County prez backs diverse judge slate

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Updated: November 25, 2011 8:06AM

She ordered a bowl of vanilla ice cream swimming in chocolate sauce. But she has put the county on a serious diet.

Since taking charge last December, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle has slashed budgets, reduced taxes and swept out the corrupt dead weight.

We met last week for an after­noon chat at Petros, the retro Greek diner and preferred Preckwinkle pit stop across from the County Building.

As the spoon clattered in her empty glass bowl, Preckwinkle cut to the chase. She wanted to talk up her 2011 judicial candidate slate. As the county’s top elected official, Preckwinkle gets a big word-up on Democratic Party slating. She is investing her hefty political capital to fix an inequitable system.

“Half of our [10-candidate] slate is black and brown and LGBT, which is pretty good,” she said, with her abrupt Preckwinklian chuckle. Three of the five appellate court candidates are people of color.

The Hyde Park progressive credits help from two once-unlikely allies: Joseph Berrios and Ed Burke. Berrios is the very regular Cook County Democratic Party chairman. Burke, the Chicago City Council powerhouse, chairs the party’s judicial slating committee. No judicial aspirant gets anywhere in Cook County without a tip of Burke’s hat — one of his snazzy skimmers — and party slating is tantamount to a win.

My, my. One of Mayor Harold Washington’s bitterest enemies gets on the diversity bus with a black female county board chief and a Latino Democratic party boss. It’s Kumbaya time.

Preckwinkle knows the criminal justice system is stacked against minority defendants. “I believe that judges do their best to be fair,” she said, but “judges who come out of communities that are most heavily impacted by disproportionate contact with the criminal justice system are more likely to treat defendants who come before them in a compassionate way.”

She recently sat in on the county bond court, which decides if the accused gets bail or jail.

“All of the defendants are black and brown,” she said. Judges “decide people’s fate like ‘this,’ ” she added, snapping her fingers. “In seconds.”

Then she snapped off some stats. In Cook County, blacks are eight times more likely to go to jail for low-level drug offenses than other groups; 83 percent of offenders enter Cook County Jail with illicit drugs in their systems. Only 15 percent get drug counseling or other help. It costs $143 a day to house about 9,100 inmates, compared with $67 for probation with electronic monitoring.

Preckwinkle is working with court officials to reduce the jail population through cost-saving strategies such as electronic monitoring and prevention services for nonviolent offenders.

Her judicial moves risk charges of bossism and political correctness. If her slate wins, it will make history and help ameliorate an inequitable system.