COOK TAKES AIM AT DRUG CASELOAD

Judges Shuffled To Cut Backlog, Jail Crowding

The presiding judge of Cook County Criminal Court disclosed Wednesday he
plans to shuffle responsibilities of several judges by Sept. 30 to try to
speed up court cases and relieve overcrowding at Cook County Jail.

Judge Paul P. Biebel Jr. said he won't close two night narcotics courts as
he once planned and intends to create a third drug court-- this one for the
day shift--by moving a preliminary hearing court from the Criminal Courts
Building.

He also plans to assign only narcotics cases to four judges filling
vacancies in the courthouse at 26th Street and California Avenue, though it
will take months for them to dispose of non-drug cases they inherit from
predecessors.

That means seven judges will be devoted full time to narcotics cases, which
make up more than two-thirds of the burgeoning caseload at the courthouse,
according to Biebel.

Biebel said he is shifting more non-violent felony cases from the Criminal
Courts Building to courthouses in Skokie and Bridgeview.

With that move, he hopes to ease the load for judges at the West Side
courthouse so they can more quickly deal with their remaining cases.

Biebel disclosed the changes at a hearing in the chambers of U.S. District
Senior Judge George Marovich, who is overseeing litigation stemming from
the overcrowding at County Jail.

Sheriff Michael Sheahan raised concerns this year about a slow judicial
system after a prison watchdog group, the court-appointed monitor in the
lawsuit, determined the average stay for inmates in County Jail exceeded
six months, about double the length of a few years earlier.

Sheahan threatened to place inmates in tents this summer if the jail
population rose to 12,000.

But that idea has been shelved, said James Ryan, Sheahan's director of
operations.

Figures released Wednesday by the court monitor, the John Howard
Association, show that for the first 13 days of the month, the jail's
population averaged almost 10,830, down a few hundred from earlier in the year.

That still leaves about 1,200 inmates sleeping on the floor.

"I think everybody realizes it is a big problem," said Marovich, who is
holding quarterly meetings with county and state officials to figure out
ways to relieve the overcrowding. "We've made a lot of progress, but there
is a lot of work to be done."

The major challenge confronting the courts and jail continues to be the
rising number of defendants charged with drug offenses.

"We're going to run 107,000 [people] through County Jail this year, a
massive undertaking," Biebel said at the court hearing. "It's just
overwhelming."

Among the reasons for overcrowding is a sharp rise in the number of female
inmates and inmates with psychiatric problems. Up to 1,000 women are
incarcerated in the jail, while 1,200 to 1,500 inmates have psychiatric
problems, according to Charles Fasano, director of the prisons and jails
program for the John Howard Association.

"The County Jail has become the largest psychiatric facility in the state,
bigger than any state prison, bigger than Cook County Hospital," Fasano said.