political cartoon

Count Us In

Organizations discuss how to make the Census matter to South Siders

BY CHRISTIAN BELANGER

On a snowy Thursday a few weeks ago, the Oakwood Community Center at the corner of 38th Place and Vincennes Avenue in Bronzeville filled up with people in attendance for a free, public panel discussion on “The Power of the US Census in Black Communities.” The event was part of Community Grand Rounds, a relatively new outreach series focusing on improving health on the South Side, organized by the Center for Community Health & Vitality at the University of Chicago’s medical system.

Dr. Doriane Miller, the center’s director and an internist at UChicago Medicine, made a few introductory remarks, during which she noted that, while it might seem a little surprising to connect the Census to health outcomes, she was working with a broad definition of health—“the presence of physical, mental, and social well-being, not simply the absence of disease.”

A pamphlet put together by UofC medical students clearly laid out the connections between the Census and funding for health-related programs in Illinois. Medicaid and Medicare, for example, get some of the most money allocated using Census data—$312 and $70 billion, respectively—by calculating reimbursement levels based on state income and cost of practicing in a certain area. Even a seemingly small undercount can have significant results: according to a study by the Chicago Urban League, undercounting Illinois’s population by one percent means the state would lose $122 million each year in Medicaid funding.

In 2010, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that Illinois was undercounted by about half a percent. But undercounting doesn’t take place equally—the agency also found that, nationally, the Black population was undercounted by 2.1 percent, while the Latinx population, as the Census Bureau refers to it, was undercounted by 1.5 percent. Renters, a group that sometimes serves as a stand-in for low-income people, were undercounted by 1.1 percent.

Perhaps taking a cue from Miller’s point that health is not merely the absence of disease, Jasmine Gunn, one of the panelists, pointed to some of the ways that funding from the Census is tied to a range of other social welfare programs. Gunn works as a project manager at Claretian Associates, a community organization that develops and manages affordable housing in South Chicago. Claretian Associates uses Community Development Block Grant funding and rents to people using Section 8 vouchers—both programs whose funding is partly determined with Census data.

“The demand for affordable housing...I would call it a crisis. The lack of units that are available—they just don’t exist,” Gunn said. “If you fill out the Census, there will be more funds allocated to nonprofit [organizations] that are trying to build affordable housing…. But if you don’t fill out the Census, the money that they allocate for your community won’t be correct.”

Gunn also pointed out that plenty of businesses use information from the Census to decide whether to set up shop in a particular neighborhood or to find investment for their business: “People giving out business loans, the first thing they have to do [is] a market analysis of the customers…. That profile comes out of the Census data.” Her point was part of a larger theme that oriented much of the evening’s discussion: economic health in majorityBlack communities, particularly in a part of the city that’s steadily been losing its Black population over the last few decades.

One of the other panelists, Cassiopeia Uhuru, is the co-founder of The Black Mall, an online directory and newsletter that encourages buying from Black-owned businesses. “It’s why it’s really important for us to be counted in the Census… with us being counted, we actually have the chance for more dollars to be circulated or disseminated into our communities and to help with our communities,” Uhuru said.

Melvin R. Thompson, the executive director of the Endeleo Institute in Washington Heights, echoed Uhuru’s point. He pointed to a concrete example of a new business being created in a Black community: this year, Thompson’s organization, which is part of the powerful Trinity United Church of Christ, plans to open Cafe DuBois, a coffee shop at the corner of 95th Street and Harvard Avenue. (W.E.B. DuBois was the first Black person to get his PhD from Harvard University.)

It appeared attendees of the panel were already grappling with issues relevant to the Census as well as broader social, economic, and political struggles in poor communities and communities of color. During the question-and-answer session following the panel discussion, the conversation circled back to the Census. One audience member pointed out that people who are incarcerated are counted by the Census as part of the population in the area where the prison is located. “They’re being counted downstate and in Statesville… they get counted down there, and they’re getting dollars for that,” she said. “We need to be the ones that say, ‘No, you need to put that money back in.’” A 2010 report from the Prison Gerrymandering Project showed that, even though sixty percent of Illinois’s prison population is from Chicago, ninety percent of those people are incarcerated downstate. In one rural county, the prison population is twenty-five percent of the total. Over the last decade, state Representative La Shawn K. Ford, whose 8th District includes much of Austin and some western suburbs, has repeatedly introduced a bill that would count prisoners using their last previous address before they were incarcerated. The latest version, introduced in 2018, is in committee, and has fifty-nine cosponsors.

The Weekly’s reporting on the 2020 Census is supported by a grant from the McCormick Foundation, administered by the Chicago Independent Media Alliance. ¬

Christian Belanger is a senior editor at the Weekly and a staff writer at the Hyde Park Herald. He last covered a traveling exhibit of community-made media, currently on view at University of Chicago art centers.

