S1E6: Will Tanzman on ending cash bail in Illinois, how Chicago organizers built a statewide coalition & spent two years defending a legislative win

You’ll hear about how this campaign grew out of a national conversation sparked by publication of The New Jim Crow (7:59), the initial local campaign targeting a Chicago prosecutor (11:12) which then got a boost from uprisings against the murder of LaQuan McDonald (12:26), shifting to targeting a local judge (20:26), and then building a statewide coalition to take on the State Supreme Court  (24:06), how they handled the growing pains within the coalition that came along with that (32:51), how they channeled energy from the 2020 uprisings to win a historic vote (35:53), and then fought back against a targeted misinformation campaign in 2022 (43:16). 

Will Tanzman is executive director of The People’s Lobby, where he’s been an organizer since 2008. During his time there The People’s Lobby’s has successfully raised the minimum wage in a number of Cook County suburbs from $8.25 to $13 and led a campaign of mass actions and civil disobedience that played a role in the closure of $125 million in corporate tax loopholes in Illinois. Will grew up in Chicago and began organizing as a high school student in the Chicago Public Schools, where he started an organization of students across the state working for a more just education system, successfully changing citywide standardized testing policies and practices.

Check out a writeup on this campaign at our website and at The Forge.

Transcript

Andrew Willis Garcés: In this episode, we’ll hear about how just two weeks ago, Illinois became the first state to end money bail, or wealth-based incarceration. Wait, no, scratch that. Just as we did with our last episode, on the campaign to cancel student debt, we’ve had to change this intro several times based on late-breaking news. As of today, January 7th, 2023, the Illinois Supreme Court is going to review the constitutionality of ending cash bail, one more time, now two years since the law itself was passed by the state legislature. 

And that’s one of the most compelling parts of this story, I think: the coalition behind that win, which is called the SAFE-T Act, has now spent more time defending it, before it even gets implemented in courtrooms across the state, than they did trying to line up the votes they needed to get it across the finish line. 

You’ll hear the origin story to this campaign, when grassroots organizers zeroed in on the issue of money bail after consulting their members, much as Southerners on New Ground did back in episode four, and how they went through several different phases in which they tried to pin down a target they believed could have the most impact on limiting money bail. 

You’ll also hear about how they accomplished one of the most difficult campaign pivots: moving from an urban, city-focused coalition to a statewide campaign, and how they dealt with the challenges that emerged when they needed to engage rural state house representatives and future coalition members that weren’t shaped by Chicago’s progressive politics. 

And finally, you’ll hear about the last two years, and the right-wing misinformation campaign they had to overcome. 

Just a note, because this interview was recorded back in October, before the midterm election, we didn’t get into one of the most interesting aspects of this campaign, given that New York also passed a law limiting money bail, which is being partly blamed for the losses of so many New York Democratic congressmen. How did Illinois organizers successfully defend almost every contested race where cash bail was used as a campaign issue? We may have to record a part two. 

Will Tanzman is executive director of The People’s Lobby, where he’s been an organizer since 2008. During his time there The People’s Lobby’s has successfully raised the minimum wage in a number of Cook County suburbs from $8.25 to $13 and led a campaign of mass actions and civil disobedience that played a role in the closure of $125 million in corporate tax loopholes in Illinois. Will grew up in Chicago and began organizing as a high school student in the Chicago Public Schools, where he started an organization of students across the state working for a more just education system, successfully changing citywide standardized testing policies and practices.

Andrew Willis Garcés: Will Tanzman, thanks so much for being here with us on the Craft of Campaigns podcast. 

Will Tanzman: Thanks for having me.

AWG: Yeah. And you're here to tell us about this campaign in Illinois that you were, are, have been part of, multi-year campaign. And just to kick us off, can you give us – if this were a movie, what's the trailer for this campaign?

WT: Yeah. So, over more than seven years of organizing, thousands of people and dozens of organizations across the state successfully fought to pass legislation, making Illinois the first state to end money bail entirely and passed one of the strictest limitations on pretrial incarceration in the country.

AWG: Awesome, I can't wait to hear about it. And so you've been – so seven years. So seven years is a long time. So tell us about who you are and the organization you're with to help us set the stage for, how are you part of this story? 

WT: Yeah. So I serve as Executive Director of the People's Lobby which is an organization of people across the Chicago region who fight for racial, economic, and environmental justice and work to elect people who share those values and will fight together with us.

And I've been organizing since the late 90s, when I was a high school student in the Chicago Public Schools fighting for education justice. And have been with the People's Lobby for a little bit more than 10 years now. And was one of the founding team in the coalition to end money bond some years back.

AWG: Awesome. And we're gonna hear about the Cook County Coalition to End Money Bond, and then how it went statewide and – take us before that, before this movie starts basically. Before the first phase of this campaign, what were the conditions like around bail and how was the conversation around this? Can you help us, like right before you guys kicked off, what was going on on this issue? 

WT: Yeah, so Cook County Jail was one of the worst places in the United States. It was and continues to be in many respects, a place where thousands of people are in cages, denied liberty, subject to really inhumane conditions while theoretically presumed innocent.

