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2 | The Gate

The

Gate

political review

Issue II

2015-2016

EDITORS’

NOTE

Since launching in 2013, the Gate has sought to cover “All Things Politics.” Every political review covers presidential politics, US elections, international relations and the like, but the Gate was founded with the idea that politics extends far beyond the lives and work of politicians. This anthology, the Gate’s second annual print edition, is a snapshot of the variety of topics we strive to cover, representing some of the finest political analysis and journalism produced by University of Chicago students over the last eight months.

From a public hospital in France to the Cook County Department of Corrections, from a Chinese military parade to the 2016 Iowa Caucuses, this collection captures the incredible breadth of politics from the disaffected and marginalized to the centers of global power.

The following selections are the result of months spent sifting through archives, traveling across the world, pestering for interviews, and, of course, writing, re-writing, and revising copy. They reflect the hard work, tenacity, and bright ideas of not only the authors whose names appear on the byline, but also an editorial team that spent hours providing feedback, workshopping, and copy-editing their work. In order to reproduce these articles in a print anthology, a team of editors led by Chelsea Fine spent long hours creating a layout and working with the print shop.

Neither this project nor the daily operations of the Gate would be possible without the resolute institutional support of the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. The Gate is grateful to Matthew Jaffe, Christine Hurley, Dillan Siegler, Katrina Mertens, Ashley Jorn, Zane Maxwell, Kate Grossman, Steve Edwards, David Axelrod, and others for generously sharing their expertise and for giving the Gate resources to support high-quality student journalism.

The pieces in this anthology, along with hundreds of others, are always available online. We hope you will join us at www.uchicagogate.com as we continue to explore, document, and analyze politics in all its forms.

– Chelsea Fine & Patrick Reilly

STAFF Editors-in-Chief

Chelsea Fine Patrick Reilly

Managing Editor

Tom Wood

Editors

Emma Herman Liz Stark

Copy Editors

Emily Lu Malloy Owen Abhinav Ranjan

Design

Chelsea Fine Haley Schwab Felicia Woron

Graphics

Felicia Woron

The cover photo, depicting train tracks and an abandoned mattress in Saint-Denis, an underserved suburb outside of Paris, was taken by Emma Herman www.uchicagogate.com 5707 S. Woodlawn Avenue

Chicago, IL 60637

TABLE OF CONTENTS 2 4 6 11 14 16 18 20 26 27 32 34 35

Under the Guise of Safety

A Deeper Look Into Chicago’s Speed Cameras

Elizabeth Adetiba

Try To Do The Most Good You Can

Julian Duggan

The Law Protects the Life of the Unborn

Felicia Woron

An Interview with Peter Singer The Abortion Ban in Chile

Hôpital Avicenne

Chelsea Fine

Cautious Optimism for Pakistan

Hamza Shad Kevin Shi

and the Paradoxes of Modern France

An interview with Husain Haqqani

Mixed Messages

Power and Spectacle in an Uncertain China

Beyond the Bilateral

An Interview with Jon Huntsman

All Eyes On Iowa

An Inside Look Into the Caucus Experience

El 11 de Septiembre

Remembering Chile’s 1973 Coup

After the Boom

The North Dakota Oil Industry

Preparing for the Presidential Library Power and Influence on Chicago’s South Side

Hometown Girl

An Interview with Patti Solis Doyle

Correcting Corrections

Reform and Recovery in Cook County Jail

Elaine Yao Haley Schwab Liz Stark Chelsea Fine Liz Stark Asya Akça Patrick Reilly

Dake Kang Sean Maher Sophia Zaller Danielle Schmidt Dylan Wells Kaeli Subberwal

Most of the articles featured in this publication were originally published on our website, www.uchicagogate.com. Original citations as well as additional images and information can be found there.

The Gate | 1

Under the Guise of Safety a deeper look into Chicago’s speed cameras

by Elizabeth Adetiba

W

hen Chicago became the first and only Illinois city to roll out an Automated Speed Enforcement program, it appeared to be just another major city looking to protect pedestrians, children in particular. Eighty-eight school-age pedestrians sustained injuries from speeding vehicles within an eighth of a mile away from their schools between 2007 and 2011. As the second anniversary of the city’s installment of speed cameras nears, however, many have come to see the program as nothing more than a lucrative, profit-fueled endeavor; the city has collected over $58 million in revenue since the first cameras were installed in 2013. For some Chicagoans, the cameras represent more than just another way of keeping the city’s sinking budget alive: the omnipresent photo-enforcement cameras are a deliberate ploy to further disenfranchise Chicago’s minority neighborhoods.

“Whatever Money You Have, You Don’t Have it to Give to the City” Chicago’s Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, such 2 | The Gate

as North Lawndale, Washington Park, Ashburn, and East Side, have the highest concentration of speed cameras in the city—and generate the most revenue. Given the city’s emphasis on child safety, the initial assumption may be that these neighborhoods have issues with speeding and vehicular safety. And in the eyes of Washington Park resident Essence Smith, these cameras are a “righteous cause.”

“People drive so fast over here. I think ticket[ing] is the best way to go about it,” she says.

But when asked about the sheer number of tickets given in her neighborhood, Smith admits that they seem to be “excessive.” Washington Park’s two speed cameras have resulted in over $10,000 in fines per day since their installation in 2014.

But according to Cecilia Butler, the president of the Washington Park Council, the presence of these cameras is more than excessive; it is “completely unwarranted.”

“Nobody wants these speed cameras. Because whatever money you have, you don’t have it to give to the city,” she says. And with Washington

Park’s population of just under twelve thousand pulling in a median income of $21,899, Butler says the tickets have further perpetuated suffering. Residents who were unable to rectify their fines within the twenty-one-day window have “lost their cars … so now they can’t go to their jobs, or pick up their kids from school.” Ashburn resident Keya Gordon, a nursing student, echoes Butler’s statement. “I have paid $600 in speed camera tickets this year so far,” she says.

According to commuting data, we can estimate that Ashburn has a drivership of 36,500.

Data provided by Loyola University Chicago visiting scholar Jack Macnamara shows that Ashburn is also home to no fewer than eight speed cameras, four times more than North Side neighborhood Portage Park, despite the fact that the latter’s estimated drivership rate is at thirty-nine thousand, higher than Ashburn’s. According to Gordon, some of these cameras are within two blocks of each other. One of Ashburn’s cameras is located at 2550 W 79th Street; another is located almost directly across at 2603 W 79th

Street. It is entirely possible that a speeding driver could receive violation near the former, make a u-turn at S Maplewood Avenue, and get nabbed again while heading in the opposite direction.

Gordon’s most pressing qualms with the cameras stem from price discrepancies between tickets issued in her majority Black and Hispanic neighborhood and the majority white neighborhoods of the North Side. “Whenever I get a ticket in [West] Rogers Park, I only have to pay $35, but when I’m at home in Ashburn, I always get the $100 tickets, when I know I’m not going that fast,” she says.

The figures Gordon mentions are the result of the city’s ticket pricing scheme. Drivers speeding 6-10 miles per hour over the set speed limit receive fines of $35, while those speeding by 11 mph and over must pay hefty $100 fines.

According to Macnamara’s data, most photo-enforcement systems installed in Chicago issue, on average, three times more $100 fines than $35 fines. But if it feels as though certain Black and Latino neighborhoods are more likely to get the higher bill, it’s because they are: North Lawndale’s highest grossing camera issues about four and a half times more $100 fines than $35 ones, while Ashburn’s issues a whopping seven times more $100 fines. While it may again appear that these areas have more issues with pedestrian safety, the neighborhoods that recorded the highest number of school-age pedestrian injuries through 2013, such as North Center and Auburn Gresham, do not possess nearly as many cameras or issue as many fines as North Lawndale or Ashburn.

“There’s No Process in Place That’s Fair and Unbiased” Despite the cameras’ overwhelming tendency to issue pricey fines, the city has put into place various fine verification measures and even the opportunity to challenge a speeding violation.

Those who have received fines have the option of viewing video footage of the alleged infraction—so long as they possess access to highspeed internet, of course. But even this seemingly legitimate measure has many Chicago drivers questioning the accuracy of the city’s photo-enforcement system.

Mark Wallace of the group Citizens To Abolish Red Light Cameras shed light on one way in which the city may be falsely nabbing drivers for speeding. Wallace claims that the city routinely refuses to specify the make and model of the vehicle that is supposedly speeding on the tickets that it issues to drivers. Instead, the section simply reads “OTHER,” which can complicate a driver’s ability to decipher whether or not his or her vehicle was truly operating at least

6-11 mph over the speed limit.

Cue the option to contest the traffic violation.

The city has outlined clear steps for drivers who do not believe they have actually committed a speeding violation. Of the five accepted speeding defenses, the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) allows drivers to challenge their tickets either by letter or in person if “the facts alleged in the speeding violation notice are inconsistent or do not support a finding that the specified regulation was violated.” But neither Mark Wallace nor Keya Gordon believes that the contestation process is fair and equitable for the city’s less affluent drivers.

Gordon questions whether or not lower-income drivers can actually afford to spend half of a workday in court for the sole purpose of contesting a $100 ticket, especially since there is no guarantee that the violation will be overturned. Gordon says that so far she has had one ticket thrown out after contesting it, but the city has yet to release data concerning the number of ticket contestations that are filed each year. As for challenging the ticket via letter, Gordon isn’t sure that everyone who wants to pursue that option “has the writing skills to effectively and persuasively petition the ticket.”

Wallace echoes many of the same concerns and described situations in which Chicagoans are forced to choose between paying a ticket and buying groceries, paying a light bill, or even just making rent. The compounding fees assigned to unpaid fines only make things more difficult. Because these “disproportionately placed” cameras most often target drivers in poorer, underserved neighborhoods, he claims, “there is no process in place that is fair and unbiased.” Speeding violations have also cost some drivers their jobs.

According to Wallace, 282 city bus drivers have been fired after receiving at least two speeding infractions while driving their personal vehicles within a twenty-four-month period. Over $18 million has been lost in earnings and benefits.

But given the time-consuming and often confusing nature of the contestation process, it may not be possible to figure out whose speeding tickets were justified or unjustified and which bus drivers deserved to keep their jobs. For them and many others, the system is routinely set up for “the city to win, and the [driver] to lose.”

“It All Just Looks Like a Money Grab” Many Chicagoans have come to see the speed cameras as nothing more than an abuse of public policy. But some city officials, like Alderman Anthony Beale, have hinted that the city cannot afford to stay afloat without the revenue generated from the photo-enforcement program.

Xavier Ramey, a former long-time resident of North Lawndale, refuses to accept that claim as a justification for the cameras. “It all just looks like a money grab,” he says.

Initially his concerns, along with those of his neighborhood, centered on “equitable dispersions,” a rather polite way of describing the sentiment that majority white neighborhoods (which, on average, have similar or even higher rates of drivership) are deliberately shielded from bearing the brunt of the photo-enforcement program—even though, in some cases, they’ve deliberately asked for the opposite.

Michael Nelson, president of the Forest Glen Community Club, says his neighborhood made a specific request for cameras to be installed because of rampant speeding, a claim substantiated by the fact that Forest Glen’s only camera generates over $7,000 in fines per day, despite having been installed only ten months ago. According to Nelson, the camera has done very little to deter speeding.

North Lawndale has an estimated drivership of fourteen thousand and is home to six speed cameras, with the most lucrative one generating over $4,500 in fines per day since its installation. But unlike Forest Glen, North Lawndale residents don’t believe their community has a speeding problem. Ramey claims that the highest-grossing camera in his neighborhood, located at 2900 W Ogden Road, isn’t close enough to an area with a high concentration of young pedestrians to justify its placement. Rather, the camera was placed in a very busy intersection with hundreds of cars passing through per day, many of whom Ramey believes aren’t residents of his community. Attempts to reach a representative from CDOT to determine exactly how many drivers receive tickets in their own neighborhoods were unsuccessful. The overall lack of transparency from CDOT only fuels claims that the speed cameras were installed for profit, not safety, at the expense of communities that are already struggling.

But as lawsuits against automated ticketing gain more traction, and state legislatures around the country move to ban speed cameras in response to many of the same concerns expressed

by Wallace and Gordon, the city’s photo-enforcement system may not be able to survive this wave of increased scrutiny. And for the many Chicagoans whose finances have suffered at the hands of these cameras, it’s a possibility worth making a reality.

This article was originally published on September 24, 2015.

The Gate | 3

Try to Do the Most Good You Can AN IN T ER V IE W WI T H PE T E R S I N G E R

BY J U LIAN DU GGA N The Gate: As an ethicist who has written extensively on animal rights and global poverty, why have you now turned your attention to climate change?

Peter Singer: Climate change is one of the great moral challenges of our age, so you can’t ignore it. I thought particularly as we have this important climate conference [COP21] coming up in Paris in six weeks, this would be a good occasion to talk about that. I am talking about “effective altruism” tomorrow at the Humanities Festival, so this would be a way of doing both of those topics.

Gate: The primary context in which one hears about effective altruism is global poverty alleviation—the classic example is buying mosquito nets, since this is a particularly efficient way to spend your money. How does this relate specifically to climate change?

Singer: I think for climate change, the most effective thing individuals can do is to be active citizens and to support those governments and elements within governments and within political systems that are taking seriously the idea of climate change. They should work for that so that there will be political impetus and support for the idea of really facing up to this problem and doing something serious about it.

Gate: In previous lectures, you have talked about several ethical principles— like an equity principle, a “you break it you buy it” principle, or something similar to a Rawlsian Difference Principle—to determine how the global community should distribute the burdens of dealing with climate change.

Could you talk a little bit about these principles?

Singer: I will talk about all three of those today, because I think they are principles that come to mind fairly obviously when people discuss climate change. Before you actually get to that, you have to understand that the political problem of climate change is a problem of distribution. A lot of people don’t see that because they think if you’re going to distribute some 4 | The Gate

good, you have to have some principle, if it’s money or food or whatever it might be. But they don’t see that climate change is the same kind of problem. It is, once you think of the atmosphere as a common resource and a scarce resource, because there are more people wanting to put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the atmosphere can safely absorb. That is why it is a problem of distribution. Once you do think of it as a problem of distribution, then you have the question, how do we divide that up? Now you have competing views. The Chinese have been saying that industrialized nations have been putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for a long time. If they hadn’t been doing so, we wouldn’t have this problem, so they are responsible for it. They are the ones who ought to cut their emissions. That’s an argument that would obviously impose a very heavy burden on affluent countries like the United States. But even if we reject that and move to one of the other two principles that you mentioned and that I’ll talk about—equal shares of the atmosphere on a per capita basis or a principle of helping those who are worse off—in either of those cases, it would still be the case that the affluent countries and the industrialized countries ought to make deeper cuts than the developing nations. I think it is important for Americans to realize that, on pretty much any plausible principle of equity or justice that you could think of, that’s going to be the case. That’s why you need to discuss those principles—to get people to see what the implications are for the affluent nations.

Gate: Do you have a preference among those principles?

