She's behind barbed wire and bars at 26th Street and California Avenue--for now.
But Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart says there will soon come a time when serial stowaway Marilyn Hartman will be released again, raising the question of what to do with her.
"We just have to go way outside the box on this," Dart told NBC 5. "I’m not blaming any judges, but they really have to come up with something that is more uniquely tailored to this case."
Hartman was arrested again this weekend at O’Hare International Airport--just three days after she was released on bond for allegedly evading a TSA checkpoint and boarding a flight to London with no ticket.
Previously the 66-year-old Grayslake woman has been arrested in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Phoenix trying to board flights where she didn’t belong.
"I-bonds and even electronic monitoring, it’s just not going to work," Dart said. "What needs to be done is a much more thorough plan that involves a higher level of monitoring or this is just going to keep going on."
Dart says as many as one in three inmates at Cook County Jail struggle with mental illness.
He says he hopes the issues raised by the Hartman case will also apply to their cases.
"The notion that a judge just missed an easy one--no, no, no," Dart said. "There is nothing easy here because you are trying to layer over mental health issues in the criminal justice system. It’s complicated, but we can do it though."
The hard thing, Dart says, is planning for what will happen after the release.
"My hope is that she is with us for a short period of time, that there is a complete and thorough analysis done about her competency to stand trial," he said. "I think she will pass that pretty quickly, and after that there will be an immediate plan made to put a thoughtful plan together."
Without such a plan, the sheriff is not optimistic about Hartman or a large segment of his jail population
"The chances of success are next to nothing," he said. "We see it play out in this case because its high profile--but we see it all the time in other cases."