Like people are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. And yet, what a lot of people don't realize – and I didn't realize until we started fighting on this, that most people who are in jail have not yet been convicted of a crime. And are literally waiting for trial for months or even years, mostly because they're too poor to afford bail. Incredibly disproportionately Black people, especially in Cook County. In some other places it's Black and brown people specifically, but in Cook County, it's really specifically Black people who are most intensely, disproportionately represented in the jail.

And people who are locked up before trial are much more likely to plead guilty. People are sitting in jail for months or years, and the state's attorney walks in and says, “You could walk out tomorrow on time served, but you gotta plead guilty”. So then in that situation, someone doesn't even get their day in court. They're just pleading guilty because they were put in a cage while waiting for trial. People who are locked up pretrial don't have the same kind of resources to fight their cases. People lose homes, families, jobs, in as little as, you know, one to three days of pretrial incarceration can really devastate people's lives.  It's a really awful situation.  

And for the People's Lobby,  we started talking about this ‘cause we were organizing with Black churches where people were kind of impacted by the broader criminal legal system and mass incarceration. That impact had been happening for decades, but the public conversation about it was changing in the wake of Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow and the broader public conversation about mass incarceration.  Folks were starting to talk about how some of the members or even clergy in our churches had been impacted, but more of them had kids or grandkids or other friends, family, people in their communities who were negatively impacted by the criminal legal system, were dealing with jail or prison or criminal records. 

And as we were just, you know, doing listening campaigns, one-on-ones, et cetera, people started to bring up that not only are people, especially Black people locked up for all sorts of reasons, but even are locked up just for being arrested and not even convicted of a crime because they're too poor to afford bail.  Those stories started coming out as we were doing kind of listening campaigns, listening conversations. We realized our members and leaders really wanted to work on this issue. That's how we got into it. . 

AWG: And what year was that, the listening campaigns and everything? 

WT: Roughly 2014, 2015.

AWG: Okay, yeah. So, and I think that's where the first phase of the campaign takes off. And I'm really interested, especially 'cause the conditions you just described, that is – I live in Greensboro. The Gilford county jail that is who is in the jail currently. Mostly people who can't pay for even a small amount of bail. They can't afford bond. There is a for-profit bill bond system in North Carolina, unlike in Illinois. And so I'm really curious about how you all got to a different place. 

So in 2014, as I understand it, there was a huge tragedy. There was state violence inflicted on people in Chicago. There was a big reaction from grassroots organizations and just people generally. And that kind of led you all into the first phase of your fight. Can you take us to 2014 and what got all this underway besides the listening project that you described. 

WT: Yeah. So as we were engaging in this listening campaign and then kind of collective research project with our members and leaders and ally organizations to find out more about,  “What's at the root of these issues? Who are the decision makers? Who could be doing something different? What really is the definition of the problem?”.

We did court watching. We did a bunch of research meetings with folks in other organizations, with criminal defense attorneys. And we realized that these bail hearings are often as little as one or two minutes long. Someone gets arrested and then they walk into a bond hearing.

And no evidence is presented. The prosecutor says, “This person is accused of X, Y, and Z”. And the defense attorney says one sentence about the person having a job or a family. And then the judge says, “Okay, bail set at $50,000.” And that's it. Person can't come up with bail, they’re sitting in jail ‘til trial.

And we discovered it through this collective research process, that Cook County had a state's attorney, Anita Alvarez, who was notoriously tough on crime and very locally committed to defending and continuing the racist practices of the Cook County criminal legal system. Including, but not limited to, using money bail to keep people locked up while waiting for trial. And she was up for election in 2016. And was being challenged by a progressive Black woman named Kim Foxx, who had a history of being an advocate for criminal legal reform and was very much starting to run on a reform platform.

So movement organizations like Southsiders Organized for Unity and Liberation and the People's Lobby and Assata’s Daughters organized protests of Anita Alvarez. The People's Lobby dialed and door knocked 300,000 voters to talk about electing Kim Foxx. And then Kim Foxx was very much helped by the movement at her back to really lean into her public and bold advocacy for ending money bail as part of her campaign.

This campaign was already in motion when the video came out. The city was forced to release the video of the murder of Laquan McDonald by Chicago police. And Anita Alvarez had helped cover this up for months in order to help Rahm Emanuel get reelected. So this then gave some additional tailwind and helped propel Kim Foxx to victory and the Foxx victory very much happened as a mandate for criminal legal system reform. But it wasn't automatic that that would translate into bail reform. But because these movement organizations had both encouraged Kim Foxx to name bail reform as one of her priorities, and then we very vocally lifted up bail reform as part of what this election was about – then when she won that helped us get tailwind for bail reform as a priority. 

And at the same time, kind of a separate thread here, is that the Chicago Community Bond Fund came out of the same Black Lives Matter movement moment, as an organization that started to pay bond for people arrested at protests, but also incorporated ending money bail entirely into their mission statement. And they then started working to convene other organizations into the coalition that became Coalition to End Money Bond. So People’s Lobby, my organization, was introduced to the Bond Fund and the Bail Coalition and became one of the first set of organizations in that coalition.