Singer: I think as a practical negotiating basis, equal per capita shares is one that seems to be pretty reasonable. I’m not saying it is the ideal principle, but it is one way that you can calculate what emissions nations ought to be emitting. It is less difficult to apply than historical responsibility where there are more arguments about, “Well, we didn’t know that these emissions were going to have this impact.” So then you have to consider whether you only hold nations responsible for their pollution from some date where the risk of climate change was known. Although equal per capita shares is a little

easier on the long-term industrialized nations than historical responsibility, it is still very tough. It still shows that there is a lot that needs to be done. I think if people understand that, they will understand why the United States should be taking a really strong stance on this issue.

Gate: As you mentioned before, the COP21 Summit is coming up in about six weeks. Do you have any thoughts on this—are you optimistic about it or do you have many doubts?

Singer: Well, I do have some doubts—I think anybody who has been following these conferences from before the Copenhagen conference of 2009 is going to worry about what will be achieved. It seems that the idea is that rather than go for some legally binding treaty, nations are making their own individual commitments as to how much they are going to reduce greenhouse gases. The idea then is that, if they fail to live up to those commitments, they will be kind of publicly shamed for not doing their part. Maybe there will be some other repercussions, though at this stage it would be very hard to say what they might be. So, you know, that is not as good a strategy as having a legally binding treaty, but it may be the only feasible one—even in the United States, where a legally binding treaty would have to be submitted to Congress. At the moment it doesn’t look like Congress would approve. So it may work for the United States as well as for other nations.

The real problem is that if you totaled up the commitments that have been made so far, they don’t add up to deep enough cuts to stop us from exceeding this two degrees Celsius guardrail that most scientists think it would be dangerous to go beyond. That is why it is hard to be optimistic, but I suppose if we get some commitments that will go some of the way toward solving that problem, we can hope that we can ratchet them up, maybe in five years’ time, and get further. I mean, that is not being very optimistic at all, but it’s better than nothing. It is a very challenging situation.

Gate: Do you see any bright spots in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development that the UN passed in September in regards to nations fulfilling their ethical obligations to stop climate change?

Singer: Clearly it is important that any continuation of the Millennium Development Goals should be sustainable. I think that the Millennium Development Goals were at least a partial success. They did achieve things and focus some things. Some goals were achieved or close to—there was a bit of fudging. If you look at the indicators of where we were in 2000 and where we are this year on global poverty issues and on things like child health issues and child mortality, we have really made quite significant progress. So that’s good. I’m not sure the Sustainable Development Goals are going make the same kind of progress. They’re a little more diverse and a little harder to measure and assess. Also, there hasn’t been as much fanfare about them. I feel that this is somewhat of a softening of what we had for the past fifteen years.

Gate: Do you see any hope for improving that situation?

Singer: I no longer see the UN goals as the sort of make-or-break criteria for whether we are going to make progress for global poverty. I think there are a lot of things already in place, some of which were in place before 2000 and some of which got developed during the 2000 to 2015 period and will continue. We are making a lot of progress now in things like reducing child mortality. That’s come down just in the seven years since I was writing The Life You Can Save, which came out in 2009 and went to press the year before. I say the number of deaths of children under five from preventable-poverty-related diseases is 9.7 million a year in the original hardback edition. By the time the paperback came out, it had already dropped by a million or so per year. Now, if we look at it, I think it is something like 6.3

million per year—a pretty dramatic drop. I think that will continue. There was just a report about the reduction in malaria that has happened in the last ten or fifteen years, which is quite dramatic, and I’m sure related to the mosquito nets that you mentioned earlier; other diseases as well. So, I think we are making encouraging progress in some of these areas.

Gate: Do you see poverty and climate change as at all different in the way the global community should approach them? In approaching global poverty, it seems that the solutions already existed, and we just needed to find the money. This is a large part of what your work has focused on. But climate change seems to be a different problem in the way the stress is distributed and the question of who should take care of it.

Singer: It is a different problem. Although certainly we can encourage individuals to reduce their own carbon footprints, I don’t think we will get a solution to the problem by individual actions in the way that we could get a solution to the problem of global poverty—or at least make a big difference on it—if everybody who is middle-class and above in an affluent country would give 10 percent of their income to effective charities. We could get rid of a large proportion of remaining world poverty. But on climate change, we are going to need government action, and we are going to need carbon taxes or cap-and-trade schemes because we need to improve the financial incentives for clean energy. Those decisions, as to cap-and-trade schemes, for example, or as to the energy generation infrastructure that is built, are going to be made by governments, maybe by some large power utilities in countries where they are independent of the government. But they are not going to be made by individual action.

Gate: The argument you published in Famine, Affluence, and Morality and the similar one you present at the beginning of The Life You Can Save were particularly well known and effective. Are there any ethical arguments for climate change that you have found to be similarly effective in stimulating political movement?

Singer: As I said earlier, what I am trying to do in my contribution to climate change really is to get people to see this as an ethical issue—and an ethical issue in which we as residents of the United States, though also true of residents of Canada, Australia, and many European countries, are not really doing what we ought to be doing. I started writing about this issue shortly after I came to Princeton, which was in 1999, because I was attending seminars at a program called Science, Technology, and the Environment.

Some of the speakers were people who were in the US administration and involved with these issues. They seemed to be discussing it without any sense of it being an ethical issue. They seemed to be discussing it from the point of view of what’s going to be good for the United States. And I thought, we really need a different framework. Climate change is going to be bad for the United States; it is already bad for the United States. I think you can see that from the droughts in the West, for instance. Sea level is going to rise near a lot of major coastal cities and so on. But that is by no means all of it. We need to think of this as something that we are currently doing that is harming and will increasingly harm people who are far from us—many people who are far from us geographically and less able to defend themselves, and many people who are far from us temporally and not around to defend themselves, but to whom we are likely to leave a world that is much more hazardous and much more difficult to live in.

This interview was originally published on November 6, 2015. It has been edited and condensed for publication in print.

The Gate | 5

6 | The Gate

The Law Protects the Life of the Unborn

BY FELICIA WORON

C

hile is one of six countries in the world that prohibits and criminalizes abortion under all circumstances. In this South American nation, performing an abortion is punishable by up to three years in prison. Having an abortion is punishable by up to five.

The Gate | 7

I

f you had been driving on Chile’s Route 63 out of the capital city of Santiago at the end of September, you would have seen a massive billboard displaying an image of prisoners detained in the country’s national football stadium after the 1973 coup d’état.

There they were beaten, tortured, and shot to death. Some were then infamously tossed into the sea, so that they could be classified as “disappeared” rather than “dead.”

“ABORTION is torture, death and disappearance,” the advertisement proclaims in bold text, deploying the same rhetoric used to describe the gross human rights violations committed by Augusto Pinochet’s military regime.

“What the propaganda did was make it [seem] as if abortion were torture, a crime against human rights,” Sebastián Soto, a student of philosophy and social work at my university here in Santiago, tells me about the advertisement. “Many people see this … and are going to say, ‘I am also committing a human rights violation’ [if I have an abortion].”

In the United States, the abortion debate centers around federal attempts to defund organizations like Planned Parenthood and the possibility of a Republican victory in 2016 further restricting women’s abortion rights and paving the way for a decision overturning Roe v. Wade. In Chile, the situation is markedly different: its abortion laws are some of the strictest in the world. Chile is one of six countries in the world that prohibits and criminalizes abortion under all circumstances. In this South American nation, performing an abortion is punishable by up to three years in prison.

Having an abortion is punishable by up to five.

But Chilean president Michelle Bachelet has long favored reforming the law, and in January 2015, she proposed a bill to decriminalize abortion in three cases: when the mother’s life is at risk, when the fetus is determined to be inviable (unable to survive once born), and in cases of rape. On September 15, abortion in cases of rape was approved by the Health Commission of Chile’s Chamber of Deputies. The bill must now pass through the Constituional and Finance Commissions before being voted on by the Chamber of Deputies in its entirety, after which it needs to be approved

by Chile’s Senate. In short, there is still a long way for the bill to go to become law, and the vote has been further postponed due to a lack of urgency compared to other government projects. Nonetheless, since

8 | The Gate

the bill’s success in the Health Commission in September, Chileans have began to take its ratification as a significant and serious possibility.

Life Begins at the Moment of Conception: A Religious Idea?

When I began my semester at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, an intense debate immediately became apparent to me—if not in the political graffiti on Santiago’s streets, then in Católica’s student Facebook group. After a bout of heavy rainstorms three weeks after I arrived in Chile, screenshots of a tweet composed by a law professor at my university surfaced: “The rain is the clamor of the heavens for the innocents who will die if the legalization of abortion is consolidated.” A month later, as the Syrian refugee crisis gained worldwide attention and an image of a drowned child found lying on a beach circulated throughout global media, another professor tweet-

6 38

Only of Senate seats are held by women

ed: “The image of the Syrian boy. Brutal, right? Tell me how someone could be in favor of abortion.”

In another post, Universidad Católica’s student federation (FEUC) shared the open petition they wrote to the members of Chile’s congress, asking them to vote against the decriminalization of abortion.

The petition now has over eight thousand signatures, but it was met with aversion from students like Lya Rogers, a first year planning to study sociology. Rogers tells me that she doesn’t feel like the university provides spaces to discuss abortion freely; even Facebook, in her opinion, tends to back the university’s stance.

As a Catholic university with close ties to the Vatican, Universidad Católica is institutionally opposed to abortion. Chile has historically been a country heavily influenced by Roman Catholicism; divorce, for example, was legalized only in 2004 amidst continued opposition from the Church.

When I asked Rogers if she thought the current abortion ban in Chile was the result of Catholic influence, she responded, “Definitely.”

Klaus Franz, a medical student at Chile’s other major university, Universidad de Chile, expounds on the subject. “It is a religious idea … that life begins at the moment of conception,” he says. “I come from a university that is pretty progressive.” Unlike Universidad Católica, Universidad de Chile is a public institution and is reputed to be more left-of-center on the political spectrum. “But the ethics and the bioethics are still pretty conservative. [They] are strongly linked to Catholicism.”

Sebastián Soto offers a similar explanation: “In [our] society, abortion is condemned or rejected to a great extent by the actions of the Catholic Church.” Of course, the Catholic influence has been particularly strong in Latin America since the Church launched its mission of evangelization in pre-colonial times. But Soto is critical of those who hold the belief that life begins at conception, yet fail to analyze or question the reasons behind it. “They start off from an argument that isn’t proven,” he says. “In biology, there isn’t agreement about when life starts, and not in philosophy either.”

Soto himself is a practicing Catholic but favors decriminalizing abortion.

Antonia Muñoz, a medical student at Universidad Católica, disagrees: “[The medical field at Católica] considers that from the moment of conception, we have a human individual … There is no doubt about this. The arguments to back that up are biological, not theological.” She also refers to philosophical arguments: “I am the same person in the moment that I was born as when I am a child, adult, grandmother … There are physical changes in me, but I don’t change my essence … This is transversal, that you exist, and have existed since the moment of conception.” In her view, an individual exists from that moment, “and it is our obligation to protect this individual.”

Muñoz says that although she is Catholic, she has not always opposed abortion; only after studying medicine and working with mothers who had had inviable pregnancies did she form her current point of view.

Antonia Mayo, a fifth-year political science student and FEUC board member, insists that her personal conviction that life begins from the moment of conception does not stem from religious beliefs or scientific reasons. “For me, the argument against abortion has nothing to do with religion,” she says. “It is a topic of human dignity, philosophy, and anthropology.” She emphasizes that FEUC’s petition to Congress doesn’t rely on religious arguments.

When I first emailed Muñoz, the medical student, with the knowledge that she had participated in faith-based organizations on campus, I asked if she would be able to explain her stance as a Catholic. In her reply, she clarified: “My position isn’t Catholic. It is a position based on medical, philosophical, and bioethical arguments.”

But those arguments can be Catholic too.

“You Would Think That Women Would Best Represent Women’s Interests” Although Catholicism has historically had a great influence on Chilean society, abortion has not always been completely banned in Chile. Therapeutic (medically justified) abortion was permitted from 1931 until 1989, but the law was changed during the final years of Pinochet’s authoritarian regime. “The dictatorship represented a reconversion to the more traditional moral values of Chilean life,” Klaus Franz explains. The total ban implemented

iticians hint at different sentiments. “There are women who have sex because, maybe, they had one too many drinks—is this rape, too?” a member of Chile’s congress asked. Another declares, “There are rapes that are violent and others that are not violent.” Yet another: “A woman … lends her body, throughout pregnancy, to the life that is growing in there … A woman who lends her body does not have the right to a therapeutic abortion.”

“What is there behind all of these affirmations?” Soto asks in an op-ed he wrote for Universidad Católica’s student newspaper. His answer is mistrust toward the ideology of gender. Instead of recognizing that “society has been unjust toward women throughout history and [needs] to make amends for this injustice,” many continue to adhere to a perspective that denies women their intelligence and autonomy and suggests that they “would have free and irresponsible sex and have abortions [like] a sport” if it were legal to do so. Chile’s pol-

50,000-150,000 clandestine abortions each year

in 1989 was largely the work of a deeply Catholic constitutional lawyer named Jaime Gúzman, who once stated, “The mother is always obligated to have her child, in all circumstances … The mother should have her child even if it will come out abnormal, even if she does not want it, even if it is the product of rape or, even by having it, she will die.”

Chile’s constitution specifies that “the law protects the life of the unborn,” but the country’s constitution dates back to 1980, also under Pinochet’s dictatorship. “This constitution has not been changed,” Rogers tells me, save for a few amendments.

“I think that this has greatly affected [our] freedom [and] rights.” Aside from the thousands of prisoners tortured and executed during the regime, the military dictatorship also imposed various repressive measures, such as a nightly curfew and restrictions on free speech. While these measures no longer exist, many of the old political and economic structures—and attitudes and mindsets—still do.

While the Catholic convictions espoused by those with political power and influence during Pinochet’s regime were undoubtedly the basis for the abortion ban, some anti-abortion arguments given by today’s pol-

itics, he concludes, are affected by machismo: a cultural ideology that stresses masculine power, imposes rigid gender roles, and perpetrates violence against women in Latin American society.

According to Soto, machismo “permeates distinct social realities”; of these, he specifically mentions Congress, the democratic system, and the Church. Undoubtedly, the three quotes from members of Chile’s congress are proof of machismo permeating politics. Surprisingly, however, two of those declarations came from female politicians.

Machismo is not just the attitudes of men used as a mechanism to oppress women: it is something that has permeated the whole of society, both genders alike. When Bachelet was running for her first term in office, one of Chile’s former presidents, Eduardo Frei, was asked if Chile would elect a woman president. He replied: “Difficult. It is that we are very machista … and the women are even more machista than the men.”

Chile’s congress is only 15.8 percent female; according to Soto, “today in 2015 … the culture of our political system still views women as at the service of others, others who have to speak for them.” He explains that the congresswomen quoted above are from the political right and hold

positions that are highly contested, even by men. As a result, Soto concludes, they must be committed to a conservative line of thought in order to keep their jobs. Conservative thought in Chile generally views women as subordinate to men. “You would think that the women would best represent women’s interests,” he suggests. Yet clearly, this is not always the case.

