can't even get out of bed in the morning because things are so bad. There must be an adjudication process that is fair, and that people responding to the situation are trained, and that you're notified who is going to be part of that group in case there is a conflict., Have you ever seen the Hunting Ground? 

Q:                    No.

AG:                 It's a horrible movie, you don't want to watch it, but you should. You find these circumstances at universities and colleges where there would be an adjudicatory process that involved the athletic department. And of course, the guy who had been the alleged perpetrator was a member of the football team and shouldn't be that way.  It's the people who are most impacted, who end up in my mind being the most credible and useful people to talk to. As an elected official, your real job is to simply represent people. It's not that I'm supposed to have the answer or the solution to every problem that's out there. It's that people are supposed to bring you their experiences and their problems and then you end up working with them and other experts and other people who are interested to figure out how we change things, how we change policy, how we put in place procedures, allocate resources that will address the issue or the concern or the problem that people have. 

Q:                    Thank you. Before we conclude, is there anything else you think I should know about criminal justice reform?

AG:                 This is what I think you need to know: Criminal justice reform sounds like one thing, but it is so many things. It's reforming the bail system, it's reforming sentencing laws, it's reforming police departments and how they interact with civilians in their communities. One of the things that we worked on over the years is what I refer to as debtors’ prison, reforming fees that people can be thrown into jail for, like municipal fees. There is a lot of work that goes on around juvenile justice reform and victims' rights. Criminal justice reform is a lot of things, and it can mean something different to a lot of people.  But there are so many different issues depending on what interests you or what you think needs to be addressed first and foremost. 

Q:                    Thank you.

AG:                 You're welcome.