And from the beginning this work was really rooted in the leadership and stories of people impacted by bail and pretrial incarceration. A lot of this was the Bond Fund. They paid bail for people incarcerated before trial and invited them to raise their voices to change this larger system. But other coalitions as well, like the People’s Lobby and SOUL and others, Trinity United Church of Christ, engaged people who'd been locked up pre-trial and we pushed the media to broadcast people's stories. We amplified them through social media. We pushed legislators and court system stakeholders to really respond and grapple with the impact of pretrial incarceration on people's lives.

We started to learn from the longer term abolitionists that the problem wasn't just the use of money to lock people up. You could end the use of money bail entirely and still lock up just as many people by just having judges deny bail entirely and order pretrial incarceration. So we eventually came to the position that the goal wasn't just ending money bail, but also dramatically reducing pretrial incarceration. And to do that, we had to make the standards for when someone could be locked up before trial as narrow as possible. 

So coalition groups organized teach-ins, protests, meetings with elected officials and constituents and community leaders. Even some actions involving civil disobedience. We partnered with a law firm that was suing the county on the grounds that locking people up just cause they couldn't afford bail was unconstitutional.

And ultimately this set of activities in this first phase pushed the Cheif Judge of Cook County to announce a new bail policy called General Order 18.8A, which prohibited judges from issuing bail amounts higher than defendants could afford to pay. We then had to organize a bunch of actions to push for implementation and enforcement of this. There were judges who were ignoring the order and still issuing unaffordable bail. And at one point we shut down the Cook County Central Court Building for hours in an act of civil disobedience.  The two times we got meetings with the Cheif Judge, both involved people engaging in civil disobedience. 

But all told, this phase led to a reduction in the number of people locked up in the county jail on an average day from about 7,500 before the general order to under 6,000 after. Which means that tens of thousands of people avoided incarceration over the course of a several year period.  And this marked the end of the first phase of the campaign. 

AWG: That's awesome. And I wanna slow it down and come back to a little bit of this, because listening to you, I could easily make up the story that you knew exactly who the target was, what the lever of power was, how you were gonna reduce the incarceration rate, you know from the jump.

And so I'm curious about a couple of things in that story. So one is, so Kim Foxx gets elected. You guys had already started working on this issue really. And then Laquan McDonald is murdered. More people are brought into the movement. This was already a demand that people attacking the criminal legal system and it's different manifestations were already making.

And Kim Foxx gets elected, and then some amount of time later, you start this coalition, the Cook County campaign to end money bond. Which was both the campaign and the coalition, the home for the campaign. And the Chicago Bond Fund was starting to bail people out also, as both a tactic, as a strategy, as a way of visiblizing, what was wrong.

Eventually, it sounds like the goal was – let's get this Cheif Judge Evans, Cook County's Cheif Judge, to adopt a rule and to have rule making and to actually impact the decisions that other judges were making, that he was making on a day to day basis.

But at the time, when Kim Foxx got elected and you started this coalition, did you all know that that's where you were headed, or that that's what needed to happen in order to reduce the number of people sitting in jail?

WT: No, that's a really good question. We absolutely did not know that that was what needed to happen.

Our initial instinct was, there were some administrative decisions that the state's attorney could make that would change the way bond worked. That they could change how they walked into court and either did or didn't request money bond, or encourage judges to issue money bond.  State legislation was an attack that we tried several times unsuccessfully before eventually we did it successfully in 2021. We first moved a state legislator to commit to working with us to pass state legislation in 2016. And it initially didn't really go anywhere.

And I would say, we thought that Chief Judge Evans was one of the players who could make it right or could make it different. Speaking for myself, I didn't think that he was going to move as a result of pressure directly. I thought that we were organizing protests of him in order to kind of draw attention to the issue and more indirectly push the legislature to act. And so when he acted instead and before the legislature, I was quite surprised.  Different coalition organizers were different levels of surprise 'cause people had different instinct on this question. 

In hindsight,  we can tell the story as if we knew all of the dominoes that were gonna move. At the time it was – each thing we tried, we had a strategy behind it and the way that it played out wasn't always exactly how we had predicted. 

AWG: I wanna back up for a second. Because you mentioned that you eventually got the Chief Judge to pass this general order that ended up really changing things. It was super impactful. And you said earlier that you all weren't sure that that was gonna be the right move, and you tried state legislation.

What did you use to decide that you could target him? That he could be moved. That he would influence other judges also. You were making different kinds of bets. On what would be the lever of power that would get people out. And so how did you figure this out and how did you figure out you needed to turn up on him? Can you take us there? 

WT: Yeah. So the Chief Judge was one of the key stakeholders in the criminal justice system  who had real decision making power. The Chief Judge appoints the bond court judges and sets some policy. Once we had helped get Anita Alvarez out and replaced with a progressive state's attorney who was pro bail reform, Evans was the key local Cook County decision maker who was not doing the right thing at the time.

I would say we did not think that we were going to move him to make a significantly different decision. As much as anything, we had identified him as a target based on research meetings with other system stakeholders. And he'd not been willing to meet with us. And, you know, judges are doing the wrong thing and he's a judge, so he clearly has power there. But as much as anything else, we thought that essentially using him as an enemy would help us highlight the issue and the fact that wrong things were being done, and allow us to highlight the issue in a way that would then push our state legislators to do more on this.