So while machismo cannot be the only explanation for the anti-abortion posture in Chile, it is not entirely separable from the subject, either. Instead, it is quite possible that machista ideals will hinder the passage of Bachelet’s bill, especially if politicians, female and male alike, cast their votes, as Soto suggests they will, based on concerns about women having “free and irresponsible sex.”

Pro-“Life”? Taking Responsibility for Public Health “I know a friend who had an abortion,” Lya Rogers, the sociology student, tells me.

“We were able to get the pill and do it, but it was super difficult.” She mentions that they were able to find a manual to help them, but were nonetheless scared that something would go wrong. “If we had to go to a medical center for assistance, they could have arrested us,” she says.

According to Franz, studies estimate that between 50,000 and 150,000 clandestine abortions take place each year in Chile. Mayo, however, considers these statistics to be largely unreliable. “I don’t deny that there are cases, but [these numbers] are used a bit to sensitize people on the topic,” she says. “Chile, after Canada, is the country with the lowest maternal mortality rate in all of the Americas, including the United States.” Also acknowledging Chile’s low maternal mortality rate, Franz offers the possibility that clandestine abortion today is generally safe, in contrast with the cases of septic abortions infamous for filling up hospitals in the 1970s. “But this trivializes the problem,” he continues, “because in the day-to-day, there are a lot [of clandestine abortions].” According to Chile’s Ministry of Health, abortion is nonetheless the third-highest cause of maternal mortality in the country.

Rogers recalls that when her friend had an abortion, obtaining the pill was extremely expensive. “If abortion becomes legal, it really won’t be made legal,” she says. “It will be made legal only for those who can access the resources.” Even today, The Gate | 9

Soto asserts, the cost of a safe procedure is extremely high, so women and girls with fewer resources often undergo procedures that put their health at risk. Earlier this year, a video campaign surfaced in Chile showcasing “tutorials” on how to self-in-

70% of Chileans

support the reform project duce abortions—including throwing oneself down a stairwell or into traffic—in an attempt to raise awareness about the dangerous reality of clandestine abortions. Nonetheless, Franz maintains that based only on statistics, the public health argument to legalize abortion doesn’t hold much weight. While the risk undoubtedly exists, it is possible that illegal practices are generally secure, statistics on clandestine abortions are misleadingly high, or Chilean women are generally lucky.

In its open petition to Congress, the FEUC argues that “abortion will never be a legitimate option … abortion doesn’t solve anything.” But is there a solution to the fact that women and girls put their health and lives at risk to avoid motherhood? Mayo offers one: “I believe that the solution … is to accompany women who have a difficult pregnancy, to give them all available services of support, not only when they are having their child, but afterward, to care for it.” At Universidad Católica, the FEUC proposed such a program this year called Humanizar. One of its aims is to support mothers and fathers who attend the university, of which there are about 1,500, by providing them with postnatal and child care, medical coverage, and more academic flexibility so that having a child is less of a barrier to completing their studies. According to Mayo, only 16 percent of Chilean students who became parents during adolescence have entered or completed higher education.

Muñoz also tells me about a program at Universidad Católica’s medical center she has worked in called Acompañar-es, a program dedicated to helping women with inviable fetuses. In this program, mothers are provided with doctors, psychologists, physiotherapists, midwives, and spiritual support from the moment of diagnosis, not only to help them accept the death of their child, but also to give them the chance to be a mother for the short duration of the infant’s life. They 10 | The Gate

are encouraged to name, take photos of, and baptize their child after birth. Muñoz reports that Acompañar-es, which has had about twenty-six patients, has so far been a success. In contrast with studies which suggest that mothers who decide to abort an inviable fetus often struggle with mental health issues afterward, none of the twenty-six mothers involved in the Acompañar-es program showed signs of depression or post-traumatic stress six months after their infants’ deaths. “All of them referred to their experience as very strengthening, and many ended up having more children afterward,” Muñoz tells me. The Humanizar proposal also seeks to extend the Acompañar-es program to victims of rape.

Mayo acknowledges that it makes little sense to oppose abortion but abandon mothers who are having a difficult time or don’t want their children. FEUC’s petition asks Chile’s congress not just to reject the decriminalization of abortion, but also to “take responsibility for supporting women and families who have complicated pregnancies.” Perhaps this is one manner in which Chile could become what the petition deems a “society that always respects the life and dignity of all.”

A C hanging C hile ?

“If it were a matter of public opinion,” Rogers says, “abortion would be legalized,” with polls suggesting that over 70 percent of Chileans support the reform project. Franz tells me that today the case to decriminalize abortion is viewed primarily as a matter of women’s rights. The Confederation of Chilean Students (Confech), a student organization representing nearly all Chilean universities, writes in its declaration of support for the reform that it would allow for the advancement “of sexual, reproductive, and health-related human rights—rights that for years have been denied to women.”

Bachelet, upon the release of the reform proposal, stated, “When [a woman’s] decision is to not continue a pregnancy [in one of the three cases outlined in the bill], the State should offer alternatives founded on [her] rights, dignity, and protection of her life.” However, while Muñoz acknowledges that “women obviously have sexual and reproductive rights,” she believes that these rights only include the use of contraceptive methods, stopping short of abortion. She asks me where I stand on the

abortion issue, and I tell her my honest answer: I wouldn’t want to be a mother right now and if I were to become pregnant, I would want the choice not to become one.

“You can’t say that you don’t want to be a mother,” she replies, laughing, “because [from the moment of conception] you already are a mother!”

But things are changing in Chile. Both Franz and Rogers mention that the current generation has an increasingly feminist attitude and is more sexually liberal than past generations. Importantly, today’s young people have also not been affected by the dictatorship in the same way their parents were. “There is much less fear [now] to express that you don’t believe something,” Rogers says. During the dictatorship, to participate in a political demonstration was to risk a beating from a policeman, if not capture and torture as a political prisoner. In contrast, in recent years, countless young people have marched down Santiago’s main streets in protest about issues such as abortion.

According to Rogers, the generation currently holding political power is still very much influenced by the dictatorship. “I believe that when I am thirty years old, things are going to be completely different,” she says. “When we fill the government positions, [our generation is] going to be the change.”

But for now, Rogers says, it worries her that although Chile is a developed nation in terms of its economy, education, and overall mentality, it is still repressive and behind in terms of liberty and women’s rights. However, what the rest of the world believes does not bother Mayo. “I am sure that in this moment, we are in the correct place,” she affirms.

“It is something worth defending … It is defending persons.”

FEUC writes to Congress that the decision they will have to make could “radically change the Chile in which we live and in which our children will live.” This much, as least, seems undeniable.

This article was originally published on November 15, 2015. Since then, the reform project has been advanced: in March 2016, it was approved by the Chamber of Deputies; it now awaits approval from Chile’s Senate.

Hôpital Avicenne

AND THE PARADOXES OF MODERN FRANCE

BY CHELSEA FINE

T

he emergency room waiting area at l’Hôpital Avicenne is filled with orange chairs, one of which is occupied by a man in khaki pants who appears to be awaiting news about a loved one. It is eight o’clock in the morning, and a few doctors and nurses in scrubs are gathered in a nearby lab to discuss cases from last night’s shift. Outside of the quiet waiting room, there is a large hallway through which patients are transported on beds and in wheelchairs to rooms where they can be seen by a doctor.

Down this hallway to the left is a tiny

room where a doctor sits on-call to help sick immigrants receive medical care for symptoms of minor illnesses, such as the flu or a small infection. For many immigrants who lack health insurance, a public hospital is the only place where they can receive care for these types of ailments. However, the doctors who treat them in this tiny room are not obligated to see these individuals separately. Immigrants could be asked to go through the triage system like every other patient, sitting for hours in orange chairs, waiting for their names to be called. Yet

the doctors have decided to remain on call and provide timely care. “We’re not going to punish them,” Doctor VinhKim Nguyen says.

Nguyen works in the emergency room of a hospital that “has always had a reputation for being different.” Originally called l’Hôpital Franco-Musulman, the French-Muslim hospital, Avicenne is a témoin—witness—to France’s recent history and serves immigrants struggling to make their way in a new country. This hospital links two worlds: the places in northern Africa from which immigrants The Gate | 11

flee, and France, their new home. It unites people with France while reminding them of their differences, showing, Nguyen says, the contradictory ways in which “France takes in people, even though it excludes them.”

“M onopolizing the B eds P arisian H ospitals ”

in

According to Paris’s Museum of the History of Immigration, the Franco-Muslim Hospital opened in 1935 as immigrants began flocking from France’s North African colonies—Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, which form the Maghreb—to France during the interwar years. These immigrants, too poor to live in Paris and without resources from the state, resorted to building homes in slums outside the capital. There they began to fall victim to tuberculosis, alerting authorities to the public health risk that these communities posed to the rest of Paris without proper health care. Fearing that sick immigrants would “monopolize” the beds in Parisian hospitals, health authorities commissioned a new hospital to be built specifically for this patient population. The Parisian government refused to sponsor the project, so the Franco-Muslim Hospital was built outside the city, in the suburb of Bobigny.

The hospital was designed by a group of French architects, including Maurice Mantout, who designed the Grand Mosque of Paris, and Léon Azéma, who was named Architect of the City of Paris and was instrumental in designing the Exposition Universelle de Paris in 1937.

This hospital, along with housing, other clinics, and a police force, was created for “surveillance, protection, and assistance” under Pierre Godin, the president of the Conseil Municipal de Paris. It operated under a “colonial” system of management: the staff was trained to speak Arabic and Kabyle, and the hospital’s procedures conformed to Islamic custom. Meals, for example, were served without pork. Yet many of the patients that this hospital intended to serve felt they were being quarantined and stigmatized; in 1937, nearly six hundred Algerians refused hospitalization in Bobigny.

During World War II, German occupying forces took control of the hospital. After the war ended, the French government opened the hospital to all 12 | The Gate

patients in Bobigny and surrounding communities as France experienced a population boom during the 1950s. In 1962, the hospital opened to women and became affiliated with the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris—the

“This hospital links two worlds” conglomerate of public hospitals operating in Paris and surrounding banlieues, or suburbs. Once a member of the public hospital system, Avicenne was scrubbed of its religious affiliation.

Four years later, it became a university hospital as new buildings dedicated to different specialized medical services were built. As the hospital continued to grow, it was renamed l’Hôpital Avicenne in tribute to physician, philosopher, and poet Ibn Sina, who used poetry to teach medical knowledge to his students in the eleventh century.

Despite bearing a name that honors a great Muslim thinker and doctor, the religious concerns that defined this hospital’s founding have been glossed over since its secularization in 1962. Now a fully secular institution providing healthcare to an underserved religious population, Avicenne has been at the forefront of defining and redefining laïcité, France’s deeply embedded principle of separation of church and state.

“I t ’ s N ot J ust a C ultural I dea , R ight ? I M ean , it ’ s L aw ”: L a L aïcité Worried about Catholicism’s influence in state affairs and inspired by the revolution that had taken place just over a century before, the French government codified the principle of laïcité on December 9, 1905. The new law aimed to “sharply [delineate] the realms of Caesar and God.” Article I of the French Constitution states, “La République assure

la liberté de conscience. Elle garantit le libre exercice des cultes sous les seules restrictions édictées dans l’intérêt de l’ordre public”—“The Republic ensures freedom of conscience. She guarantees the free exercise of worship under only such restrictions as are enacted in the interest of public order.”

In theory, laïcité, which does not translate well into English, grants all citizens religious freedom. In a man’s private life, he can practice whatever religion he chooses, or no religion at all; in the eyes of the state, however, he is just French. The government argues that this law is applied equally to all religions, and to a certain extent, this is true. For example, the president does not take the oath of office using a Bible and schools cannot stage nativity plays, although Easter Monday, Ascension Day, Whit Monday, and Christmas Day are all national bank holidays.

In practice, however, laïcité has alienated religious minorities as France has become increasingly diverse. Many feel that French enforcement of laïcité has disproportionately affected the country’s Muslim population. As the New York Times notes, “Islam does not easily accept the ban on the public exercise of religion, whether it is the full veil for women or gender-mixed swimming pools, Friday prayer that overcrowds mosques or halal food in schools.” Specifically, France’s recent controversial “burqa ban,” which bars Muslim women from wearing burqas and niqabs in public places, has been seen as a secularizing law that has unfairly targeted Muslim women.

Rigid religious secularism permeates French society in a way unseen in the United States. According to Angeline Escafré-Dublet, a political science professor at Sciences Po in Paris, young women in public schools wear headscarves to school in the morning and walk straight to the restroom, where they promptly remove them before attending class.

L’I slam

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“N euf T rois ”—I slam N inety -T hird

in

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This tension between public and private is ever present in Nguyen’s work at Avicenne, as he serves a religious patient population in a hospital that does not recognize religiosity. Located in the

notorious ninety-third Seine-Saint-Denis department in France, Bobigny is a “symbol of the underserved suburb,” serving poor members of minority groups, many of whom are immigrants from the Maghreb and other parts of the Middle East and Africa.

Though the French government specifically bans censuses from polling ethnic affiliation and religious belief, an estimated five million Muslims live

Avicenne. “The medical problem is very much a result of the social issues,” he said.

Avicenne is one of three hospitals that serves undocumented patients, so in addition to running an on-call room for these individuals, it also has social workers who try to get people papers they need for proper documentation.

Yet according to Nguyen, the problem is greater than determining whether

“Nearly one-third of Muslim immigrants in Europe live in France” in the country, making up just over 7 percent of the population. According to the Brookings Institution, between 35 and 40 percent of French Muslims live in neighborhoods like Bobigny on the outskirts of Paris, where they make up between 10 and 15 percent of the local population. According to Nguyen, over 150,000 individuals near the hospital lack any sort of documentation.

Approximately one-third of Muslim immigrants in Europe reside in France, making it, on paper, the most accepting country of Muslim immigrants in the European Union. Yet the Muslim population in France is not monolithic: French Muslims come from different countries and speak different languages.

However, Brookings found that “what Muslims in France increasingly do have in common is their ‘lived experience.’”

The Muslim French identity has been shaped by racism and microaggressions, the ghettoization of the suburbs, and a lack of social services and other resources.

Bobigny and other underserved suburbs have become places where “drug dealers compete with career advisers to recruit teenagers.” Crime is high, tourists stay away, and residents are shunned by their Parisian neighbors, who reside just thirty-two minutes away by Metro.

A P ost -C olonial H istory It is within this historical, political, and demographic context that Nguyen and his colleagues tend to sick patients at

a patient has papers; three-fourths of the hospital’s patients have specific religious needs, and many do not speak French or English. More importantly, due to laïcité, French law prevents these patients from receiving culturally and religiously sensitive care.