Lack Of Access, Long Waitlists: LEE V. GAINES/ILLINOIS NEWSROOM

Education In Illinois Prisons State policies for GED and degree programs in prisons block some from education

BY LEE V. GAINES, ILLINOIS NEWSROOM

Powered by Illinois Public Media/WILL radio/tv/online, Illinois Newsroom provides news about Illinois and in-depth reporting on agriculture, education, the environment, health, and politics. Originally published online February 11. Reprinted with permission. W hen Ralph Gray transferred from one prison in Illinois to another, he didn’t know the move would mean sacrificing access to an education.

Gray guessed he was sixteen credits shy of receiving an associates degree from Lake Land College, a community college that offers classes in several prisons in Illinois, when he left Western Illinois Correctional Center, a medium security facility located between Springfield and Quincy.

When he arrived at Graham Correctional Center in Southern Illinois several years ago, Gray said he was told he’d be placed at the end of the waitlist for an auto body course. The class was the reason he requested a transfer. He’s still on the waitlist, according to Gray.

Gray isn’t the only person incarcerated in Illinois prisons that isn’t able to further their education. A lack of teachers, funding and the department’s own policies prevent many from obtaining their GED, associates degree, or a trade skill.

An Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) policy stipulates that once a class is full, inmates are placed on the waiting list in order of their release date, with those getting out soonest receiving priority.

According to IDOC officials, the policy was changed in June 2013. Previously, prisoners were placed on the waiting list

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ FEBRUARY 19, 2020 in ascending order based on the date they requested access to the educational program or course. Gray’s projected parole date is January 2029.

Despite the fact that inmates like Gray remain shut out of educational programming due to the policy, IDOC spokesperson, Lindsey Hess, said the department does not plan to change it.

“Given our limited resources, we must prioritize educational programming for men and women reentering their communities first,” Hess wrote in an email.

Access to education in IDOC facilities is low. In fiscal year 2018, which runs from July 1, 2017 to June 30, 2018, 723 inmates received a GED, and 168 received an associates degree, according to department data. That same year, IDOC held more than 15,000 inmates without a high school degree, and more than 18,000 without a college degree, department data shows.

A lack of opportunity I DOC Director Rob Jeffreys attributes low attainment numbers to a lack of teachers and a lack of funding in the corrections and community college system, as well as the geographic location of many of Illinois’ prisons.

In fiscal year 2018, the department employed 119 educators in a prison system with roughly 40,000 inmates. The number of educators in the system rose slightly to 124 in fiscal year 2019, according to IDOC data.

Jeffreys said it’s more difficult to recruit educators in rural areas, leading to a concentration of educational opportunities in prisons located near urban centers. For example, DePaul University, North Park University, and Northwestern University operate privately funded educational programs inside Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum security facility located just outside Chicago.

Including Stateville, only three of the system’s twenty-eight prisons offer credit bearing courses above the associates degree level. Those programs, which are located in Stateville, Sheridan and Danville Correctional Centers, are operated by colleges and universities. Two prisons, Pontiac and Menard Correctional Centers, offer neither post-secondary nor vocational programming. The remaining twenty-six facilities have some vocational courses, but whether they offer associates degree classes depends on if the community college that works inside the prison can pay for and hire an adjunct professor to teach in the facility, according to prison officials.

“When you talk about the Chicago area, I mean, we have all types of facilities up there to provide programming,” Jeffreys said. “But when we start talking about… the southern part of Illinois, there’s not a whole lot of opportunity to provide secondary education in those particular facilities.”

Hess wrote in an email that Jeffreys is “primarily focused on expanding educational programming in facilities in downstate Illinois.”

Funding is also an obstacle. The department contracts with community colleges to provide vocational programs inside state prisons, while community colleges are responsible for the cost of academic post-secondary programming, for which they receive reimbursement from the Illinois Community College Board (ICCB).

But state investment in community colleges has dropped dramatically over the last two decades, according to data from the state’s community college board.

In fiscal year 2000, state funding accounted for about a third of community college revenue. In fiscal year 2017, state funding made up just about fifteen percent of community college funding. Adjusted for inflation, the state invested about half as much in Illinois’ community college system in fiscal year 2019 as compared to fiscal year 2002.

In the absence of increased investment, community colleges have increasingly relied on local tax dollars and tuition. Matt Berry, a spokesperson for ICCB, said incarcerated students rarely pay tuition.

“The colleges are able to claim these students for ICCB reimbursement, but… the funding formula is significantly underfunded,” Berry wrote in an email. Offering more courses inside state prisons would not necessarily lead to more revenue, given that the amount of state funding available to community colleges is “a finite pot of resources,” Berry wrote.