And as it turned out we were doing direct actions on him at a moment when the state's attorney's election had changed the politics around this, and had given tailwind to conversations that other Cook County systems stakeholders had been having and had been pushing the Chief Judge on, at the same time that the progressive law firm was engaging in impact litigation with people who'd been bonded out by the Chicago Community Bond Fund. And in partnership with the coalition had launched impact litigation. And through all of this confluence of factors, Chief Judge Evans really decided to do the right thing and issued this general order that led to thousands of fewer people getting locked up.

But it was really – as much as anything, that we were trying some different things, all in the context of a kind of larger power analysis. We ultimately weren't sure which levers of power we're gonna be able to be moved in a successful way.

AWG: So in some ways you're saying, “We had a sense that he could be helpful. We didn't know how far we could really push him”. So I hear what you're saying is, he in some ways was just responding to the political environment that you all created. You got Kim Foxx elected in 2016. Also the Chicago Bond Fund came out of that sort of movement moment. And other bail funds too around the state.

And then it's 2017. And also the other thing that's happening, you said impact litigation. There's a civil rights lawsuit that Judge Evans is also responding to, and maybe trying to get around or undermine. But eventually he does adopt this order that reduces bail by 50%. And then I think you all actually have to do a bunch of implementation work with court-watching and other things.

 Take us through this next part. 

WT: Yeah. So at this point, we spent a little bit of time court watching, doing some direct actions, calling on judges to enforce this affordable bail order. And at a certain point we kind of decided that we had reached the limit of what we could accomplish through Cook County judicial actionm and that we needed to change either law or policy at the state level.

There was a move by the Illinois Supreme Court to explore the concept of adopting statewide, a similar affordable bail order. For a while we saw that as our best path forward. So we created a statewide network, the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice. We organized in a bunch of different places. And had a kind of initial statewide convening in 2019 with 150 people from a dozen counties. And pushed, originally the Illinois Supreme Court, to change pretrial policy at the state level.

And eventually, we spent about a year pushing the Illinois Supreme Court as they're considering pretrial reform. But they decided to punt to the state legislature, at which point we shifted our focus to that arena. Our broader power analysis of the state was that we could get a majority of legislative vote if we could move beyond the traditional progressive base in the city of Chicago, which included some intering suburbs.

We kind of figured we needed to add some swing areas in the further out suburbs that were up for grabs between Democrats and Republicans. Places like DuPage County, that were  increasingly multiracial and economically diverse suburbs. As well as some key smaller cities and towns like Rockford, Bloomington, Champagne, Peoria,  East St. Louis. Those are the places that we were reaching out to and talking to the bail funds that had started in those places. Finding faith-based organizations, finding statewide organizations that had chapters in some of these places. And really organizing activities that allowed previously isolated groups of people to act collectively and show legislators and the media that bail wasn't just a Cook County problem.

AWG: And this is 2017 to 2019 thereabouts. There are more bail funds starting around the state, but – if there's not a bail fund in my county, how are you organizing people in these swing counties, like you're saying, to make this a real visible issue and make the legislators feel like there's a crisis on their hands that they have to address?

WT: Yeah, so it kind of ran the gamut from – teach-ins, a lot of teach-ins. Folks from the Chicago Community Bond Fund did road trips all over the state to find the people who were concerned about this stuff for whatever reason. The ACLU joined at this point. Groups like the People's Lobby expanded some of our organizing outside of Cook and into DuPage. And we found some local Bernie folks who after the Bernie campaign were looking for a political home. We’d do teach-ins. We’d do meetings with legislators. We would do town hall meetings. 

We did turn out to Supreme Court hearings for a whole year, as we were pushing the Illinois Supreme Court. We're encouraging folks to just show up at public hearings convened by the Illinois Supreme Court to share their stories and call on the Supreme Court to change the way they did this. But then we shifted from asking the Supreme Court to shift this, to asking legislators to co-sponsor the Pretrial Fairness Act.

So we got legislation introduced and then we're asking constituents to meet with their legislators or to write op-eds or letters to the editor about how their legislators should support bail reform in the Pretrial Fairness Act. So then we spent a couple of years really pushing on the state legislative side, building the co-sponsor list, doing public hearings, talking to the governor's office, talking to other court system stakeholders 

AWG: By talking to them you mean trying to get the democratic governor to support the bill? Or what was the goal there? 

WT: In 2019, after the Supreme Court kind of punted to the legislature and we realized we needed to really focus more on change through legislation. So our policy side folks, in conversation  with the impacted people and organizers, drafted legislation that created a complete overhaul of the way courts would determine pretrial release or incarceration, in order to remove money from the equation and significantly reduce the broader set of conditions under which pretrial incarceration would be an option.

Then we did a bunch of lobby meetings with legislators, public rallies. Our policy and lobbying folks talked to the Governor's office and the Lieutenant Governor's office. And the Lieutenant Governor had been a real criminal justice advocate. Juliana Stratton was a legit respected criminal justice advocate. And spent that whole year building support within the legislature.