In a conference room with boxes of Ebola suits and Christmas decorations tucked away in the corner, Nguyen explained that public medicine in France needs to be secular while also serving a patient’s individual needs. He and his colleagues are working on methods that optimize individualized care while adhering to laïcité.

A psychiatrist, who asked not to be named in this article, discussed “transcultural psychiatry,” a new method of medicine in France that emphasizes sensitivity to the cultural differences between immigrant patients and French doctors when treating mental health illnesses. “When you have someone coming from another cultural context, you need someone to translate, not just the language, but the entire process,” he said in French, as Nguyen translated.

For some patients, this hospital is one of the first places they see in France.

Nguyen and his colleague describe the “severe trauma” many immigrants face during the perilous journey to Europe, which manifests in what they call “culture-bound syndromes.” They have cared for a child soldier, a woman who thought she was cursed, and a man who was convinced that witches had followed him to France. When working with pa-

tients, Avicenne doctors will collaborate with traditional healers, translators, and other mediators to ensure patients are “more informed” and feel comfortable with the treatments prescribed to them.

This new approach to psychiatry is controversial, as it highlights aspects of personal identity that the French government has long sought to exclude from the public sphere. Many French citizens believe that this type of personalized care is racist. Yet in a part of Paris that is deeply suspicious of the French government but relies on its services for survival, this sort of culturally aware medicine is key.

With a thick grey beard and warm smile, the psychiatrist is, like two-thirds of the hospital staff, a Muslim who fasts every year during Ramadan. Yet he is also the man who must patrol the hallways of the hospital to ensure religion is absent—if he sees someone using a prayer rug on the floor, he must ask that person to exit the building and pray elsewhere. According to Nguyen, the hospital does employ a priest, an imam, and a rabbi to administer last rites, but beyond this, it can do nothing about patient religiosity, even during times of illness and death, when religion and prayer can be one’s only comfort.

“T he I dea

of

T otal E quality ”

As laïcité celebrates its 110th anniversary this December, Nguyen and his colleagues continue to walk the line between providing transcultural care and respecting laïcité. Their work sits at the foreground of France’s debate about how to treat immigrants and religious minorities and grapple with the country’s colonial past. “The colonial heritage of this hospital is swept under the rug,” Nguyen said, “because it offends the idea of total equality.”

Yet the remnants of that heritage are more evident now than ever before. The shooters responsible for twelve deaths at Charlie Hebdo and five deaths a day later at a Jewish supermarket came from the very neighborhood where Avicenne operates. According to Nguyen, “they were as French as French can be.”

This article was originally published on September 21, 2015.

The Gate | 13

Cautious Optimism for Pakistan An Interview with Husain Haqqani

By Hamza Shad and Kevin Shi Gate: During your political career, you worked in Pakistan’s government in several capacities and ultimately served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States from 2008 to 2011. Tell us more about your tenure as ambassador and what you think of that experience.

Haqqani: I think I served Pakistan well at a very difficult time. When I became ambassador, Pakistan’s stock in Washington was relatively low. General Pervez Musharraf’s military dictatorship had become an American military ally again, this time ostensibly to combat terrorism. But by 2007, it had become obvious that his government was playing a double game of supporting some jihadi terrorists fighting in Afghanistan and against India, while weeding out some others. So Americans were very suspicious of Pakistan and its double game. The elected government asked me to serve, and I came in with a clear mandate from the civilian government to reassure the United States that Pakistan will fight terrorism, not because we want to do it for America and to get aid, but because we want to do it for the sake of Pakistan. I was always desirous of strengthening Pakistan’s democracy, so it was an opportunity to serve.

It was a difficult time in many ways because Pakistan’s military, although no longer directly controlling the government after Musharraf, still exerted a lot of indirect influence and remained the power behind the scenes. The military did not like me, partly because I had written a book exposing its links with Islamists and making the argument that it was too large for the size of Pakistan. I worked very amicably with the military leaders while serving as ambassador, but I knew deep down that they did not agree with my personal worldview and had reservations about me.

On the other hand, I had good access in Washington—I was able to talk to a lot of people who otherwise would not have had time for the Pakistani ambassador or the Pakistani embassy. I was able to negotiate greater American support for Pakistan’s civilian government. The United States offered Pakistan the largest civilian aid package ever. In the past, more aid had been given to the military than for civilian purposes, but this time, the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009 assured Pakistan $1.5 billion every year for five years, totalling $7.5 billion for healthcare, education, infrastruc14 | The Gate

ture development, and disaster management—things that had been ignored under military rule in the past. The military did not like the language of the bill, but I support the argument that the US needs to support Pakistan’s civil society more than it needs to support Pakistan’s military. Anyway, I think that bill was positive for Pakistan—it proved to be very useful when Pakistan was hit by historic floods in 2010 and millions of people were uprooted. Pakistan simply didn’t have the resources to care for them. The American assistance came in handy.

Politically, I was able to make the case that the civilian leaders of Pakistan should not be marginalized, that even though American officials tended to talk to the Pakistani military directly, they should not completely marginalize the civilians. Things changed considerably after Osama bin Laden’s discovery in Pakistan; the Pakistani military mounted greater pressure on the civilian government and eventually forced me to resign. But I think as a whole, the three-and-a-half years I served as ambassador were a good time for me, for the position that I served, and for the government that I represented. It was also a good time for US-Pakistan relations in many ways.

Gate: On that note, can you talk a little bit about being the formal head diplomat of Pakistan in the United States, but actually being just one arm of Pakistani diplomacy in the US—the civilian arm?

Haqqani: As ambassador, I discovered that I was not conducting bilateral diplomacy between Pakistan and the United States, but was part of a “triangular” diplomacy involving Pakistan’s elected civilian government, Pakistan’s military, and the US. The US has systems in place whereby the CIA and the military do not act on their own—they respond to civilian oversight. In Pakistan, the Pakistani intelligence service and military are largely independent and far more powerful. There was a lot of push-and-pull in Pakistan at that time as the military tried to clip the civilian government’s wings in conducting foreign policy. The government that I served wanted better relations with India, a more robust posture against terrorism, and closer ties with the United States. The military wanted close ties with the US only to the extent of wanting aid and military equipment. They certainly did not want to give up their

dream of having Afghanistan as part of Pakistan’s sphere of influence, and they were very reluctant to make moves in normalizing relations with India that did not take care of their interests as an institution. So in the beginning, all branches of the American government preferred to go through me and the civilian government, but once they realized that the civilian government was relatively weak and could not always keep its promises, they also started directly negotiating a number of things with the intelligence and military leadership.

While I was ambassador, I made it a point to at least be in the know. I told my American counterparts that if you want to talk to the military separately, I can’t stop you, but you need to take me into confidence as to what you are talking about with them, so that the Pakistani civilian leaders at least know what the military and Americans are committing to one another. Because after all, it is not an institution making a commitment; it’s a country making a commitment. And that was not always easy.

Gate: Speaking of the relationship between Pakistan and the United States, US officials have called Pakistan both America’s “most allied ally” and an “international migraine” at different points in history. Why has it been, at times, such a difficult relationship to manage?

Haqqani: Pakistan’s circumstances of birth were such that it lacked the historical and political identity that its much larger neighbor India had. Pakistanis always felt insecure about India. From inception, they thought that India wanted to finish off Pakistan. Pakistan got 33 percent of British India’s army but only 17 percent of its revenue services. All of these factors made Pakistan seek an international ally that would make Pakistan feel secure on the one hand and make up for Pakistan’s lack of economic depth and resources for maintaining a large military on the other. Most countries raise a military to match the threat that they face. In the case of Pakistan, it started out with a military and then raised the threat to match the size of that military.

The United States was looking for allies against communism. Pakistan offered itself as an ally, and the Americans gratefully accepted that after an initial few years of reluctance. And then neither side looked back. But the relationship was always based on false pretenses. The Pakistanis were pretending to be concerned about America’s primary concerns. Yes, Pakistan did not want communism to succeed, but there was no immediate threat or danger to Pakistan from communism. So Pakistan’s military buildup was not against communists; it was against India. The Americans, on the other hand, were bluffing themselves that if only they gave Pakistan more aid and assistance, they would be able to bring Pakistan around to helping them. In between, Pakistan did help America with intelligence gathering, running U-2 flights out of Peshawar, and allowing them to spy on China from East Pakistan, but that was not what the Americans originally expected. Similarly, the US could not come to Pakistan’s assistance the way Pakistanis wanted in the wars Pakistan initiated in 1965 and 1971. So the fundamental lack of congruence of interests is what has made this relationship go through its various ups and downs. Americans often find it convenient to have Pakistan as an ally because they can get several specific transactional advantages, just like they got during the 1960s in the form of the U-2 flights over the Soviet Union, and, more recently, as a partner in gathering intelligence and occasionally detaining, arresting, and handing over al-Qaeda suspects.

But that said, Pakistan’s priority is conflict with India. America’s priorities are global. The question is, can Pakistan continue to pursue policies that do not support America’s global objectives while performing specific favors for the US and continuing to receive American assistance? I think that that is unsustainable over the long term. Pakistan has already received $40 billion in civil and military assistance since 1950. Compare that to South Korea or Taiwan, where far less assistance helped catalyze major economic success.

Pakistan has ended up only with greater dependency, less of a sense of secu-

rity, and far too many internal problems. The way I foresee the US-Pakistan relationship going is that it will continue to be a transactional relationship in which the Americans will give Pakistan due favors in return for Pakistan’s favors to the United States. But the divergence of interests between the two countries will also continue.

Gate: Looking at Pakistan’s foreign policy, India is clearly the most important country of consideration, as you mentioned. Although these two countries are known for their contentious rivalry, what do you think their respective goals should be for a more open and productive bilateral relationship?

Haqqani: The problem with India-Pakistan relations has been the notion that they need to solve their conflicts before they can have normal relations. Historic experience shows that most countries have done much better when they have normalized relations as a means of solving disputes. Pakistan and India have an unresolved dispute in Kashmir, and they have some other issues of border demarcation, etcetera. But those issues should not stop the two countries from trade, from normal travel between their peoples, and from increased educational exchange. The reason why we have not reached that point is because there are ideologues in India who insist that Pakistan is India’s enemy so there should be no concession made, ever, to Pakistan. In Pakistan’s case, the Pakistani military, as well as most political forces in Pakistan, believe that India is a permanent and eternal enemy of Pakistan. They see Pakistan as an ideological state, and what is the core of that ideology? Separateness from India. There is a strong religious component to it. There is a desire to somehow be more closely attached to the Middle East than South Asia even though historically and culturally, Pakistan is deeply connected to India. In an environment like that, it is just not possible to talk rationally of normal relations.

Gate: Do you think the relationship will change as India becomes a more ambitious power on the global stage?

Haqqani: I think that at the moment, Pakistan’s military is worried about India’s rise rather than looking at it as an opportunity. Pakistan could actually benefit from India’s economic growth by trading more with India, but that is not how most Pakistanis see India. They see their enemy as growing and becoming more powerful. The fact still remains that Pakistan cannot sustain competition with India endlessly. At the time of partition, Pakistan had about 19 percent of the population and 17 percent of the resources, but 33 percent of the military. Over time, the gap between the Pakistani and Indian militaries has widened, and as India’s economic prowess increases, India’s ability to buy better military equipment globally will also increase. Instead of meaningless competition with a neighbor, Pakistan should think about having normal, friendly relations with a neighbor with whom it will always be a neighbor.

Gate: Overall, would you describe yourself as an optimist for the Pakistani state and civil society?

Haqqani: I am a very cautious optimist who wants to continue to struggle for a stronger Pakistani civil society and for complete control of civilians over the military. Pakistani civil society is not dead. In some areas, it is very robust. The real issue is, should Pakistan remain a warrior state where the military prevails, whether through popularity, manipulation, or direct control, or should major decisions of war, peace, and national policy be made by those who are elected to make those decisions? I want the latter and am willing to struggle for it.

This interview was originally published on December 4, 2015. It has been edited and condensed for publication in print.

The Gate | 15

MIXED MESSAGES POWER AND SPECTACLE IN AN UNCERTAIN CHINA

by Elaine Yao

F

rom the sweat beading on president Xi Jinping’s forehead to the eerily deserted streets of central Beijing, there was something curiously joyless about the mercilessly sunny morning of China’s much-hyped military parade. Indeed, the September 3rd parade, which commemorated the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, was planned down to the minute with an exacting precision that left no room for spontaneity. Despite a media frenzy in the days preceding the parade that aimed to fire up public excitement and encourage nationalism, the event seemed wholly detached from the people themselves. While many Chinese expressed positive opinions of the parade, the government seemed more interested in keeping them away than allowing them to participate.

As I watched the parade on television along with the vast majority of China’s population, I was struck by the emptiness of Tiananmen Square, which struck a stark contrast to images from other iconic moments in China’s history: Mao Zedong fierily ad-

16 | The Gate

dressing cheering crowds from the balcony of Tiananmen, the student protests and subsequent crackdown of 1989. In those images, central Beijing teemed with people, radiating an electric excitement, a sense of happening.

Now, in the same place where Mao shook hands with ecstatic workers from his armored vehicle during the military parades of the 1960s, Xi stayed well clear of the perfectly disciplined troops who lined the roads. He addressed them only with the conventional “Greetings, comrades!” and “Comrades, you have worked hard,” his monotone amplified by a crackling megaphone. I was almost disappointed, bored: for all the supermodern missiles that rolled past in drab camouflage paint, the parade felt curiously sterile. For the entire week, the city had operated in a state of partial lockdown: markets and roadside vendors were banned from the streets, and throngs of temporary security guards lined every corner.

Even as I followed the crowds that spilled onto the streets after the parade, hoping to catch a glimpse of the troops and new weap-

onry up close, the government’s paranoia was palpable. Security forces screamed at any person who began to step onto the curb or press against the yellow tape. Residents who lived in close proximity to the planned route were forbidden from having guests, opening windows, or leaving their buildings during the duration of the parade. Never before had living in Beijing felt so much like living in a police state. Why, I wondered, was Beijing so obsessed with the possibility of something going wrong, so fearful that one of their own would interrupt their perfect show? China’s faultless show of power unintentionally exposed Beijing’s anxieties and the risks of putting on a spectacle at such a sensitive moment.

Certainly, the China of 2015 is much changed from the China of 2009, the year of the most recent military parade, and is nearly unrecognizable as the nation that experienced the tumult of the Mao and Deng eras before its breakneck rise to economic stardom. China doesn’t put on military parades on a regular basis: the last two were held in

2009, for the 60th anniversary of the PRC’s founding, and in 1999, to commemorate the turn of the century. The timing of this military parade was particularly striking, given the recent stock market crash and chemical explosions in Tianjin, which happened merely seventy miles away. Placed in the context of those events, the military parade seemed to emphasize failings in governance. Beijing, it appeared, was unwilling to allocate resources to ensure the safety of its citizens and the stability of its economy, but spent heavily to put on a lavish military show. Even while the government was spending on custom-fitted uniforms for every soldier, it couldn’t contain the hazardous chemicals lurking in China’s biggest cities.

