And now from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, the Act Files, with your host, David Axelrod.

If you don't live in Chicago or the Chicago area, you may not have heard of Tom Dart, the sheriff of Cook County.

But if you're a student of criminal justice reform in this country, you probably have.

Tom, who came out of a traditional Chicago political background, became sheriff of Cook County and very quickly realized what he was dealing with

in running the largest jail in America. And the kind of people who get caught up in the criminal justice system who shouldn't be there and shouldn't be sitting in a jail, the mentally ill, the poor guilty of shoplifting and other minor crimes who end up spending months, sometimes years in incarceration.

And he has implemented some incredible reforms. I sat down with him the other day and talked about the state of our criminal justice system and what we can do about it.

So Tom Dart, you are sheriff of Cook County. You've become a major voice nationally on the issue of criminal justice reform.

But I want to, before we talk about all of those issues, I want to talk about your career path because it's quite tortured.

Yeah, well, it has, it's had it zigzins, eggs, but the thing is that you started off in a very traditional kind of way in Chicago politics.

You come from a family that sort of was involved in Chicago politics and you you started off on the route that a lot of Chicago politicians take tell me a little bit about where you come from and and how you got to where you are today because it's it's a, as you say, not a straight line.

No, there was nothing straight about it. And it's interesting because my father was involved on the periphery of politics. He worked for the first mayor daily as first assistant corporation counsel. So we had government in our DNA, I guess, but my father was obsessed with the notion that I don't, shouldn't get involved.

He thought I was too honest and he wanted me to make money because he never had the opportunity to make money. So he was involved in the periphery of Chicago politics and thought you were too honest to be part of it.

Oh, yeah, he said time and you'll never survive. And so he did everything he could to keep me out of politics. And I think when I ran the first time, it was his dream come true because I was running against I think it was an 11 or 12 year incumbent African American state legislator in a district like the United States.

I was running a head to head in a district that was 80 some percent African American. I was running head to head. So I think it was his dream, the sense that I was going to get out of my system. I'd run. I'd lose.

Why did you want to?

I always felt very young age that I want to be engaged in making change and making a difference. I mean, sounds naive and it sounds simplistic, but it really was that. I didn't have a precise notion of how I want to do it.

I often thought that government would be my best vehicle to make change in our communities. And so it's always what I want to do. And even though my dad who I loved horribly was always pushing me to go more into the law, because I'm a lawyer to go on the business of law.

It never interests me at all. And so when I left the law school, I went directly to the States Attorney's office because that was something that intrigued me. And I thought it could help victims of crimes and like and I did and I enjoyed it, but it was very limiting.

And so when the legislative seat was somewhat available, I decided that was going to be my attempt to move to another level.

And you got to the legislature, Illinois legislature is an interesting place, tightly managed.

Yeah, and it's interesting because it goes through cycles. And I do think it's almost a recurring theme that everyone always looks back on the generation or the sessions before saying those were the good old days.

But when I first started in the early 90s, it was a different place where individual legislators had a ability to introduce hundreds, which I did hundreds of bills. You can amend anybody's bill at any time.

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