AWG: And was that just vote counting in the sense of, “We're just trying to get a majority, or we're trying to get key committee chairs”. Was that basically the goal and you feel like if we got to a certain vote count, we're gonna get this passed and it's gonna end money bond?

WT: No, it was both. When our first sponsor moved into a position within the administration in the house, the person that we asked to be our next sponsor was intentionally the chair of the House Criminal Law Committee, Justin Slaughter. We were working to build support within key committees and also working to build support within key caucuses. So the Progressive Caucus, the Black Caucus, and our folks within the legislature that were then kind of working to build support within party leadership.

AWG: And did you have a real overt opposition force at this point trying to convince the same people that you were lobbying to not back the bill? 

WT: Honestly, I think our opposition underestimated us. I think that law enforcement did not believe that there was a really serious chance of this scale of transformative change until Governor Pritzker announced in the beginning of 2020 that ending money bail was his top legislative priority for that year. At that point then, law enforcement started pushing back hard.  The specific players that pushed back on this were the State's Attorney's Association was one of the key ones and now has come back as one of the key players pushing for rollbacks. 

And I can't remember what the other specific lobbying groups were. Law enforcement generally, but that manifested as a certain set of state’s attorneys that were very vocal, a certain set of sheriffs that were very vocal. And actually, some county clerks were concerned about the court funding and some of the administrative elements.

AWG: So you didn't really start to get real deal active opposition until early 2020. But just backing up though, to build the kind of coalition where the governor says, “This is my top legislative priority” after several years of work, that's serious.

And you talked about, “Okay, well we had to go to the suburbs”, which first of all is pretty rare for a group that's based in one urban county that's usually got its hands full. But to go out and be like, we have to collect all the suburbs too. But also I'm curious about what this did in terms of your organizing, 'cause again, I can make up the story hearing you talk that was like, “Well we just kind of kept building the coalition” and you guys are running a real inside game operation. You've done civil obedience, came out of Chicago, come out of movement moments where people were furious and demanding, real structural change. But you can't bring that same energy necessarily to the suburbs, depending on the moment. So you have people who are willing to risk arrest in the streets, to get in the elected officials' faces. You have inside game lobbyists, you're getting theACLU on board now. 

How did that change your organizing and what can you tell us about the sort of texture of that as you all start to both gather steam, but also need to gather people who are not abolitionists? One of the also core differences it sounds like, is you started out as a group of abolitionists really anchoring this campaign and having to recruit other organizations that are not, and other people who are not.

WT: Yeah, this definitely turned out to be one of our kind of key secret sauces. This was different from other coalitions I've been part of. I've been part of some great coalitions on different issues where you had to be able to bring a busload of people to a protest or a lobby day in order to be part of the coalition. I'm not opposed to that orientation. I think that that is a reasonable strategic position. 

But part of what ended up being our secret sauce was we had, you know, base building groups like the People's Lobby and SOUL that brought real people power and were able to make the shift to organizing and grassroots organizing in the suburbs. We had legal policy groups like Chicago, Apple City, the Illinois Justice Project that were aligned ideologically, and kind of brought that level of policy expertise and stakeholder relationships.

And so when we're talking to the governor's office and the court system stakeholders. As public support on the outside is building for ending money bail, and we're getting more and more media coverage for impacted people's stories and so on, these policy folks and lobbyists are talking to folks at various levels of government about what it would actually look like to end money bail. And so then when the governor decides, “Hey, this actually is a thing that makes sense, let's do this”, our proposal was positioned as the proposal that had credibility both among the grassroots and among the policy experts to be the way that one could end money bail effectively.

And it really required a lot of trust building between these folks: the people that wanted to shut shit down in the streets, and the folks who were down to lobby their legislators in the suburbs, and the folks who were the policy experts. And some of it was just a lot of time spent in rooms together, hashing stuff out and building relationship and being aligned together to build those relationships so that we could recognize that not everybody had to use abolitionist language but that the bill that we were pushing had an abolitionist orientation. And so there was a lot of time spent hashing out, well, if we make this change in order to bring in the domestic violence advocates and people that were organizing and advocating policies that would benefit survivors of sexual violence..what would that mean for us and how could different parts of the coalition talk about this work that we were doing in ways that were true to slightly different political orientations but still pulling in the same direction? 

So it was a lot of conversations, a lot of endless meetings. But stuff that was ultimately crucial to kind of building that alignment. 

AWG: Sure. So it's early 2020. Governor Pritzker says, “This is my top priority”. Sheriffs, police,  state's attorneys, they're all like, “Wait a second, we gotta come out against this”. The pandemic happens and then what happens?

WT: When the governor said, “We're gonna do this”, but before the pandemic, there was a whole several month period of a bunch of different working groups with all sorts of different stakeholders. They start with our legislation as kind of the baseline. But the Governor's Office is clear that there's gonna be a bunch of conversations and negotiations and we're not sure exactly where we're gonna end.

So there's a bunch of conversations with these working groups and the pandemic happens and that just shuts down activity in the legislature entirely for some months. Then the uprising happens and you know, a bunch of us are in the streets, and the Black caucus in the legislature really decides that this is a moment when they are gonna be leaders. They see the demand from the community and they see the injustice and they see the moment of possibility. And so they start talking about a set of pillars for reform that includes, but is not limited to criminal justice. And they're  having a bunch of different conversations with different community organizing groups and policy folks and stakeholders of various sorts about what's gonna be in these pillars. 