Trading educational opportunities for better living conditions G ray said he understands that the money available for education in state prisons is limited. But he thinks the current policy, which prioritizes those with shorter sentences for programming, is unfair to people like him.

Gray grew up in Champaign, and he was sent to prison in 2012 shortly after he turned eighteen. He was sentenced to twenty years after he pleaded guilty to the aggravated kidnapping of an Australian researcher who was visiting the University of Illinois during the fall of 2011. Gray is now twenty-five.

Truth-in-sentencing laws dictate that Gray must serve the majority of his sentence, which means he’s also not eligible to receive “good time”—time cut from his sentence—for participation in correctional department programs.

During his first few months in prison, Gray said he acted out, largely because he was still processing the length of time he had to serve. But then, he said, he had an epiphany.

“I was really determined to, you know, kind of get on the right track, and I never lost sight of wanting to go home,” he said. A big part of getting on track for Gray meant getting an education. He requested a transfer to Western Illinois from Menard Correctional Center because Lake Land College offered classes there.

“I gained a lot of college courses. I took almost every business course that they had there,” Gray said. He said he was able to get into the courses because many of the inmates at Western Illinois were serving similarly long sentences.

“One thing about Western [Illinois] Correctional, your living conditions were bad, but they made sure that everybody has the opportunity to get into school,” he said. At Western Illinois, Gray said he could only leave his cell for about an hour and a half each day. He decided to request another transfer, partly because he wanted a better quality of life, but also because he wanted to take an auto body course.

“Because when you think about it, an incarcerated person, a person with a felony is fighting with a lower chance for a job compared to a person that doesn’t,” Gray said. “But if you take a guy that’s been incarcerated and you give him a skillset that he can learn, he can take that to the street with him when he’s released.” Graham Correctional offered an auto body class, and Gray thought that developing those skills would make him a more attractive candidate to a future employer.

What he didn’t realize, he said, is that leaving Western Illinois for Graham, a lower security facility located between Springfield and St. Louis, would mean he’d lose access to all in-person educational programs.

“A lot of guys are sacrificing leaving prisons that are worse living conditions to come here and, you know, they’re leaving their educational classes and all that stuff. They’re not realizing that when you get to these lower level prisons, that you’re not going to be able to obtain courses and classes,” Gray said. “So that pretty much exiles us from gaining educational programming in certain facilities, which doesn’t seem right.”

California’s solution F ew states have succeeded in recent years to pass legislation aimed at increasing access to post-secondary programming in prisons. California is an exception.

California went from offering face-toface college classes inside only two state prisons to having community college classes and teachers in thirty-four of the state’s thirty-five correctional facilities in a five year time span.

The change occurred as a result of legislation passed in 2014, which allowed educators to teach classes inside correctional facilities and provided a mechanism for which community colleges could receive reimbursement for those classes from the state.

Last year, the state’s then-governor, Jerry Brown, approved a budget which allocated $5 million to the state’s community colleges serving incarcerated and formerly incarcerated students. Now, people incarcerated in state prisons can earn college credits and associates degrees that are fully transferable to public universities in the state, according to Brant Choate, who directs the division of rehabilitative programs within the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Choate said there’s a financial incentive for community colleges to participate in prison programming.

“Some of the colleges in remote areas have seen this as an opportunity to increase their enrollment,” he said. “But I think more so, and I can only tell you this anecdotally from what I’ve seen… there’s this feeling of social justice.”

Choate said stakeholders, including prison officials and college educators, have benefitted from the arrangement. He said educators have realized the environment may be safer than they previously thought, and that the students are extremely engaged. “Many of our students are actually receiving honors,” Choate said. “And it’s very exciting to see that, and word spreads amongst community college faculty where, in many cases, that’s where everybody wants to teach.”

Choate said the increase in educational access has also led to improvements in the workplace for prison personnel.

“It’s almost like a conversion of one officer at a time,” he said. “They attend the graduation, they see the behavior change on the yard, they see an attitude change in the

Associate Degree Attainment in Illinois State Prisons

2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 Year

AA degrees awarded People without College Degrees

inmates… and that just makes it a better work environment.”

Unlike IDOC, Choate said the department allows anyone who wants to to access college programming, including those with life sentences.

“We view them as human beings and people that deserve an education, but at the same time, those people who know that they’re never going to leave prison—they’re some of our best instructors on the inside,” he said.

Choate said incarcerated scholars have served as mentors and tutors to other inmates, and as role models for those just entering the prison system.

“It changes them from essentially criminals to academics,” Choate said. “People are huddled around the domino table now talking about the most recent classic literature piece they’ve read, as opposed to talking about how they’re going to get in trouble because they’re bored.”

Choate said the dramatic change in access to education in California prisons came in large part from buy-in both at the correctional and community college system levels, as well as state lawmakers.

He said he’s “very aware” of what kind of programming other state prisons offer incarcerated people.

