Anyone is entitled to access Illinois Criminal Records if they so wish as they are public information. When it comes to actually obtaining copies of these records it is pretty easy to accomplish and often you are able to obtain them for free. However, there are some law enforcement agencies and companies who will carry out a search for you of these records but will charge a fee for doing so.

The Illinois State Police hold criminal history information on particular individuals and if you would like to see sight of this you will need to pay a fee of $16.00 in order to do so. Whereas the Circuit Court in Jackson County will allow you access to their database and this will cost you $12.95 for each search that you carry out.

In general most of the law enforcement agencies are the ones who are required to maintain the databases that these records are held on. They will then share this information with the courts and in some cases with certain individuals who have requested a person?s public arrest records.

The information which is held on these databases should be either updated on a daily, monthly or quarterly basis by the person charged with doing so. So just how good the arrest records information is will depend upon how well maintained and updated the database is.

The figures that have been kept for Criminal Records Illinois have shown that there has been a decrease in the number of arrests made and yet still theirs are above the national rate. This is somewhat strange as the state has actually seen a steady decrease in the number of arrests being made. During a 12 year period from 1990 to 2002 the State of Illinois saw a decrease of 28% in the number of arrests being made. Originally in 1990 of 100,000 of the population 1,237 people were arrested and this figure then drops to only 894 in 2002.

Yet even though for the whole of the State of Illinois the arrest figures have been reduced between 1990 and 2002 there were some counties where they had substantial increases. Of the 102 counties which make up this state 43 of them were shown to have a large increase in their arrest rate records. Whilst of the rest of the counties 42 saw no differences and 17 of them had a notable reduction in the number of arrests that were made.

When you take a closer look at the State of Illinois public arrest records for the period from 1995 to 2002 you will be amazed to see that the number of counties where increases have occurred has fallen from 43 to 8. Of these eight, seven of the counties where there have been increases in the arrests made are rural ones.