Since there wasn't activity happening in Springfield, we upped our remote work. We engaged in pretty intense lobbying and advocacy. We did digital lobby days on Zoom. We did faith leaders and impacted people met with legislators remotely.  We did large scale digital organizing. I think we texted like 300,000 people and generated about 13,000 emails and calls from constituents to legislators. We're escalating our kind of broad reach of push using the tailwind of the uprising.

So then as they're nearing the moment of introducing and passing this package of criminal justice reform, legislators were hearing more about our bill than any other part of the package that the Black caucus was pushing. And then equally necessary, we had a true champion in the Black caucus in Senator Robert Peters, who had been one of the coalition organizers and really worked as an organizer inside the legislature to make all of this happen.

AWG: Just to slow pause that and make sure people understand. He worked for the People's Lobby, your organization, as Political Director, was appointed to the Senate and then was elected, and then became an inside game champion.That's right?

WT: Exactly. And he was our – he was the bill sponsor in the Senate, starting in 2019 when he served out the second half of a term that had been Kwame Raul's seat before Kwame Raul got elected to the Attorney General seat. 

AWG: And all of this mobilization you're talking about is like fall 2020 into January 2021, when the Black caucus submits the package of reforms?

WT: Exactly, exactly. We had been having hearings all throughout this time in order to kind of sow the seeds and lay the groundwork. Subject matter hearings about content of the Pretrial Fairness Act. 

AWG: What was it like when y'all won that vote? 

WT: It was intense. We had a whole bunch of people on Zoom together, watching hearings into the middle of the night. Because in my role as an organizer, I wasn't one of the people who needed to be on call for legal talking points. So I was allowed to go to sleep. I remember going sleep at one point and thinking, “Man, I don't see this, I don't this happening”, and then I woke up at five in the morning cause I was just like restless and there's, you know, 300 text messages. Our bill got voted on by the Senate in the middle of the night.

There's a narrative that this stuff happened in the dead of night. And while the final passage of the Safety Act in the Senate did happen at like three in the morning or four in the morning or something, we'd been having hearings about this for months and years. And all the elements of this bill had been fairly well debated.

But then I remember in the House, it was within an hour of the adjournment of the lame duck session. They had a lame duck session that was an opportunity to move one last set of things before the previous legislature was gonna be discharged, and the new legislature would take office. And they passed it with exactly 60 votes in the House. At 11:15 or something, before 12 noon adjournment.

And we were able to make the case ultimately that the Black Caucus representing people directly impacted by this issue was pushing hard for it. And we were organized in enough suburbs and downstate kind of swing areas that those legislators were hearing from their constituents as well. And there was a moment of instability in leadership in both the Illinois Senate and House over the course of 2020, so that the legislators who supported bail reform were able to make some really smart and pragmatic deals with Democratic Party leadership that kind of leveraged some of this instability to get the bill passed.

When it passed, it felt like this moment where all of the different pieces came together in a way that there was no way we could possibly have predicted.  But felt like all the work that we had done had come together in this incredible moment. 

AWG: And after the excitement had settled, the dust had settled, Few days, few weeks in… Was the feeling within the coalition, “We've basically got this, we did it”, or was it the daunting feeling of, “Wait, we have to get this implemented now”, or “We have to court watch across the state”, or “We have to protect this victory”? What was that sense coming out of it, of what it meant and what the next steps were?

WT: As we were in the final year of the campaign leading up to passage, bail reform in New York had passed and was attacked viciously. And some pieces of it were amended in ways that made it less far reaching. We saw this all happening as we're in our final year of organizing. And then because the tailwind of the uprising allowed us to pass something that was honestly a little bit more transformative than we thought was possible, we realized that by the same token, it was gonna be even more viciously attacked. And even as it was passing, the Republicans were standing up there and saying, “Y'all are gonna see consequences for this next year, next year's election”. 

Three months before it passed a bunch of our core organizers knew in theory that we might have to do some defense. But as it was passing, we were already starting to realize that we were gonna have to do much more intense defense. And so we kept the coalition going. We didn't miss a meeting. We didn't miss a beat. We just immediately shifted into what do we need to do to defend and implement this? We had a set of strategic conversations between core coalition partners to think through the five or six elements of defense and implementation, from being part of the rule making and implementation process, to defending vulnerable legislators who voted for the bill in the next election, to much broader public education so the people knew what was in the bill, to winning the public narrative battle.

And we've been working together and fighting together for defense and implementation for the last 18 months. 

AWG: So you have Democrats in the Senate, not just Republicans, who have been taking the lead on the opposition. But now you also have Democrats in the Senate as of today also signing on to an effort to roll back the Pretrial Fairness Act. 

Can you bring us up to speed on where you all are at today after the last 18 months of trying to defend this victory, and in advance of full implementation is coming up January 1st, 2023?