“The key difference is that we have support from our legislature, and California has decided to make this a priority and fund it,” Choate said. “Funding is the biggest barrier for all the other states, so they’re reliant upon private foundations to fund college and that’s the main difference.” The cost of an education in prison W hile funding remains a barrier in Illinois, the state may actually save money if it were to implement broader access to educational opportunities inside its prisons, according to research from the Rand Corporation. A meta-analysis from the nonprofit policy think tank found that people who participated in educational opportunities while incarcerated were forty-three percent less likely to recidivate than those who did not. Additionally, the report states that for every dollar a prison system spends on education, they’ll realize five dollars in savings due to reduced recidivism rates.

A 2018 report from the Illinois Sentencing Policy Advisory Council estimates that forty-three percent of those who are released from state prison will return within three years. The report also estimates that recidivism related costs to victims and taxpayers will total $13 billion over the next half-decade.

State analyses indicate that educational programming in prison settings saves money. A 2018 report from the Governor’s Office of Management and Budget predicted that vocational, adult basic education and post-secondary education would reduce recidivism, with post-secondary education yielding the greatest benefit to cost ratio of nearly thirty-nine dollars in savings for Illinois taxpayers and crime victims for every dollar spent on it.

State Representative Mary Flowers, a GRAPH BY DEBLINA MUKHERJEE FOR SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY. BASED ON WORK BY LEE V. GAINES FOR ILLINOIS NEWSROOM

Democrat who represents parts of the South and West Sides, filed legislation in 2017 that would have mandated educational and vocational programming in all of Illinois’ adult and juvenile prisons. The measure died in committee.

She said she filed the bill because she wanted to see something done to address recidivism in the state.

“The vast majority of the people that are incarcerated come from the minority districts, and so they really come back to my area,” Flowers said. “And as a result of them not being educated, not having health care, not having job training, it’s really a double or triple whammy on the community, because you could guarantee that someone’s going to get hurt, you can guarantee that there will be recidivism, you can guarantee that it will be an extra cost on the taxpayers.”

A fiscal note provided by IDOC stated that Flowers’ proposed legislation would cost the department more than $380 million over ten years. Flowers said she was told that the bill failed due to its projected cost.

But she believes the price of not educating the state’s prison population will ultimately cost taxpayers more. “If they really want to do a fiscal note, how much money we have paid out for false incarceration, or how much money we have paid out for recidivism, it would way surpass this $380 million. It was really insulting to me,” she said.

Flowers said she plans to reintroduce similar legislation this year.

“There’s fewer people incarcerated now, so I would like to see how much they say it would cost,” she said. “And I always like to ask the question: ‘how much will it cost if we don’t do it?’ But I never get an answer.”

Real worries G ray said he worries about his lack of access to an education largely because of his family. He said he’s a father, and he looks forward to supporting his family when he returns home from prison. He said he’s heard that the administration at Graham Correctional Center, where he’s located now, may implement a baking class. Gray said he hopes that’s true.

“Because anything that I can take educational wise, I will take because I know it’s important, and it’s detrimental to my future if I don’t have them courses,” he said. Gray said he’s looking into correspondence courses, which his family will have to pay for, to access the education

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ FEBRUARY 19, 2020 he believes he needs.

“My family has been very big in helping me, and without them I would not be able to do them classes,” Gray said.

A spokesperson for Illinois’ prison system wrote in an email that agency officials are trying to increase educational opportunities for incarcerated people, including building partnerships with public and private colleges and universities. In an interview last fall, Jeffreys also said the department planned to hire a vocational coordinator, and he hoped to bring people from local trade unions into the prison to serve as teachers.

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for IDOC wrote, “Director Jeffreys and IDOC’s programming staff are reviewing educational programming in other states and how those programs are funded. We are actively seeking additional partners and working to expand programs currently in place. ”

The funding stream—regardless of educational partnerships—for the Illinois prison system is controlled by the state’s General Assembly. Choate, with California’s correctional system, said that’s the case in that state, too. He said they needed political support to expand educational programming in California’s prisons.

“I mean, it needs to come from the people that are in charge of the money,” Choate said. “And if you convince your legislature—and it’s always helpful to also have your governor’s office and the governor, him or herself, be behind it—but once you have that support, then it’s just a matter of, in our case, crafting the bill to make sure that everybody was happy with it, so it could pass. And that’s what happened with us.” ¬

Lee Gaines covers education for the Illinois Newsroom. She started at Illinois Public Media in 2017 and her stories have been featured nationally on NPR. Prior to her work at IPM, Lee wrote for newspapers and magazines in Chicago and nationally. Her work has appeared in the Tribune, Reader, Chicago Magazine, and the Marshall Project. She also recently completed a fellowship with the Education Writers Association.