Earlier this month, a man walked into a West Side grocery store, according to a police report, and tried to walk out of the shop with two concealed cans of an alcoholic beverage.
Even though the cost of the alleged theft was around $13, the 29-year-old man, who the report notes is a U.S. veteran, is facing a felony retail theft charge due to a criminal background that includes a retail theft conviction and a stint in prison for armed robbery.
“Do not go back to that Food for Less,” Cook County Judge Luciano Panici Jr. warned as he set conditions for his release from jail from a courtroom at the Leighton Criminal Court Building. “They do not want your business.”
This man’s case is only just beginning, but Cook County prison admission data suggests that if convicted, his $13 shoplifting incident is more likely to land him in prison than any other point in recent years.
In Cook County, felony case filings and prison admissions for retail theft have risen sharply since 2024, according to data reviewed by the Tribune.
The spike corresponds with a change implemented by Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke, who upon taking office in December 2024, reversed a policy mandate from her predecessor, Kim Foxx, that ordered prosecutors to limit charging retail theft as a felony to instances where the stolen goods were alleged to be $1,000 or more, or if a defendant had 10 or more prior felony convictions, unless there were extenuating circumstances.
Though retail theft makes up a small percentage of people being admitted to prisons, the rise in such cases has raised alarm in some quarters, with some questioning whether it’s a good use of resources when the root causes of such offenses are often driven by social factors like poverty, mental illness and addiction.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Burke said the office “follows the law and charges felony retail theft when the cost of the stolen goods exceeds $300, as determined by Illinois statute.”
Despite attempts to change the law, Illinois remains among the strictest in the nation for felony thresholds for theft and retail theft laws.
Retailers, though, say profit margins, particularly for small businesses, are tight, and they want to see shoplifting taken seriously.
According to the statement from the state’s attorney’s office, citing police data, Chicago Police Department reports for felony theft fell in 2025 compared with 2024.
“We believe consistent enforcement, meaningful accountability and appropriate detention for felony retail theft have helped drive these offenses down,” the statement from Burke’s office said.
Researchers, though, say studies have not shown that more punitive policies effectively reduce theft.
And critics of state law and Burke’s policy say that alternatives to prison, including job training, counseling and other services, can offer better solutions.
“When we have these dramatic, unacceptable disparities in socioeconomic conditions and opportunity, are we really using prison as the response … when there is a very clear set of solutions in front of us?” said Deanne Benos, executive director of the Women’s Justice Institute.
By the numbers
Earlier this month, a 42-year-old woman allegedly walked into a Northwest Side Target and took clothing, cosmetics and luggage, hid the merchandise in the luggage and tried to walk out the door with allegedly more than $300 in stolen goods, according to a police report.
On another day, a man was arrested and accused of stealing items from an Aldi grocery store in Uptown.
In a September case, a woman was accused of changing the SKU tag on a toaster at Macy’s in an attempt to purchase the item at a lower price.
The defendants are all among new felony retail theft criminal cases filed so far this year. And according to Cook County data, prison admissions for felony retail theft are at their highest numbers since at least 2018.
In 2024, Foxx’s final year as state’s attorney, 109 people were admitted to prison for felony retail theft. The following year, the numbers more than doubled, with 296 people admitted, according to the data.
The trend continues in 2026, with 205 people admitted to prison during the first half of the year, compared with 119 during the same time period last year.
On average, people were sentenced to about 1.6 years in prison for such felonies in 2025 and 2026, according to the data.
David Olson, co-director of Loyola University’s Center for Criminal Justice Research, said many similar cases would have been charged as misdemeanors under Foxx.
“That’s going to drive an increase in the number of felony cases that are being heard in Cook County,” Olson said. “The implication is that a conviction on a felony carries a lot more weight than a conviction on a misdemeanor, including the potential of being sentenced to prison for a felony.”
Felony retail theft case filings have also increased, with 2,910 filed in 2025 compared with 1,225 in 2024.
Such filings were under 1,000 for each year between 2018 and 2023, according to the data, dipping most significantly during the pandemic years.
For women in particular, prison admissions for retail theft increased threefold, rising from 12 in 2024 to 36 the following year.
Though women make up a much smaller portion of those that go through the criminal justice system, advocates say their needs are often different and shouldn’t be overlooked.
“With women in general … when you’re looking at pathways to prison, they’re paved by severe inequities, racial, gender-based, sexual orientation … that carry those disparities,” Benos said.
Two prosecutors, two policies
In January 2018 during an address at City Club Chicago, then-Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx delivered a mission statement of her administration to a round of applause.
“The criminal justice system should not be a financial-based enterprise and should not punish people for being poor,” Foxx told the crowd.
During her administration, she said, fewer people were going to prison for “low-level retail theft” due to her office’s stance on prosecuting retail theft as a felony, one of her first major policy moves since taking office.
Then-Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx announces a restorative justice initiative on Nov. 30, 2018, in Chicago. (José M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune)
In similar fashion, her successor, Burke, made retail theft one her first policy changes upon taking office — except she reversed Foxx’s policy, using the legal threshold of $300 set by Illinois law.