WT: Yep. January 1st, 2023. Yeah, so starting right around Labor Day, the largest Trump donor in the state had donated 28 million to a PAC that since right around Labor Day has been running massive, statewide ad campaign bashing the Pretrial Fairness Act, bashing the end of money bail, using horribly racist imagery. They had a whole two page spread in this fake newspaper that got mailed to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, just showing mugshots of mostly Black and brown men who they say would be released under bail reform. They had a TV commercial that was a ring camera footage that had been doctored, that showed a white woman walking down the street and attacked by three Black men. And she screams, and it's just this like ten second scream. Apparently the scream was added to the footage. 

So in this context, some of the conservative Democrats who had never been fans of the Safety Act and had been traditionally closer to law enforcement, had been talking to the State Attorney's Association, which is mostly Republican and mostly aligned with this increasingly Trumpist Illinois Republican party. 

So we're fighting tooth and nail. And we'll be fighting tooth and nail until and beyond implementation. 

AWG: And fighting tooth and nail, can you give us a picture of what the organizations, and I’m especially curious about organizations that have a base of people who are formerly incarcerated – What that looks like day to day right now, and then what an advocacy shop is doing, what a legal shop is doing in the coalition to try to defend this victory.

WT: We're doing a ton of contacting legislators. There are folks making plans for press conferences and direct actions. We're planning bus trips to Springfield for when the next special legislative session happens right after the election.

We've got a group of folks that are doing electoral work in some of the key swing districts, so that we can show that nobody needs to lose their seat because of this vote and use that to win the argument within the Democratic caucus that this is not only good policy and really important for people, but also good politics.

And we're doing a ton of media pushback, fact checking, op-eds, letter to the editor. A whole gamut of tactics and strategies. It feels like right now the core elements are, we need to win the election. We need to win the narrative battle. And we need to put some real heat on the Democratic legislators that are trying to negotiate with racists, negotiate with explicitly racist forces, and point out that they are acting as tools of Trumpism in Illinois. 

AWG: It does feel kind of like a good place to transition to just – I want to hear a little bit more from you about what you think has been, you said the secret sauce, but also just, what is especially relevant in this time and this movement moment for us. ‘Cause the attacks that you're experiencing are happening in many other states, right? The same kind of ad, even if there's not like the same kind of victory for Republicans to try to roll back.

But also you all have accomplished a ton and – well, first of all, this is how our movements work and our campaigns win in stages and often sometimes that stage is the rollback. Or the victory gets undone all of a sudden, or after a period of time of being implemented, and then we have to get back to where we were. 

And you all, if nothing else though, have still changed the narrative, even though the narrative wins have kind of swung against you all in some ways, definitely compared to two years ago. But in 2015, you know, whenever you would say you had started, there wasn't a conversation about, can we dramatically reduce across the state who is incarcerated pretrial, and have really shifted the Overton window, what's possible and the stories people can tell or not tell. 

So it feels right also that we catch you in this moment of, well, no, it's not like we won and then that was it. And it's just progress from here. But there's a step back and there's a fight back, and hopefully there will be a step forward after this or several. 

But if you could just tell us a little bit more, you said the secret sauce was having many different organizations, was having different roles, but what do you think we should know that we might not from just reading the headline about how you all think you were able to win over time to the place that you are at now? 

WT:  I think one of the crucial dynamics was that we both had a really intentional focus on building and exercising power, and a real expansive vision of the kind of longer term change we wanted to win. And that led us to not just preach to the converted, to recognize that some of the core folks in the coalition could be abolitionists, but every conversation didn't have to be about abolition. And we could organize a set of groups that effectively acted as an alliance between left and center left, and even some segments of the center. But with the center of gravity clearly towards the left. Because the left groups were intentional about power and built something that the more center left folks wanted to be part of.

AWG: And you say they wanted to be part of it, and obviously you all got Anita Alvarez out, got Kim Foxx elected. What are other examples that we might not have heard about that are like, why would I as a center left group, or a group that doesn't build political electoral power, doesn't have a base? What else have you guys done that I'm like, “Oh, I need to show up even if they make me uncomfortable with their abolitionist talk”.

WT: Well the Chicago Community Bond Fund bonded people out and supported their leadership development, and acting as spokespeople. And our coalition broadly was the organization that lifted up directly impacted folks' stories, and developed a level of kind of policy expertise around what changes would look like that the court system stakeholders could actually engage with.

And we're constantly getting media coverage, and getting those stories covered in ways that got out to literally millions of people. So kind of the coalition broadly, and its set of member groups built sort of an unassailable, like – these are the folks that are doing bail reform.

Anybody who wanted to do bail reform, it was clear that this was the group that one had to work with. And we've built enough momentum that, as part of the kind of broader conversation about criminal justice reform was moving forward, we changed the public conversation so that bail reform was seen as one of the things that needed to change, and that we were the people to do it.

But yeah, we had rallies with hundreds of people, like public meetings with a thousand people, social media graphics that got shared pretty widely, and tweets that got retweeted and all sorts of things that had really wide reach .

AWG: I wonder about – we hear a lot about needing to… not necessarily water down the message, although sometimes that is it, but especially if you're abolitionist, to use different language. 