When it comes to putting on a good face for international observers, Beijing spares no expense. As I drove through a far-flung northern suburb of Beijing two weeks before the parade, I passed by a long section of thick, camouflage-patterned walls that stood several meters high. With guards stationed at strategic checkpoints, gates, and watchtowers, the formidable barrier resembled a surreal modern-day Great Wall. Straining to glimpse something behind the tightly sealed gates, I could only see a wide expanse of stone-paved space. When I asked my companions what in the world they were guarding, they laughed and told me that it was a 1:1 replica of Tiananmen Square that was being used to carry out rehearsals for the parade. Dumbstruck, I expressed my surprise that Beijing would spend the money to rebuild Tiananmen Square simply for the purpose of rehearsing.

“Oh,” they said, apparently surprised by my ignorance of common knowledge. “They do this for every military parade.” However, with the world’s standards for Chinese behavior and responsibilities changing, is it a good idea for Beijing to simply repeat what worked in the past?

Connections with the past were on full display during the parade, which was political theater at its finest. Despite rumors that President Xi was at odds with previous leaders and suspicions that he was looking to oust their supporters, both Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, as well as a host of former premiers, appeared on Tiananmen alongside him. It was fitting for an atmosphere of old-school socialist glory. The Communist Party was evidently aiming to display a strong and unified front, quelling rumors about the internal rifts and power struggles allegedly destabilizing the party from within. Nonetheless, seeing the architects of China’s rise arrayed on one stage prompted me to wonder what

elements of “traditional” CPC governance would be preserved and what changes would need to be made if there were to be more of these extravaganzas in the country’s future.

Since the last parade, China’s relations with its neighbors and the wider international community have become increasingly close but also increasingly strained. While China has made progress with economic liberalization, significant parts of its political and economic systems remain closed and opaque. The government has been selective in regards to what it exports and imports, causing some to complain that it has been leveraging its own position at the cost of others who are playing fair. Analysis and concerns over China’s recent currency devaluation, which made international headlines days before the parade in August, exemplified this concern. For China to fully integrate into international trade and financial systems, it has to learn to play by the rules—which sometimes means sacrificing its own advantage. It’s unclear whether the CPC is ready to do that yet, particularly when the Chinese economy is beginning to falter. As concerns over increasing Chinese investment in Africa and South America demonstrate, the international community is still wary of the environmental and social consequences of Chinese businesses investing abroad, typically with government encouragement.

Economic governance aside, the increase in Chinese interference beyond its borders has been causing concerns for its neighbors. Some have interpreted the parade as a signal that Beijing will continue to focus on projecting its power overseas, a fear of many Western countries that have watched China’s expansion into the South China Sea and the resulting tensions with Japan, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Of the countries that marched in the military parade—most notably Russia, but also Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, and Mongolia— few were American allies. Many were countries sandwiched between Russia and China that could afford to affront neither power.

Despite Xi Jinping’s surprise announcement at the parade that military personnel would be reduced by 300,000, there was no indication that China’s military capabilities would be weakening. Indeed, many of the newly unveiled weapons demonstrated surprising capabilities that caused reverberations throughout the international defense community, including a “carrier-killer” missile that can change direction and hone in on a target while in orbit. However, several Chinese citizens who spoke with me insisted

that tensions with countries, particularly the Philippines and Japan, were instigated by the other countries while China was simply defending territories and resources to which it held a legitimate claim.

Despite its efforts to strengthen its international presence, the CPC can’t shelve its numerous domestic issues. As Chinese citizens’ incomes rise, so do their expectations.

Gleaming malls, stadiums, and skyscrapers are impressive, but they do little to correct deeper underlying problems with serious long-term effects. As the consequences of these problems come to light in the form of of stark income inequality, deserted “ghost cities,” and tumbling stocks, the CPC must commit to making changes if China is to continue growing. The military parade may only have acted as an especially spectacular skyscraper that diverted attention from the challenges that lie ahead, bathing the country in a glow of nationalistic pride and implying that the true blame for the country’s troubles lies abroad, in Japan and the United States.

Blaming the outside world is the oldest strategy in the CPC’s book. But as the glow of the military parade fades and China becomes increasingly tied to other major world economies, anti-Japanese sentiment may begin to lose its edge.

As CCTV’s monopoly on news weakens, and the state television broadcaster simply becomes a mouthpiece for the Party, capturing the attention of all Chinese for any sustained period of time is no longer a simple task. These days, real news appears first on microblogs and social media sites like Sina Weibo and WeChat. One Chinese joked to me that it had been pointless to get up early to watch the 10 a.m. parade, as all state television channels were simply looping the footage for the rest of the day. Despite the huge cost and effort that went into perfecting those short three hours of glory, the real news of the summer, both inside and outside of China, was the stock market collapse, currency devaluation, and shocking industrial accidents. The military parade was meant to exhibit strength, stability, and power. However, against this backdrop of uncertainty, transition, and dissatisfaction, it may indeed have exposed the paradoxes and challenges of daily life and governance in a country that carefully chooses the face it reveals to the outside world.

This article was originally published on October 18, 2015.

The Gate | 17

An Interview with Jon Huntsman

By Haley Schwab and Liz Stark The Gate: How important is our diplomatic relationship with China, and how do you think we can leverage this relationship in order to strengthen ties with global and regional powers?

Jon Huntsman: Well I would define it as the most important bilateral relationship in the world. That’s not going to change any time soon. In fact, as the twenty-first century plays out, it will become even more important for reasons that I think are widely visible, whether economic, security, people-to-people, or dealing with regional issues like North Korea. It is inconceivable that just the United States can make movement on the important issues of the day— whether it is Africa, the Middle East, debt in Europe, security on the Korean Peninsula—without having some sort of collaborative relationship with China, whether you like that or not. Let’s just start with that premise, so you have to make it work. Failure is not an option. The world suffers as a result. I have always thought, and I practiced as a diplomat, the idea that you have to have a comprehensive relationship with China that engages them at a lot of different levels on the issues that matter most. People say, “Gee, things aren’t working out on trade, maybe we just impose a tariff and settle it out.” What people don’t realize is that a lot of these issues are intertwined, whether it’s getting their cooperation on the Korean Peninsula, whether it’s trade, whether it’s intellectual property protection, whether it’s human rights, whether it’s third-party conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa. They are all kind of intertwined. To get any kind of cooperation at all, you have to have a mix of different issues that become your priority. You can’t do one-off things and expect it to come out favorably. So we need to do a better job at developing a broad, comprehensive, global agenda with China. Because it isn’t simply a bilateral relationship anymore. It really is a global relationship. I think it is the only such relationship we have ever managed at the global level, which is to say that the stuff we talk about when we’re together goes beyond just the bilateral. It is not easy because we’ve never done anything like that before. But that’s how we need to proceed.

Gate: If you could prioritize some of the top issues that you would like to see us work together with China to resolve, such as cybersecurity, how would you rank those priorities?

Huntsman: I would say that cybersecurity, and including in that intellec18 | The Gate

tual property theft—which probably costs us $300 billion a year, which we don’t think about in those terms, but what it wipes out of our own economy is huge—that cluster of issues, I absolutely agree with you. That is today, or will quickly emerge as, the premier issue of our bilateral relationship. I think number two is probably regional security, for example, with North Korea and nuclear proliferation. And third, the islands—which present a real hazard in the global commons—that could spiral out of control without any kind of de-escalation capability. That’s how conflicts that you can’t back away from begin.

Gate: This past summer cyber security became a major issue following the Office of Personnel Management hacks. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security confirmed that they have reason to believe that China was behind the attacks. How do you think this affects US-China relations, and if you were currently the ambassador, how would you proceed and deal with these types of conflicts?

Huntsman: Well it was an espionage coup for China. You have to think, if we had been on the other side and able to get the same information, would we have done the same thing? This is the tit-for-tat relationship we have, whether people see it or not. I mean, we hit each other all the time. On both sides, we have sophisticated means by which to do it. But shame on us for letting that happen! I don’t think we can complain that China did it—of course they are going to do that kind of thing. But we should have been smarter in terms of having more of a firewall protecting information like the SF-86 forms [that contain government employees’ personal information]. I got mine ripped off, my wife got hers ripped off, my son in the Navy got his ripped off. Our whole family was cleaned out by this. We all got notes from OPM basically saying, “We’re very sorry to inform you, but your SF-86 was taken.” It doesn’t take much in terms of algorithm support to sort through who is who in government and what they’re doing. So it was a huge espionage coup for China. But this is going to go on and on. We are going to poke, and they are going to poke. At some point, you have to make the pain such that it stings more to steal than not steal, that the price you have to pay for engaging in this kind of behavior is too high. But right now, you can do it effortlessly and you can rip stuff off and there are no consequences. There are no rules of the road. There is no world trade organization or international something-or-other that says, here are the

rules and here are the punishments if you violate those rules. It just doesn’t exist.

So at some point, we are going to have to look at establishing rules of the road for something as new as cyberspace. And then determine what the punishment will be if people cross certain boundaries. All the while—and we are very good at doing this as a country, by the way—we need to develop technology in the form of countermeasures that can be used. We are perfectly capable of staying ahead in this race to protect our most important, sensitive information. So we should have a parallel track—rules of the road, but at the same time, devise new technology that would serve as a form of countermeasure against that kind of attack.

Gate: As a follow-up, given recent news of Apple and Tim Cook challenging federal rulings about releasing data from terrorists’ phones, how do you see that affecting not only domestic issues, but also our international security?

Huntsman: Personal privacy is a big thing in this country. The rest of the world knows it, I think they respect us for it, and I think they would like to aspire to that same level of privacy for their own citizens. But you have big state-run media operations and propaganda departments that make it virtually impossible in most countries. I think we wipe out something that is so sacred to this country and most Americans—and that is the issue of privacy—if we create new back doors and surrender to the government. If it comes down to either security or privacy, that’s almost a false choice. Of course, we all want to have a secure environment. But I think if the government prevails in this suit, we lose the sweet spot at which we’ve resided for so long, where we can talk to China and Russia, and at least sometimes Iran, about issues without looking like hypocrites. So if the government ultimately has control in the name of security over our content or communications or privacy, then I think we become farther and farther from that American ideal. This is a personal and emotional issue for a lot of people, even though we want the most secure environment we can find.

It’s a horrible choice and dichotomy to have to present to the American people as both sides of the debate are very emotional. But this gets right to the heart and soul of our values as Americans, whether you are Republican or Democrat.

Gate: Shifting gears a bit, the Institute of Politics hosted a film screening of the documentary All Eyes and Ears. In this film, you discussed how you feel that the United States has lost credibility because of its wars and unilateralism. Specifically, you said that as a superpower, there’s a “perception that we don’t take into account the concerns of others with whom we are doing business.” Do you still feel the same way? If so, how can we change or restore our nation’s credibility?

Huntsman: I think we have relied way too much on unilateralism and militarism. We have completely tossed aside the concept of diplomacy. We now have more musicians in the Defense Department—and I say this with both my sons being in the military—than we have diplomats in this country. Traditionally, wars have been fought when diplomats fail at their work, which is sitting at the negotiating table with people you don’t always agree with. It’s almost as if we don’t do that anymore. We don’t believe in sitting down with people we have differences with—we bomb them. And for whatever reason, and particularly since we went into Iraq fifteen years ago, this has been the predominant philosophy for many in this country. I am worried that the next generation is growing up with this military-first philosophy, that the United States can get in and punch somebody, bully them, and we’ll get our way. That’s not the way the world works! That’s maybe how it works on the presidential debate stage when you get people cheering you on. But that’s not the way the world works. The world is like a big family, and we are at the end of the table as the most powerful member of that family, maybe the one who controls the bank account. And everyone has different approaches to what they want for dinner, and not everyone is going to get their way. You’re going to have to go through negotiations to come to some middle ground on the issue of what you’re going to have

for dinner, or in the case of international diplomacy, things of much greater import. I think we’ve got a ways to go in terms of reorienting ourselves around a worldview that says, yes we want a very powerful military—the best in the world, and we have that today, as we are spending over $500 billion a year to get it—but we also want the best diplomats, who are the best trained and best able to get out there and preserve peace or create peace in hostile environments before we send men and women in to die. I don’t think we have exploited that option to the best of our abilities as a country. We used to do that, but we don’t do it as much anymore.

Gate: Why do you think that is?

Huntsman: I do think that 9/11 changed everything. We were hit in ways that we never expected. It left us reeling and numb to realize that we could be hit internally. Something that [German Chancellor] Bismarck used to say, “America is the luckiest country in the world. They have a country north of them that is weak, and one south of them that is weak. And fish on both sides.” We have impenetrable barriers and perfect geography here. So we have more flexibility, in terms of how we do foreign policy. We can make mistakes without it ending us. But most countries in the world don’t have that luxury. They are surrounded by, in some cases, a dozen nation states, some of them hostile and some with whom they’ve gone to war with in recent years. Very tense environments— you have religious splits, land and border disputes, history that is playing out in some ways in some regions of the world that have been very unfavorable.

Meanwhile, we have this perfect setting. And then came 9/11, and I think it shattered our sense of innocence. We hit back because we had to do something after that. But the choices we made were wrong, some of them, and resulted in wars that we should not have fought. And a reordering of the post-Ottoman Middle East that today is reeling from those choices and no closer to stability.

We used the military-first option post-9/11, as we should have, but we haven’t taken a step back to say that we need some diplomatic solutions too. The hard part about that is that to have diplomatic solutions, you actually have to talk to people you don’t get along with sometimes.

Gate: What would be your diplomatic analysis of the Iran nuclear deal?

Huntsman: My diplomatic analysis of the Iran deal is that I think it’s horrible that we are giving up $150 million in unfrozen assets without having any benchmarks that Iran is supposed to meet along the way. I am okay with unfreezing assets—we did it with Vietnam and China, and now with Cuba—but there’s got to be a sense of performance along the way. But that’s not written into the agreement. I can’t figure out for the life of me why we did not structure something that says, “OK, we are willing to take this journey because we’re all in favor of moving toward regional stability. You have your issues, and you are supporting people in the Middle East who have totally destabilized the region through Hezbollah and Hamas and Houthis in Yemen,” and we’ve got to figure out how to pull back from that. We have to have people at the table who can ultimately guide us to some peaceful outcome, which would include Saudi Arabia, Israel, Russia (who we don’t talk to), Iran (who we also don’t talk to), and probably China. They all have to be at a table together at some point. The Yalta and Potsdam conferences of a generation or two ago, they did that for a reason. That’s how you move the world. So I can see [in the Iran deal] that there’s this aspiration regionally, but in terms of the payoff and the way that [assets are] unlocked instantly, this is a huge mistake. It lessens the incentive for Iran to actually be on its best behavior, if it ever will be.

This interview was originally published on February 22, 2016. It has been edited and condensed for publication in print.

The Gate | 19

ALL EYES ON IOWA: AN INSIDE LOOK INTO THE CAUCUS EXPERIENCE

BY CHELSEA FINE, LIZ STARK, AND ASYA AKÇA

W

hen the Institute of Politics led a group of students to the 2016 Iowa Caucuses, the Gate sent three reporters to Des Moines.

