Advocates push Illinois lawmakers to roll back harsh truth-in-sentencing laws, restore sentence credits, and reduce decades-long prison terms.
In 1998, a new law quietly multiplied the years many people would spend locked up in Illinois prisons.
“Truth-in-sentencing,” a policy passed by the Illinois General Assembly during a wave of “tough-on-crime” laws, promised to create more transparency around prison sentences.
Instead, the policy rolled back opportunities to earn sentence reductions by eliminating or sharply limiting “good conduct” credits that had long structured how prison time was served.
What is “truth-in-sentencing”?
Before truth-in-sentencing, most people in Illinois prisons received what was known as day-for-day credit: for every day served without disciplinary violations, they earned a day off their sentence. Credits could also be earned by working, volunteering or taking classes. The system was designed to incentivize participation in educational and rehabilitative programs, and safer prison environments.
“It was part of a larger shift in corrections overall, and certainly in the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC),” said Katrina Baugh, Illinois Policy Consultant for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a nonprofit that advocates for legal justice reform across the country. “It no longer became about correcting—it became about retribution.”
In an open survey measuring the quality of prison life across IDOC facilities, one anonymous respondent described truth-in-sentencing as “a de facto life sentence,” continuing: “With little hope of ever going home, this place is soul crushing.”
A de facto life sentence
Prior to truth-in-sentencing, earning credits could shorten sentences by as much as 50 percent.
Truth-in-sentencing established minimum sentence percentage “tiers”, ranging from 75 percent to 100 percent, with most sentences falling in the 85 percent tier.
With sentences lasting decades longer, incarcerated population in IDOC facilities are getting older, and the number of actual life sentences has risen. A 2025 report from Loyola Chicago’s Center for Criminal Justice notes that nearly one third of truth-in-sentenced individuals in Illinois prisons will be held beyond the average age of death due to “natural causes” in prison.
The more than four thousand Illinoisans in this category, while not sentenced to life in court, are serving “what amounts to ‘virtual life’ sentences,” the report states.
“Because we’re holding people in prison so much longer, the need for hospice care in the IDOC has increased immensely,” Baugh said. “It has been an increased cost of incarceration for elderly folks—a cost that has been immense while benefits have been non-existent.”
In recent years, Illinois advocates have demanded greater end-of-life care through legislation like the 2025 Eddie Thomas Act, which sought to bring palliative and hospice care to IDOC facilities. Still, as of Jan. 2026, IDOC still has not released reports on end-of-life care options.
The average age of death in IDOC, as of a Dec. 2025 public report, is 56 years old—23 years below the U.S. average life expectancy. A John Howard Association study of IDOC’s population projects that by the time of release, more than 42 percent of returning citizens will be over age 50.
Another anonymous survey respondent wrote, “It’s a slow death penalty, so mentality why tolerate all the [abuse] daily while knowing you’ll die in prison or that you might as well be dead before release.”
The costs of a punitive system
Federal grants incentivized states to adopt truth-in-sentencing, with promises of funding to defray the immediate costs of expanding facilities or staffing to accommodate a growing prison population.
During the first five years following Illinois’ first pushed to enact truth-in-sentencing in and closely relates laws, the state was awarded more than $124 million, a fiscal analysis reveals.
But the temporary financial benefits have been dramatically offset by the long-term costs of keeping people locked up in overcrowded facilities, Baugh told The Chicago Reporter.
“In reality, the cost has been immense and the benefits have been nonexistent,” Baugh said.
The financial cost of protracted prison sentences falls on Illinois taxpayers—a point emphasized by advocates for repealing truth-in-sentencing.
If sentence credits were re-introduced across IDOC facilities, the reduction in costs of incarceration of those currently TIS sentences would total between $2.5 billion and $5.4 billion, a Loyola Chicago report states.
Advocating for change
The greatest cost of truth-in-sentencing is human life, Baugh told TCR, as well as social costs of keeping people from returning to their loved ones.
For the more than 12 thousand people serving TIS sentences across Illinois prisons, day-for-day credit would spare more than 110 thousand years spent behind bars.
Reform advocates like Families Against Mandatory Minimums are now backing legislation that would roll back the harshest effects of truth‑in‑sentencing. One recently proposed house bill would expand sentence credits and apply them retroactively to people incarcerated under the old system, and its companion, a senate bill, would make similar changes in the Senate.
Together, these bills aim to shorten the decades‑long sentences imposed under current law and restore opportunities to earn time off for programming and good behavior—a long‑sought shift in Illinois’ approach to incarceration.