Retail theft can also be bumped up to a felony if the defendant has certain convictions as part of their background, though Foxx also sought to limit felony cases to defendants with longer felony records.
In a statement to the Tribune, Burke’s office said the Foxx policy “caused sustained damage to our communities, businesses and public safety.”
The divergent approaches underpin long-running debates in the Chicago area about how best to handle retail theft given limited resources and contrasting views about how the criminal justice system should be used for people accused of nonviolent offenses.
In fact, studies have not proven that easing retail theft laws leads to higher rates of theft.
A 2017 analysis by Pew Research Center found that states that increased their felony theft thresholds saw no impact on property crime or larceny rates.
“All lend evidence to the conclusion that what a state felony threshold is — whether or not it’s 200, 500 or 800 or 1,500 — doesn’t have any impact on property crime rates in the state,” said Jake Horowitz, senior director of safety and justice for the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Sharlyn Grace, deputy public defender for policy for the Cook County public defender’s office, said retail theft offenses are often the result of a failure of support or social services.
“It’s more expensive to put someone in (the Illinois Department of Corrections) than it is to help them pay their rent, make sure they have housing … sign them up for Medicaid for treatment if that’s what someone needed,” she said.
According to a 2025 annual report from the Illinois Department of Corrections, the average per capita cost of housing a prisoner is more than $52,000 a year.
According to Burke’s office, prosecutors do “frequently refer first-time offenders charged with felony retail theft to diversion programs, restorative justice community courts, and treatment courts when appropriate.”
How to combat retail theft?
Retail associations, though, say that some of the theft stems from organized crime rings where items are boosted, then resold.
“No one has advocated for putting away a needy mother caught trying to steal a gallon of milk,” said Rob Karr, president and CEO of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association.
Karr said Burke’s policy change around retail theft is welcomed by retailers in Cook County.
“Retail across the board whether you’re large or small has the narrowest profit margins of any industry sector,” Karr said. “So it puts pressure on everyone … but particularly for smaller businesses it’s more impactful because they’re often operating on even smaller margins and have less reserve to recover.”
But Horowitz said that criminology research casts doubt on whether harsher punishments reduce certain offenses, noting that the severity of punishment is not often a meaningful deterrent if it’s easy to get away with the crime.
“The chance of being caught for any given shoplifting event is very low,” he said.
What’s likely to be more effective, Horowitz said, is targeting organized retail theft by going after the fences that resell stolen goods. That’s because the boosters who are doing the shoplifting are easily replaceable, he said.
“You have to go after the top of the pyramid,” Horowitz said.
Of the felony retail theft cases the Tribune observed during recent first-appearance hearings, most were small-scale thefts: individuals stealing low-cost items from department stores, grocery stores and convenience stores. Often, they had a criminal background that led to the cases being bumped up to felonies.
Local police and prosecutors, though, have investigated and charged cases that allegedly involve organized retail theft operations.
Last year, seven people were accused in a “highly orchestrated smash-and-grab burglary” of the Louis Vuitton store on Michigan Avenue, according to an announcement at the time from the state’s attorney’s office.
Police investigate the scene of a smash-and-grab burglary at the Louis Vuitton store on Michigan Avenue on Sept. 11, 2025. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)
In that case, the alleged thieves appeared to unroll an organized effort, showing up in six stolen vehicles, ramming the store and loading up nearly $700,000 in merchandise, prosecutors alleged.
And the theft ended tragically: While speeding away, one car struck another vehicle, killing a man who was on his way to work for his last shift before taking paternity leave, prosecutors said.
‘Outdated’ Illinois law?
In 2017, a bipartisan commission tasked with researching ways to safely reduce Illinois’ prison population recommended, among other reforms, raising the state’s threshold for felony charges for both retail theft and other types of theft.
But nearly 10 years later, despite attempts to pass legislation, Illinois remains one of the most punitive states in the country for theft and retail theft.
According to state law, prosecutors can charge retail theft as a felony if the amount of stolen goods is $300 or more. Other types of theft have a threshold of $500.
Advocates for easing the threshold question why retail theft is prosecuted more harshly than other types of theft and say that states should regularly look at updating their statutes to account for inflation and rising cost of living.
“These thresholds are extremely outdated,” said Shawn Fagan, senior research manager for Campaign Zero, a criminal justice reform organization that tracks theft thresholds across states.
States in the U.S. have an average felony theft threshold of $1,134, according to Campaign Zero, a figure that is more aligned with Foxx’s policy than the current Illinois law.
Illinois is out of pace with its direct neighbors, including Indiana which has a felony theft threshold of $750, as well as more conservative states like Texas, whose threshold is one of the nation’s highest at $2,500.
When states don’t update their laws, experts say, the effect is that the laws grow more punitive over time with inflation and rising cost of living.
“Just looking at what the cost of a smart phone was then to now, what was petty theft 15 years ago is larceny now,” Fagan said.