Featuring interviews with local and state politicians, candidates’ family members, media personnel, and Iowans, this article captures the frenzy of the twenty-four hours leading up to the caucus, telling a story that is not about the politics or the victory speeches, but about the nature of the caucus itself.

20 | The Gate

C

hocolate chip cookies and bottles of water sit on a table in the corner of Des Moines Middle School gym as local Democrats stream inside to register to caucus on a cold February evening. Everyone files into their respective camps: Clinton supporters climb the bleachers on the right; Sanders voters take the bleachers on the left; and O’Malley caucus-goers sit at the table with the cookies.

For Iowa residents, voting for each party’s presidential nominee on Caucus Day is a family affair. The Democrats’ registration lines grow as voters, many of whom have been attending caucuses since childhood, wave at neighbors and hug friends. One young woman recalls that as a little girl, she used to be embarrassed to caucus for Republican candidates with her father. Now an eligible voter, she is proud to be supporting Bernie Sanders at her first caucus.

Another young woman cradles her infant, who can barely hold his head up, while a disgruntled father chases his toddler across the gymnasium. Six local and international reporters have their cameras trained on two young Sanders fans as they eagerly perform their “Go Bernie, Go Bernie, Go Bernie, Go!” chant and dance.

Not too far away, the local Republican party is beginning to caucus as well. Dozens of people have braved the threat of a major snowstorm to participate, and extra chairs need to be brought into the room to accommodate everyone. The caucus begins with the Pledge of Allegiance, but with no flag available, they make do with a University of Chicago student’s American flag tie instead. He proudly displays the tie while standing at the front of the room as everyone addresses him in unison. Once the pledge is complete, representatives speaking on behalf of each candidate make their final case for why this room of Republicans should caucus for them. They begin alphabetically, starting with Bush and concluding with Trump, and the audience listens attentively to each pitch.

Back in the Democrats’ gym, precinct captains distribute stickers of support as voters file into their seats. At 7:05 p.m., a man steps toward center court and begins calling the caucus to order. “Dick, we can’t hear you!” someone yells from the back of Clinton’s section. Dick begins shouting a bit louder, while his young granddaughter tugs at his jeans. As a hush falls over the crowd, the caucus begins.

He reminds the caucus-goers to sit in the section designated for their candidate, prompting a few confused Clinton and Sanders supporters to shuffle across the gym and trade places. Young children, unaware of the

election unfolding before them, curl up on the bleachers with their parents’ phones. The voters begin counting off one by one from the bleachers. “Where was I, ninety-eight?” shouts Dick, as the ambient noise of the gym drowns out the voices of caucus-goers in the back. The final tally records 192 voters in the room. Of those, two have declared that they are undecided, six have pledged their support for O’Malley, and the rest are divided between Clinton and Sanders, though Clinton holds a sizeable majority.

With the final count complete, the gym doors are closed, and people cannot enter or exit. Dick announces that he has been serving as temporary chair of these caucus proceedings, and the time has come to officially elect a chair. He proceeds to nominate his son, and a young woman contests by nominating herself. She is a senior in high school, and this is her first caucus. Her nomination is seconded, though she loses to Dick’s son by a close margin. “I’m glad my son has been nominated,” Dick announces, “because I’ve been doing this for forty years and it’s time to turn it over.”

While the Democrats begin the voting process, Republicans have already voted by dropping paper ballots into plastic bags. When the official ballots run out, caucus-goers turn to writing candidates’ names on pieces of scrap paper. Representatives from each campaign watch as the votes are tallied and recounted by hand. To report the results accurately and efficiently, caucus leaders enter the precinct’s final numbers into an app that Microsoft developed just for this caucus. When the results are submitted, an error screen pops up, warning that turnout is well beyond what was originally predicted for this site. After the final votes are uploaded and stored in the cloud, Marco Rubio is declared the room’s winner.

The Democrats use the same app. After entering their numbers, caucus leaders determine that each candidate needs at least twenty-nine supporters to become viable—that is, to receive any delegates. O’Malley, with only six votes, quickly falls out of the running, which means his supporters and the two undecideds can opt to align with a new candidate. Suddenly, all eyes are on O’Malley’s corner.

Dick’s son opens the floor for debate, and several Clinton and Sanders caucus-goers flock toward the eight voters sitting at the table with the cookies. The Clinton and Sanders supporters energetically try to persuade them to vote for one of the frontrunners. After several minutes, one man proudly marches to Sanders’s team as half the gym erupts with applause. “We gave it our best,” one Clinton supporter shrugs.

Some Sanders and Clinton voters try to convince one another to switch teams, with very little success. “I hear what you’re saying,” says one Clinton fan to a Sanders supporter, “and I respect that.” “Whoever takes the nomination, I’ll vote for,” agrees the Sanders backer.

Meanwhile, everyone else sits in the stands.

Several of them look over at the visitors’ corner and whisper about the spectators who have come to watch their caucus. “Sometimes, the observers are here to make sure we don’t cheat, but that’d never happen here,” one man tells his neighbor. One of those observers thinks otherwise. He is an attorney from Washington, DC and wants to be sure that the caucus, which is “ripe for error,” runs smoothly according to protocol.

After thirty minutes of discussion and debate, one undecided caucus-goer and several O’Malley supporters join the Clinton camp, while the second undecided voter commits to Sanders. The remaining three O’Malley supporters, one of whom serves in Des Moines city government, decide to stand by their candidate. In the end, Sanders receives three of the precinct’s delegates and Clinton gets seven.

After cheers and applause, the caucus is over, the rest of the cookies are eaten, journalists call their networks, and this middle school joins 1,680 other precincts across the state of Iowa in launching the 2016 race for the White House.

First in the Nation Iowans have been caucusing since the nineteenth century, but at first, the state carried no special designation as “first of” anything. In 1916, Iowan political leaders tried to switch to a primary process, but saw so little voter turnout that the leading candidates did not even bother to place their names on the state’s ballot. Even after returning to the popular caucus voting forum, Iowa’s method of selecting party delegates was “just one more party event in a crowded season, and candidates and the media had no reason to pay the state any special attention,” as one TIME writer explained.

In 1968, however, the Democratic Party was forced to reevaluate its election procedures after a candidate who was ineligible to run in the primaries secured the nomination.

Party leaders then revised the rules going into 1972. The new schedule required a thirty-day notice for placing primaries on the party’s calendar. Because Iowa’s election process has four parts—the caucuses, the county conventions, the congressional district conventions, and the state convention—Iowa’s caucus had to take The Gate | 21

place at the beginning of the calendar year, which bumped New Hampshire to number two.

Despite its new first-in-the-nation status, Iowa played an insignificant role in the 1972 nominating process. Presidential hopeful Edmund Muskie, for example, “spent about a day there.” In 1976, however, a peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter decided to spend some time in the state that was now first in the nation to vote for president. He came in second to the undecided vote, which propelled him into the national spotlight and ultimately to the White House. In every presidential election cycle since then, Iowa has continued to garner national attention. Now, candidates arrive a year before the caucus to develop their strategies and test their policy ideas among Iowans.

Braving the Cold to Canvass An avid Sanders supporter, University of Chicago student Jonny Behrens drove with three friends through southeastern Iowa to canvass for his candidate a few days before the big vote.

Ready to tackle his second Iowa assignment, he arrived at a Bernie Sanders field office in downtown Muscatine. As he approached the narrow storefront plastered with signs, he was greeted by a lit-up snowman wearing a Bernie shirt and red scarf. It was a very cold day, and Behrens placed his coat next to a folding table with mismatched chairs brought in by volunteers to furnish the space. Posters proclaiming that “The Revolution Starts Here” dotted the walls, along with local artists’ paintings of the senator. “It was very obvious that this was a temporary space,” he said. “It was clear that this was a stopping point for volunteers to get canvassing materials, take a break from the cold, and meet other organizers.”

As signs began to peel off the walls and the clipboard supply dwindled, staffers sounded increasingly tired from the week’s excitement as they sent their volunteers off for the final time. “It was very clear that we were at the end of a long process,” Behrens remarked.

After receiving a list of addresses from a staffer, Behrens grabbed some bumper stickers, informational flyers, and door hangers that said “Caucus for Bernie.” Equipped with golf balls that he could use to knock loudly on doors without hurting his knuckles in the cold, he was ready to leave.

On the streets, Behrens knocked on twenty-five or thirty doors. Some residents were not home, while at one house he saw an open door and could hear the television but got no answer when he rang the bell. To the six 22 | The Gate

people who answered their doors, Behrens explained that he had traveled all the way from Chicago to canvass for a candidate he believed in. Some were sick of politics and had no interest in voting. (As one Sanders supporter later remarked, “Sometimes people don’t want to talk about politics.”) Others were excited and planned on caucusing, but were still debating between candidates. Still others were big Bernie fans but could not attend the caucus, including one man who worked for a large shipping company and could not leave work in time, and another who owned a small business and could not afford childcare. For one of his last stops, the voter registration information he received from the campaign led Behrens to a home where he expected to find a young Democrat. He was surprised when an older woman, this young person’s mother, answered the door, pointed to a Rubio sign, and informed him that no one in her house would be voting for a Democrat.

Campaigns, Coffee, and Caucus Coverage Regardless of Iowans’ individual partisan leanings, dealing with politics had become a staple of daily life in Iowa. For months leading up to this primary season, Iowa was inundated with politicians, canvassers, and news outlets. By Caucus Day, reporters from Dallas to Buenos Aires were stationed on street corners to talk to Iowans, most of whom casually walked by without paying much attention. News vans lined up bumper-to-bumper, broadcasting non-stop coverage of the day’s events as Iowans simply maneuvered around them on the busy streets. When cars drove by and passengers shouted, “Do you know where your precinct is?” pedestrians nodded and continued walking. A few blocks away, former President Bill Clinton strolled into a downtown coffee shop with little fanfare from locals.

Meanwhile, another cafe, Java Joe’s, was converted into a fully-equipped television set for the NBC news network as candidates stopped by to present their final cases to Iowa.

The set directors, producers, and interns downed one cup of coffee after another as MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” kicked off the caucus coverage at four o’clock that morning. A steady stream of political elites and respected pundits poured into the coffee shop throughout the day. Guests ranging from Iowa governor Terry Branstad to legendary news anchor Tom Brokaw also stopped by to lend their perspectives.

Java Joe’s was only one example of a local institution overrun by Caucus Day media.

Workers scurried around the Iowa State Capitol building to transform the rotunda into a studio where Fox News could broadcast results later that night. Meanwhile, across the state, major news networks kept cameramen on call and deployed them to follow candidates and record b-roll and interviews. ABC news anchors spent the hours leading up to the caucus in their local affiliates’ studios, preparing their remarks for different candidate victories.

The media circus made Caucus Day both a political attraction and an economic stimulant for the small midwestern state. As the attention of the nation fell on Iowa, political junkies and activists alike flocked to the area. “We’ve got hotel rooms going for $900 [a night],” Jamie Fitzgerald, the Polk County auditor and commissioner of elections, told the Gate. “It’s very lucrative for Iowa’s economy.”

Trayveon Lewis, floor manager at Ray Gun, a popular local shop in Des Moines’ East Village, agreed. The caucus “changes our customer clientele,” he said, as a diplomat wearing a French flag pin walked by with several aides. “We get a lot of media in our store and a few celebrities that come in, too …

They attract everyone else. So today, a Monday morning, is normally pretty slow, but it’s kind of hectic out there right now.” “But that’s what we want,” he added with a smile.

Ray Gun has gained notoriety for its quirky and satirical election apparel, branding itself as “Urban Outfitters meets the Onion.” One of Lewis’s items, a T-shirt with a collage of Bernie Sanders faces, displayed prominently on “Caucus Wall,” sold out in just a week.

When asked how Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status has impacted his store’s business model, Lewis laughed and said that they recycle their “core shirts every time caucus season comes around.” He continued, “And if we aren’t the first caucus anymore, that’s a great opportunity for us to make some T-shirts about that.

We can come up with ideas even if things change.”

Lewis noted that other stores in the area were “less election-specific,” so he did not think the caucus changed their businesses significantly. “We always recommend that people go to other stores around the East Village,” he said. “We’re a team effort out here.”

Overall, though, Lewis believed that the Iowa Caucus was important because it challenged visitors’ assumptions about the state: “We get a lot of people that think we’re just corn fields, and this is a great time for you to see that we’re more than that. We’re interesting. We have a lot to offer, and if you have

the time to come around caucus season, this is the time to be in Des Moines.”

Caucus Eve

By Caucus Eve, Iowa had only one more day in the spotlight before the campaigns, media, and activists packed up and headed to New Hampshire. On the streets of Des Moines, billboards flanked major intersections, lawn signs speckled front yards, and bumper stickers from this election and elections past decorated vehicles. Massive tour buses were tucked into the corners of parking lots as get-out-thevote rallies dominated the candidates’ agendas in the final hours before the caucus.

The candidates’ families were also along for the ride. In a parking lot on a freezing Cau-

cus Eve, Heidi Cruz stepped outside of her husband’s rally to speak with a crowd of journalists and constituents who had been barred from entering the packed auditorium. “Starting in the summer, I really went out on the road and gave speeches for him to tell people who Ted is,” Mrs. Cruz told the Gate, “I think it’s been helpful for people to see who he is on a personal level and from his family’s perspective.” Bundled in a warm coat, Mrs. Cruz was unfazed by a Trump supporter in flannel loudly proclaiming his Twelfth Amendment rights, while another man was escorted out of the rally for causing a public disturbance.

She continued, “My role in this campaign has been one thing and that is to help Ted win … There are traveling challenges of hauling through airports and on the bus and all, but

it’s so inspiring.”

Governor Martin O’Malley’s teenage son, William, expressed similar sentiments during a press avail on Caucus Day outside O’Malley’s Des Moines headquarters. “We started out on the O’Malley family road show,” he said with a laugh, as he listed the places in Iowa he had visited to campaign for his father. “I’m really going to miss this place.” William later spoke with the Gate inside the headquarters, a small office covered with posters and teeming with lively supporters. “I think we are set to surprise a lot of people tonight,” he said. “Win, lose, or draw, I am so proud of this campaign and everything that everyone, from the field organizers to my dad, has [done] these past few months.” William smiled over at his father, who was working his way through the The Gate | 23

crowd, snapping a few selfies and bending down to pet a golden retriever that had wandered inside. As the governor thanked and shook hands with his supporters, he repeated the line, “Stay true,” asking precinct captains to affirm their support and caucus-goers to pledge their votes.

As William noted, the get-out-the-vote effort was not only each candidate’s responsibil-

the candidate … You could see [some of] them growing. You could see their stump speeches getting better each time,” Rob said. “It was interesting to see which candidates’ speeches stayed relatively the same. For some, we could probably recite [those] by now … [But for others], there were portions that were the same, but new items were also introduced.”