But I'm curious about, were there things that were hard about that or where you all felt like you had to compromise or where you said, “No, we're holding the line and not compromising. If you wanna get with the bail reform game in town, then you've just gotta hang with, we're being really explicit about who belongs in jail and who doesn't in a way that is making it sound like not a lot of people belong in jail”. Can you tell us more about that?

WT: There were definitely some growing pains as the more and less abolitionist groups were figuring out how to work together. And some of us moved! I mean, when the People's Lobby joined this campaign, we were not an abolitionist organization. And I will say we are still not an explicitly abolitionist organization. But I would say our own orientation has moved much further  in that direction, as I believe is probably the case of some other coalition organizations.

But there was a lot of conversation about, what were the lines in the legislation that we wanted to stake out. There are versions of bail reform that decrease incarceration in certain areas and increase them in other areas. And we try to be very careful about that.

One of the crucial lines that we drew was that the coalition was never going to use pro-carceral language. Even if some member groups might feel the need to do that, that we weren't gonna say, as a coalition, “We need to lock those people up”. We could be clear collectively on the people that we didn't want locked up. And again, recognize that some groups in their own individual communications might not hew to exactly the same line. In cases where people did wanna see some people locked up pretrial and, our bill was not full abolition by any stretch. The bill will significantly decrease pretrial incarceration. 

But we had a lot of Google Docs with all sorts of people writing over each other's stuff and suggesting various changes, and lots of very long conversations to kind of figure out what were talking points that people in communities impacted by both violence and incarceration wouldn't be scared by. And how can we really focus on, “The thing that keeps people safe is not incarceration, but is real resources”.  

AWG: And is there another lesson that feels especially relevant for us? 

WT: I think maybe one more thing I'll say about the kind of left center, left alliance was that the left folks had to be really serious about power building. We had to knock enough doors, we had to win enough elections, we had to get enough media coverage that the churches that wanted to see things get better and the ACLU and the other folks were attracted to that kind of pull of power. We had to be honest about that political orientation without being overly dogmatic or self-righteous about it.

I think one of the things that this campaign really illustrates is a concept I've heard in a bunch of different places of like a movement ecosystem. I think that sometimes organizers are really committed to their theory of change, which is great and folks should do what they do well. But that can shade over into an assumption that this is the one right way and others are wrong. Or that a given organization or organizer needs to do everything rather than doing a few things well and connecting to other groups that do other things well. 

So as a base building and electoral organization, it's really important that the People's Lobby doesn't act like we're gonna be an effective social service provider to directly feed people or directly provide legal defense. But it was really important to this campaign that there was an organization like the People's Lobby to do what we do, and an organization like the Chicago Community Bond Fund to do what they do brilliantly of both providing direct service and mutual aid, and leveraging that work to bring more directly impacted people into the campaign than any other organization.

And that doesn't mean a sort of liberal, everyone is okay view, that like all theories of change are equal. It means that you have to do a power analysis and look at the kinds of constituencies and organizations that you need to bring together to have the power to win, which means making strategic decisions about how to build power, but doesn't act like there's one way to move all the players who need to be moved.

And the last lesson that I draw out of this, I think is important for the movement right now is that, as I said earlier, some stuff that we didn't predict that worked and stuff that we thought was gonna work that didn't work like the Illinois Supreme Court. We both did a ton of work and built a ton of power and positioned ourselves strategically. And we also very much ended up in the right place at the right time with regard to some of the larger political trends happening in Illinois. Without some change in instability in state democratic party leadership, there were pieces of our inside game that wouldn't have been possible. Without the uprising we would've had to compromise way more.

And we tried and failed at our first best guess as to how to move state policy through the Illinois Supreme Court. So it all feels much neater and more clearly directional in hindsight. And some of that strategy was intentional. Some of it was, we tried a bunch of things that each made some strategic sense, and some worked and some didn't. And ultimately it added up to enough to position ourselves to move in the right moment. 

So I think in these moments when the kind of context around us is changing very quickly, it's incumbent on organizers and movement leaders to be strategic and to recognize that the best strategies are dependent on factors outside of our control, and the constants, the things that we can control, are constantly building power and exercising that power in the ways that seem strategic at the moment, and recognizing that we'll then need to pivot, sometimes quite quickly. And we never know precisely what's gonna work until it does.

AWG: Will Tanzman, thank you for helping us see ourselves a little better through your campaign. A lot of us who have made it through the victory, to then have to claw back, wait a second. Or the victory got clawed back away from us. Thanks for helping us learn about this campaign. Hopefully learn about the craft of campaigns a little more deeply, and wishing you all, of course, lots of luck for the next phase.

WT: Thank you so much. 

AWG: Since our conversation was recorded, coalition organizers helped defend all of their legislative champions who had been targeted by Republicans in the midterm election. But then in December the State Senate passed revisions to the Pretrial Fairness Act, which coalition organizers claimed as a win, because the vast majority of it was left untouched.… Just hours before it was to take effect, on December 31st, an appeals court judge put it on hold, and the State Supreme Court says it will review the law’s constitutionality. Assuming the new law survives that scrutiny, the coalition is gearing up for the next phase, monitoring the law’s implementation. If you’re in Illinois, you can sign up to get involved in court watching. 

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