Prosecutors said 11-year-old Jayden Perkins was killed by Crosetti Brand last month as the boy tried to protect his pregnant mother from her ex-boyfriend’s knife, a mere day after Brand had been cleared by the Prisoner Review Board for release from Stateville Correctional Center. (Courtesy of Jayden Perkins Family Support Fund)
The killing of an 11-year-old Chicago boy in a stabbing attack is drawing attention to a small state board responsible for deciding when prisoners can be released on parole.
Republicans, who Tuesday introduced a package of legislation in response to Jayden Perkins’ death, said the attention is overdue and is a tragic life-and-death example of Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker and his appointees to the Prisoner Review Board being too lenient about who is allowed out of custody.
“We have very little faith in the governor, how he views the PRB, and those that he seeks to appoint,” Senate Minority Leader John Curran (R-Lemont) said. “That’s why we are seeking to actually tie the governor’s hands and raise the minimum of qualifications across the board on this critical agency.”
Prosecutors said Jayden was killed by Crosetti Brand last month as the boy tried to protect his pregnant mother from her ex-boyfriend’s knife, a mere day after Brand had been cleared by the Prisoner Review Board for release from Stateville Correctional Center.
Brand was previously released from Stateville in the fall after serving time for a 16-year home invasion sentence but was sent back to prison in February for violating his parole terms by allegedly threatening Jayden’s mom.
A three-member Prisoner Review Board panel determined that wasn’t enough to keep Brand behind bars and voted for his March 12 release; by March 13, Jayden was dead.
“The PRB voted to release Brand despite overwhelming evidence it already possessed that he was dangerous,” Curran said.
Pritzker said Republicans are politicizing the parole process, making it difficult to find anyone willing to serve on the Prisoner Review Board.
“Much of what was proposed by Senate Republicans is already standard practice at Prisoner Review Board,” Pritzker’s office said in a statement. “As always, Governor Pritzker appreciates any good faith effort to increase the Prisoner Review Board’s capability and attract qualified candidates for appointment and confirmation.”
Both GOP lawmakers and the governor are calling for board members to receive training on domestic violence.
Pritzker has not otherwise called for any specific reforms — though he has charged the board and the Illinois Department of Corrections with reviewing procedures related to domestic violence cases, and is moving to hire an executive director for the board, which could give members more time to focus on cases.
Republicans have long accused Pritzker of being soft on crime, both because of cases handled by the board and because of Democrats’ SAFE-T Act, an overhaul of the criminal justice system that last year made Illinois the first state in the nation to completely eliminate cash bail.
Pritzker cast the latest accusations from Republicans that he is mismanaging IDOC and the board as a retread, and called Perkins’ death “unbelievably tragic.”
The GOP’s package seeks to:
- codify domestic violence training for board members,
- mandate everyone on the board has a minimum of 20 years’ experience in criminal justice,
- heighten requirements for notifying victims of an inmate’s release,
- and increase penalties for people guilty of violating orders of protection.
“We have been raising red flags, we’ve been warning about the lack of qualifications of some of the governor’s appointees for years,” state Sen. Jason Plummer (R- Edwardsville) said. “Literally years. I don’t know why it’s taken a dead child for people to finally recognize some of these people are not qualified to serve on the board.”
Following Jayden’s death, LeAnn Miller, the Prisoner Review Board member who led the panel that released Brand, resigned, a move that Pritzker this week called a “proper decision on her part.”
“The Prisoner Review Board must be able to operate independently as they review enormously difficult cases, but I believe LeAnn Miller has made the correct decision in stepping down from her role,” Pritzker said in a March 25 statement. “It is clear that evidence in this case was not given the careful consideration that victims of domestic violence deserve and I am committed to ensuring additional safeguards and training are in place to prevent tragedies like this from happening again.”
Longtime Prisoner Review Board chair Donald Shelton also left his $108,300/year position.
Prisoner Review Board members (left to right) Julie Globokar, Darryldean Goff, Matthew Coates and Jeffrey Grubbs are pictured at the board’s March 28, 2024, meeting in Springfield. (Peter Hancock / Capitol News Illinois)
Republicans want any future board member to have served 20 years as a prosecutor, criminal defense attorney, judge, probation officer or public defender.
Most, though not all, Prisoner Review Board members have criminal justice experience, though not in those specific roles. Members include a former Cook County circuit court judge, an administrator with the state juvenile justice department, a former federal prosecutor and a chief of police for the city of Carbondale.
“The members of the PRB, as you know, are of both parties,” Pritzker said in response to reporters’ questions at an unrelated event on Monday. “They’re nominated and approved by the Senate. The changes that are necessary here are evident in the fact that the panel didn’t take into consideration enough the domestic violence history of this particular prisoner.”
Even before Republicans’ new push, Pritzker said the “opposite party” has politized the prisoner release process, which he said will make it harder for him to find anyone willing to serve on the board.
“The more that people politicize the position, the less likely it is that someone would want to serve in it,” Pritzker said. “We’re contemplating that we need to make nominations to those positions, but we don’t have any decisions yet.”
According to the Prisoner Review Board website, the board has 11 members — meaning there are three open seats as well as the recently vacated chair’s position.
Board members are paid $92,928 annually; the governor’s proposed budget would increase that to $101,771 next fiscal year. The chair would be paid $113,600.
The Pritzker administration, however, said it has identified a candidate it wants to serve as the board’s executive director, with a spokesperson saying, “we think it is worthwhile to have an ED who handles the day-to-day machinations of running an agency allowing the Chair to focus solely on case work.”
GOP state senators are also calling for increased transparency, such as “written public notice within 24 hours of a decision to release in cases following a final revocation hearing when an individual has violated the conditions of their mandatory supervised release” and mandated immediate notice to a victim if a person is released from custody or a sentence is commuted.
Illinois already provides for victim notification through several avenues, and anyone can sign up to learn about actions taken by the Prisoner Review Board regarding a specific inmate.
According to state data, the board held thousands of hearings last year — on clemency, parole, to set initial conditions or to modify conditions of release, and on final revocations. It’s not immediately clear how many of those hearings resulted in an inmate’s release from custody, but 400 victims were notified when that happened.
Prior to the attack, Jayden’s mother, Laterria Smith, had been seeking an order of protection against Brand.
Sen. Steve McClure (R-Springfield) said he will introduce legislation that would increase penalties for violating an order of protection — making it a class 4 felony rather than a misdemeanor for a first-time violation, and thereafter increasing violations from a class 4 to a more serious class 3 penalty.
“It would demonstrate the seriousness of the offense,” McClure said, “and I think most prosecutors would agree that a simple misdemeanor is not severe enough for someone who is violating such a serious order from the court.”
Pritzker’s office did not directly respond to that proposal.
Illinois Democrats have in recent years been intentionally reticent to enhance penalties, as part of a broader restorative justice approach.
Contact Amanda Vinicky: @AmandaVinicky | [email protected]