The Hosts could see how the candidates’

“It’s not a primary; it’s a neighborhood meeting” ity over the last several days—field organizers, staffers, and volunteers had worked tirelessly to rally support. University of Chicago student Matthew Foldi phone-banked for Marco Rubio, calling committed supporters to remind them to vote at the correct location at the correct time. He remarked that most calls “were relatively routine” and people were generally receptive, even though they had been bombarded with caucus news since 2014. Foldi did find one eligible voter, whom he said “must have been the only person in Iowa [who did] not know what a caucus was.” Foldi proceeded to spend over ten minutes explaining the process to him, fully convinced that this man was not going to vote anyway.

Like Foldi, Behrens, and hundreds of volunteers from across the United States, retirees Rob and Claudia Host had also trekked to Iowa to partake in the caucus process. Traveling all the way from Hawaii, they settled in Des Moines and set out on a mission to experience Iowa’s unrestricted access to presidential candidates months before other states would have their time in the spotlight.

“We wanted to see all the candidates,” Claudia told the Gate. “You know what Iowa is with all the access that you get.” Using a smartphone app that compiled and broadcasted candidates’ public schedules, they tracked the campaigns and attended as many events as possible. “We’d generally only go to one candidate [event] a day, but there were some rare occasions when we went to as many as three,” she said. “We got to see every candidate. Not Jim Gilmore. I don’t know why his name was even there. But we saw Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee, even candidates that dropped out early.” The Hosts estimated that they saw Clinton at least ten different times since arriving in April, just as Iowa was beginning to make headlines. “As time went on, you could see improvements or lack thereof, depending on 24 | The Gate

strategies evolved as caucus season ramped up.

As Dan Balz, political correspondent for the Washington Post, said on CNN, “We’re talking about O versus MO in a place like Iowa”—organization versus momentum. Some candidates’ Iowa strategies resembled well-oiled machines, while others relied more on voters’ sheer passion to rally support. At some events, the couple was impressed. “But with others,” Rob noted, “I was like, ‘Wow, his ground game is really bad.’ At some events, no one asked us for our names, telephone numbers, or email addresses, which is what these events are for. At others, you couldn’t get into events without giving your email address.” Ultimately, the Hosts decided to support Hillary Clinton; they agreed with her policies and believed she built a strong combination of organization and momentum in Iowa.

Not only did they support Clinton, but they also became “super volunteers because [they] said yes to everything.” Claudia was selected to be a precinct captain for Clinton, tasked with building support, counting votes, and reporting results. After months of spotting Clinton from afar, they were excited to see their candidate at her first victory rally.

Hats, Stickers, Signs, and War Paint For everyone in Iowa, whether candidate, campaigner, or caucus-goer, months of intense focus on the Hawkeye State ended in just one evening. As the media began broadcasting results and projecting the night’s winners, the candidates and their most enthusiastic supporters flocked to parties across Des Moines. The line to attend Clinton’s rally circled around the Olmsted Center at Drake University. Attendees went through security checks, were sorted into sections, and then filed into the event space to await their candidate and her family. “I’m With Her” and “Fight for Us” signs, along with “H” stickers, were passed around as one woman

wearing Hillary Clinton boxing gloves stood in the front row and led a series of cheers. In the back of the room, major news networks set up cameras as their colleagues aired results from studios miles away. People were excited, including two six-year-olds who were staying up way past their bedtime. When Hillary emerged with Bill and Chelsea Clinton at her side, the room erupted as cameras turned on, hands flew into the air, and signs waved wildly.

Meanwhile, University of Chicago student Sam Zacher arrived at Bernie Sanders’s Des Moines rally and discovered a vibrant, electric atmosphere. “It felt as though his campaign was trying to evoke a feeling of nostalgia for the ‘70s and ‘80s,” he said. “It felt like a party that college students would have gone to a couple decades ago.” The crowd seemed to fit this vibe, he noted, recalling quite a few flannel shirts and thick beards. Zacher was also impressed that so many people at the rally, like him, had come from out of town. One Ohioan brought twenty friends; a Missourian came by himself just for the night; and a group of young kids came on a school trip from California. One older Des Moines resident opened her home for the night so volunteers from out of town would have a place to crash after the rally. As people cheered, danced, and chatted, some booed as Clinton gave her quasi-victory address on television screens lining the walls. Then their candidate arrived and the cheers began. “He walked up the stairs gingerly,” Zacher recalled. “He’s not a spry senator, but he had a big cheesy smile on his face. He was clearly enjoying the rally.” After giving a speech that was interrupted by applause at the end of each sentence, Sanders began his victory lap around the stage, high-fiving his supporters. “He knew he nearly tied Hillary Clinton,” Zacher chuckled, “And he was proud of what he did.”

The joy of the Democrats, Clinton for winning and Sanders for doing so well, sharply contrasted with some Republican supporters whose candidates performed poorly. Although a “Make America Great Again” sign was gloriously plastered in front of Trump’s campaign headquarters in west Des Moines, inside the building, the Trump rally bristled with tension.

Supporters waved American flags and wore their red hats with pride. The energy in the room was uneasy, though, even hostile at times, especially when Marco Rubio’s third place speech, broadcasted on televisions in the corners of the room, was met with jeering, boos, and expletives. For a man who had promised his followers that “we will have so much winning if I get elected, you may get bored of winning,” the experience of not winning was crushing and infuriating. As angry tears smudged the war paint smeared on her cheeks, a young woman started a deafen-

ing chant of “Trump! Trump! Trump!” when Trump appeared before the crowd. He remained on stage for a brief three minutes, ending with: “Iowa, we love you, we thank you. You’re special. We will be back many, many times. In fact, I think I might come here and buy a farm.” But for those Trump supporters in Iowa, another farm was the furthest thing from their minds— what they wanted was a win.

“Come Early, Come Often” “Today’s a big day in Iowa,” Governor Terry Branstad told the Gate. “This is the political center of the universe today, but tomorrow that’ll all change.”

When the next day—February 2—arrived, a blizzard swept through the state and the crush of candidates, field organizers, and journalists disappeared. Rob and Claudia Host were both surprised and exhausted.

“The TV ads stopped. We didn’t have phone calls or emails asking us to phone bank. There was nothing. It went from a feverous pitch to nothing. It was like an Olympic event— all the adrenaline was gone. We felt like a washcloth that had been wrung out. We were tired,” they said.

Since the Iowa Caucus ended last month, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada,

Moines Register, agrees: “Iowas not supposed to be a predictor. It’s supposed to start the process.”

For them, Iowa is about more than just predicting the country’s 45th president. The state’s process is about bringing the candidates to the people. “We demand to see our candidates,” Robinson said.“We’re looking for something beyond sound bites.”

Still, if the caucus fails to predict the nominees, which happened in the last several cycles for the Republican Party, it is likely that both parties will reevaluate their primary schedules for 2020, or wait until 2024 when there is no incumbent in the race.

Despite questions of whether Iowa can prophesize the parties’ nominees, there may be other reasons to move the caucus. First, only 15.7 percent of eligible voters participated in this year’s caucus, compared to 57.5 percent of voters at the national level in 2012.

Second, some believe that an open caucus allows voters to be easily swayed by public opinion. This can be particularly salient in the Democratic party’s caucus process, though Fitzgerald argues, “These are your family and neighbors; nobody is going to judge you for who you support.” Finally, some argue that Iowa’s prominence gives greater weight to certain issues that concern Iowans specifically,

“Iowa was not supposed to be a predictor” the Super Tuesday states, and several others have participated in this year’s election process. Candidates from both parties have suspended their campaigns—some immediately following Iowa, and others more recently— while the remaining frontrunners continue to battle for their party’s nomination.

“Every other state is a compact race when Iowa and New Hampshire are over,” Craig Robinson, founder and editor-in-chief of the Iowa Republican, told the Gate. As the rest of the nation continues to join the conversation, one question that remains is whether Iowa got it right. Months from now, the country’s gaze will return to Iowa to see if the state’s winning candidates—Hillary Clinton for the Democrats and Ted Cruz for the Republicans—are the ones facing off in November.

“Sometimes we’re a springboard; sometimes we’re not,” Jamie Fitzgerald remarked.

“But we kick the tires. We want to look you in the eye and see what you’re about.” David Yepsen, former chief political writer at the Des

leaving other states with inequitable access to candidates running for president.

Yet Brad Anderson, state director of Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign in Iowa, believes that moving Iowa’s timing in the calendar would be a mistake. He told the Gate, “The race is over today without Iowa because Iowans care so much. It’d be Trump versus Clinton without Iowa, but Iowa is giving the other candidates a chance.” In other words, the Hawkeye State levels the playing field.

Robinson agreed: “Get rid of us and all you see are media markets and money.”

And if Iowa is not going to be first next time, then who is? Iowa is centrally located and not overwhelmingly populated, and it has relatively low advertising costs, which allows candidates to become known to voters. According to Robinson, “Not everyone is prepared to sit in the front row, and Iowa has proven that it is.” Iowa is ideal, Yepsen believes, because it is not a primary, “it’s a neighborhood meeting.”

The nature of the Iowa caucus has changed over time, which suggests a need for reform.

Claudia Host thinks that the state should have more precincts and smaller caucus meetings to bring back a sense of community.

“Having that living room discussion that you hear about, that’s not the experience anymore in highly populated areas. You need to find a way for it to work even though it’s suffering from growing pains.”

Still, others like Anderson remain hopeful.

Iowa, as the host of the nation’s lengthiest encounter between presidential candidates and the American public, is a place where people can directly participate in the political process. “The caucus is one of the most perfect forms of democracy you can possibly envision,” Anderson said. “We don’t decide the nominee; we winnow the field.” After seeing candidates suspend their campaigns once final numbers were tallied, Rob Host agreed: “If you say Iowa doesn’t pick the winner but winnows the field, then Iowa did its job.”

Now that their job is over, Iowans’ lives are returning to normal. The Hosts plan to stay in the Hawkeye State through the general election and are still processing the whirlwind of their past several months. “One Clinton staffer remained in the state,” Claudia remarked. “All those people and only one left. It was really incredible to see them build up this enterprise and after two days, they’re breaking it all down. Now I think [Clinton’s headquarters] is a nail salon.”

As the news vans moved on and campaign volunteers flooded to the next primary states, life in Iowa has quieted. Branstad, the longest-serving governor in United States history, is ready to regain political control of his state. “I understand that when you have presidential candidates here, that’s going to overshadow what we’re doing. But I also understand that tomorrow, they’re going to be gone, and I’m still going to be here,” he said. Now that the candidates have left, Iowa’s political agenda is back in Branstad’s hands.

But the governor knows that in another four years, Iowa will become the epicenter of national politics once again.

“My advice to candidates is to come early, come often,” said the governor. Iowa is the state where the candidates can learn what Americans want from a group of people who care about their civic responsibility. “Meet with the people,” he said. “People here care.”

This article was originally published on March 14, 2015.The photographs featured in this article were taken by Asya Akça.

The Gate | 25

E l 11 de S eptiembre R emembering C hile ’ s 1973 C oup

W

alking down the street on September 11, I passed a large banner that commemorated the date. “We have gotten rid of everything except the memory,” it read.

This banner was not written in English, nor was it located in the United States. It did not commemorate the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center or the attacks on the Pentagon. September 11 has been a grim date for Chileans for nearly three decades longer than it has been for Americans. In case anyone needed a reminder why, the banner’s painter had added, in one corner, “Forty-two years since the coup.”

September 11, 1973 marked the third major interruption in Chile’s 150 years of democratic rule. By any measure, it was the bloodiest. That morning, the country’s military launched a plan to unseat President Salvador Allende, the only democratically elected Marxist in world history. As soldiers took control of key positions around Santiago, fighter jets dove toward La Moneda, the country’s presidential palace, and fired rockets into its second-floor window. Rather than surrender, President Allende retreated into the study of his burning mansion, put a pistol given to him by Fidel Castro to his head, and pulled the trigger.

He would be the first of many victims of the military’s sixteen-year rule, followed by a number of his supporters, opponents of the military, and others who were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. All told, the junta led by General Augusto Pinochet detained and tortured 27,255 Chileans, 70 percent of them in its first three months of power. Of these, 2,296 were executed.

Approximately a thousand more remain unaccounted for. Chileans have a name for them: “the Disappeared.”

In a nation with only 10.1 million people at the time of the coup, few remained untouched by these deaths. As that banner in the town of La Serena made clear, the memories of a tragedy of this scale endure.

The mother of my homestay family remembers watching the fighter jets crest over the hill where I go jogging. Her husband, work26 | The Gate

By Patrick Reilly ing as a taxi driver at the time, was stopped regularly by military police in downtown Santiago. For every story like his, there are probably several more that were lost. When my BA research led me to search for the details of a strike in October 1973, I discovered that the newspaper issues from the days following the coup had gone missing.

Scrolling through the National Library’s catalog, I saw listings jump from “June-August 1973” to “January-March 1974.”

Despite gaps like these, Chileans have worked hard to preserve the events of those months. Today, a statue of President Allende faces La Moneda’s restored façade, with the words of his final radio broadcast to the nation etched on a plaque. A short Metro ride away, the Memory and Human Rights Museum presents visitors with videos of tanks rolling through Santiago, harrowing testimonials of torture victims, and chess sets carved by political prisoners in concentration camps. For its part, the National History Museum displays half of the pair of eyeglasses Allende was wearing when he shot himself.

I had seen most of the dictatorship’s grisly dregs in these museums by the time 9/11/15 rolled around. When it did, several of my Facebook friends in the United States posted some version of the story that Americans have told themselves for over a decade: the nation’s citizens were cut down by a foreign, inhumane ideology that must be destroyed. Chileans can’t console themselves with this narrative. Since the return to democracy in 1990, their task has been to understand how so many of their fellow citizens met with such grisly fates at the hands of their own leaders.

The short answer is: they had help. While the coup and all that followed was carried out by the Chilean military, a declassified set of files in the National Security Archive reveals that the CIA waged a covert campaign to unseat Allende. Conventional wisdom holds that President Nixon and Henry Kissinger refused to tolerate a Marxist president in the Western Hemisphere. Other

documents suggest that when Allende nationalized the Chilean telephone system, then controlled by the US-based International Telephone and Telegraph, one of the corporation’s executives prompted the Nixon administration to act. Beginning with Nixon’s 1970 order to “make [the] economy scream,” Chile received an array of covert operations: truck drivers’ strikes across the country, unofficial sanctions imposed by American corporations, and an influx of money and weapons for the military.

After one of Pinochet’s agents killed an Allende supporter with a car bomb in Washington, the United States government was quick to denounce the regime. Other American institutions, however, have also had a hand in the junta’s activities—including the University of Chicago. The regime turned to a group of Chilean economists who had studied in Chicago under Milton Friedman to dismantle Allende’s centralized economy and implement neoliberal economic policies. The so-called “Chicago Boys” raised Chile’s GDP, but at a cost. Today, Chile has one of the highest rates of inequality in the world; there are sprawling shanty towns within a few Metro stops of horse racetracks and ten-story shopping malls.

On September 11, 2001, American Muslims became victims of guilt by association.

If Chileans viewed gringos from the same perspective, a UChicago student traveling here to research the period of the dictatorship would deserve their suspicion. But the most I’ve gotten is a knowing smile when I tell my interviewees where I study. (“Yes,” I admit, “I’m a Chicago Boy.”) There have also been bits of black humor at my Spanish-immersion program, and during our occasional tours of Santiago. During one, our guide turned to the two Chicago students in our group, grinned, and said, “I don’t know whether you are friend or foe.”

This article was originally published on September 11, 2015

AFTER THE BOOM:

The North Dakota Oil Industry

By Dake Kang and Sean Maher

The Gate | 27

A

pril 4, 1951, western North Dakota.

A towering derrick stood sentry over the rolling plains. The silence was shattered by a detonation, which did instantly what four months of drilling could not: break through the thick North Dakota shale to reach the oil beneath.

Photos were splashed across papers and publications. With some twenty billion barrels of oil waiting underground, the Bakken Formation, as it soon came to be called, turned out to be one of the largest deposits of oil ever discovered in the United States. However, this wellspring of prosperity proved short-lived.

Despite the vast amount of oil, technical difficulties made extraction prohibitively expensive. This changed in the early ‘80s, as the Iranian revolution drove the price of oil sky-high. Production boomed again, only to go bust when reality pulled prices back down to earth.

In the past decade, a third oil boom, the largest to date, has developed in North Dakota. Beginning in 2006, new pressure to develop America’s domestic petroleum reserves, along with a new oil extraction technique called “fracking,” brought the oil industry back to North Dakota in force. The rural town of Williston transformed into a metropolis overnight as workers from across the country flocked to the oil fields, lured by shockingly high salaries.

O pportunity Millionaires were minted by the thousands. Populations doubled, then tripled.

Unemployment fell to just 3 percent— the lowest in the nation—and the state government boasted a multi-billion-dollar surplus. On top of that, the boom got going just as the Great Recession ripped through the economy, with unemployment peaking at 10 percent nationwide.

Four neighboring counties at the core of the Bakken Formation—Montreal, Williams, Dunn, and McKenzie—quickly gained a reputation as one of the few places in the country where job seekers could find success; headlines like “North Dakota, a place to go for employment” or “North Dakota Went Boom” were splashed across the pages of the New York Times.

David VanAssche heeded these headlines. After graduating from from the University of Washington with an accounting degree during the depths of the 28 | The Gate

financial crisis, he struggled to find work in his field. After six months of a fruitless job search, he heard about North Dakota, and set out for Williston with no work or permanent housing. Less than twenty-four hours later, he had a job.

Less than a year later, he started his own mailing and business services company.

“Thanksgiving Day 2011 I travelled to Williston, [and] spent the night at the Walmart parking lot,” says VanAssche. As people from all over the United States flocked to North Dakota, housing became a rare commodity. “[People] were living in an RV, or in someone’s garage, or in someone’s yard, literally camping in the middle of winter.”

Housing wasn’t the only shortage Williston faced in hosting newcomers—convenience stores and supermarkets struggled to scale up quickly enough to meet the new demand. Walmart, for example, had hour-long lines: “There’s literally empty shelves, and there’s pallets stacked in the middle of the aisleway, because there’s no-one to stock the shelves . . . you’d literally have to cut open the Saran wrap off of a pallet to get what you need.

That’s what it was like, it was just crazy,” VanAssche says.

With oil prices topping $100 a barrel, drilling proceeded at breakneck speed, as companies attempted to get as much oil out of the ground as they could. Rigs went up across the state, companies cropped up by the hundreds to supply the well-drillers, and workers went home with eighty-hour overtime paychecks amounting to well over six figures annually.

By 2014, the boom had reached a fever pitch. Business Insider called Williston “the most expensive place in America to rent an entry-level apartment,” beating out New York and San Francisco. Seven hundred-square foot apartments went for over $2000 a month. Men outnumbered women twelve to one. For almost a decade, the good times just kept rolling.

Then came the crash.

T he C rash On June 20th, 2014, the price of a barrel of Brent crude oil stood at $114.81.

Six months later, it was $47.99—a 60 percent drop.

The sudden dive in oil prices sent Iran and Venezuela into crisis and fueled rumors of a conspiracy by the US and Saudi

Arabia to ruin their mutual geopolitical enemies.

Reduced gas prices are expected to save the typical American household about $750 this year. As oil prices tanked, motorists cheered, but North Dakotans are less giddy.

“The question is the same: What does $41 oil mean for North Dakota?” asks Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council. We’re sitting in his classically plush, dark-tone office, with pictures of Ness and his family pheasant hunting in the Dakota wilderness hung on the walls, and a large portrait of Theodore Roosevelt surveying the scene.

Ness, at first smiling and chatting about sunflowers and the rugged Dakotan outdoors, is quick to sober up as he describes how what at first seemed like a temporary drop in prices is threatening to turn into a full blown industry crisis.

We started looking at this in December—we had 186 rigs going, everything was going maximum, full throttle,” said Ness. “We said if this lasts six months, this is serious. We started saying six months to fifteen months, but now people are saying this could be two, three, four years.”

As of November 2015, two thirds of those rigs have vanished, leaving sixty-four standing. According to Ness, many companies—not only the oil companies themselves, but the companies providing auxiliary services, such as clean-up, maintenance, and construction, are in serious trouble.

“Absolutely, some of these companies are overleveraged,” Ness said. “Will they be able to sell off part of their assets in order to buy down their debt? . . . Can you find the capital out there to service your debt? Can you produce enough oil to produce a reasonable return to pay off your bills?”

Companies have already started to fold. Samson Resources and American Eagle Energy declared bankruptcy in October, but are struggling to find buyers for their lands in the Bakken. With the industry’s long-term prospects looking dire, investors and banks are starting to get jittery.

As Ness puts it, “A lot of the banks are starting to get less . . . smiley.”

North Dakota’s woes are compounded by the fact that oil is a substitutable commodity with many providers on the global market. It makes little difference

whether a barrel is from the Gulf of Mexico or the Persian Gulf—fueling an international oil industry race to the bottom. Prices are likely to take further hits as operators maximize production from existing wells to stay afloat and Iranian oil returns to a flooded world market. To make things worse, the Bakken’s remote location means producers here get 7 to 11 percent less than prices on the global market.

“It just seems the world is awash in oil, and every time you turn around more oil is discovered . . . So far, OPEC hasn’t flinched, Russia hasn’t flinched, US shale production hasn’t flinched,” says Ness.

“Even if I’m not making what I want to make this month, I’m better off making half or a two thirds, because you have to keep the money coming in, and that’s what going on with oil production right now.”

It’s an open question who’s going to be the first to drop out—but one thing is for sure: eventually, someone will.

“Somebody’s gonna not be able to continue to produce because of cost,” Ness said.

On the streets of Williston, too, the boom days are over. Gone are the massive traffic jams, the two hour waits at Applebee’s, the stampedes at Walmart.

The Fox Run RV park on the outskirts of Williston used to be crammed to the brim, with a waiting list; now one out of every five lots lies fallow, and a camper goes for half the price it once did.

During the heyday, oil companies booked entire hotels for their staff (even at $300 a night, rooms routinely sold out) but today, signs outside hastily constructed accommodations lining the interstate advertise slashed rates, and newly constructed subdivisions try to move unsold units.

But for many Williston natives, times aren’t all that bad. If anything, the end of the boom was a relief, a much-needed break from the crowds that used to swamp the city.

“I call ‘em transient people, you know?” says David VanAssche, who arrived in Williston at the height of the boom in 2011. “They’re the people who worked here—a real common thing you’d hear of was three weeks on, one week off . . . they’d work seven days a week, twelve or fourteen or fifteen hours a day, and they’d fly home for a week or two, and come back. Most of those people are The Gate | 29

then, Hamernick believes, there is a lot to be done to keep businesses operating and ensure that community members can remain in their homes in the midst of huge economic change.

“You can call this gentrification, or you can call it an investment,” said Hamernick. “If you view it through the lens of gentrification, then the library is essentially going to come in and displace everyone who has lived here for years through rising property taxes, rental rates, and unrenewed vouchers. If you think of it as an investment, then there are things that can be done to ensure that the library brings about positive change, at least in part.”

Rollerson said that he sees a lot of private interests maneuvering to buy up local real estate in preparation for increased South Side property values. “Those who are in a position to do so and have resources are trying to acquire as much land as possible, probably secretly so they can get a better deal once the smoke settles,” he said. “A lot of things are happening under the table that are positioning people with a lot of resources to make some nice-sized profits once the opportunity comes.”

Though Rollerson acknowledged that he didn’t have proof for his claims, he assumed that the University of Chicago, as one of the biggest stakeholders in the project, is among the organizations trying to “gobble up” real estate.

A representative of the university’s Office of Civic Engagement declined to comment for this article.

The people trying to profit from property value increases are almost certainly not current residents of Woodlawn, which is among the poorest neighborhoods in the city. Hamernick estimates that more than 95 percent of Woodlawners do not own their homes. “As a result, when a renter’s property value spikes, they can’t afford to remain in their home,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out if we’re in a position to leverage community assets and persons to be able to put people into homeownership, because at the moment property value is relatively low.”

Low homeownership is a problem because the people who stand to benefit most from the library in the long term are current homeowners.

“In America, wealth is generated over decades as a result of owning or inheriting property,” Hamernick said. “Even if you come into a situation where the property tax rises so fast you can’t keep up, you’ll at least be able to sell your property and have some sort of windfall.” In theory, if a homeowner can ride out the property tax hike, their property will continue to rise in value, benefiting them in the long term.

For this reason, Hamernick and his team have been scaling up their homeownership efforts. Thanks to a large anonymous donation,

Sunshine Enterprises has been able to acquire and renovate its first single-family house over the last six months. “Ideally, we’d be interested in finding more individuals with an interest in philanthropic investing to enable us to give more South Side families the opportunity to own their homes before the library is constructed,” Hamernick said.

In all likelihood, however, only a few families will be able to own a home courtesy of Sunshine Enterprises. Securing affordable housing in the run-up to the Obama Presidential Library’s construction remains an important issue to many Woodlawners and other South Side residents.

Illinois already struggles to meet the demand for affordable housing: a 2014 study by the Institute of Housing Studies at DePaul University found that across the state, there are only fifty-nine affordable rental units for every hundred low-income rental households, and Hamernick is concerned that the new presidential library will only exacerbate this problem. “Usually when this sort of investment comes in, the number of remaining affordable units is substantially fewer,” he said.

The process in which affordable housing units are broken up in the wake of new infrastructure development does have its merits. “In theory, you don’t want massive concentrated poverty,” Hamernick said. “That’s not a good model for helping families get out of their current economic situation, so in a sense you do want rent-controlled or affordable housing spread out over a large geographic area where there are modest- to medium-income families.”

A 2010 study from the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Center found that low-income families living in mixed-income housing developments benefited from “improved housing quality, increased safety, improved property management, and improved mental health from a reduction in stress.” Most importantly, Hamernick said, low-income families receive community support while they attempt to find work and better their current economic situation.

Sunshine Enterprises is also equipping local entrepreneurs to survive imminent changes in the community. Hamernick sees an enormous opportunity for business owners to capitalize on the influx of tourism dollars, but also sees major obstacles. “The problem is that most business owners in this area are very disorganized,” he said. “If you want to benefit from a new presidential library you’re going to have to have your books in order—you’re going to have to be legal.” This is where Sunshine Enterprises and its community business academy comes in.

Entrepreneurs learn the basics of accounting, marketing, and corporate strategy in a classroom setting and then transition to one-on-one coach-

ing with established entrepreneurs. “We’re trying to equip business owners to make sure that they are able to capitalize on that community investment,” said Hamernick. “We want to put our business owners in a place to take advantage of that opportunity when it comes.”

Unfortunately, the library may not be the job creator that the South Side needs. Though the Barack Obama Foundation claims that the library will bring 3,280 temporary construction jobs and 1,900 permanent jobs to the South Side, Rollerson noted that South Siders are skeptical about the percentage of jobs that will be made available to members of the local community. “We already know that there is a going to be a small percentage awarded to the African American community, but we have to assume that those will be low-level jobs,” he said. “It’s not necessarily exciting for members of the community to know that there’ll be a huge enterprise coming in but they won’t benefit from it.”

Rollerson also expects that local companies, just like local residents, may be passed over by the library’s hiring managers. “With a project of this size, there are a number of contracts that could be doled out, both for construction and operations or vendors once the structure is place,” he said. He added that a number of local firms are vying to secure the contracts related to the library, but “unfortunately, those contracts aren’t typically awarded to minority vendors.”

Hamernick called upon the University of Chicago and the Barack Obama Foundation to play a key role in ensuring that the library will bring jobs and sustainable housing to the area.

Both organizations certainly have the funds and the ability to invest in the surrounding community. If the University of Chicago turns the South Side into a tourist attraction but fails to provide for established residents, it will pay a high price in the loss of the local culture that enriches students’ experiences, and it will destroy years of painstaking progress toward a good rapport with community members.

According to Rollerson, the university can begin by pledging to keep jobs and profits generated by the library in the community. “If an organization, including the University of Chicago, is going to benefit from the library, then they need to tell us that they’re not going to be the only ones benefiting,” Rollerson said.

“They need to tell us that they plan to give back. I think that would empower the city as a whole and get everyone excited for the library’s construction.”

This article was originally published on February 21, 2016.

The Gate | 33

HOMETOWN GIRL: An Interview with Patti Solis Doyle

by Danielle Schmidt The Gate: How did growing up on the South Side of Chicago shape your decision to go into politics?

Patti Solis Doyle: I grew up on the Southwest side in an area called Pilsen, which is basically the “Little Mexico” of Chicago where most Mexican immigrants came. We grew up very poor and didn’t have a lot—I had five brothers and sisters. My parents have a very powerful but common story: they came here with nothing but a third grade education, worked really hard (sometimes two or three jobs at a time), and raised a family. Because we grew up where people didn’t have a lot, our neighborhood was often forgotten. My oldest brother, Danny, became a community organizer when he was in his early twenties; he’s sixteen years older than I am. He really organized our community to advocate for itself, to get better healthcare and better schools. He was very inspirational to me. So when I graduated from college, he took me to rallies, door-knocking, and canvassing. He took me into people’s living rooms to hear what they were going through. That’s what got me going and wanting to get involved. And I did; I worked in local politics here in Chicago before I went off into national politics.

Gate: In 2008, you were the campaign chief of staff to Joe Biden.

What are your thoughts on the importance of a strong vice presidential candidate? Can the vice presidential candidate make or break a general election bid?

Solis Doyle: As a campaign staffer, which I am, you want a couple of things from your vice presidential pick. You want someone who can bring you what your existing candidate doesn’t already have, whether it’s a strong outreach to a specific swing state that you need, like Florida or Ohio, or in Hillary’s case, because she has experience, qualifications.

She’s an older woman, so we’re looking for somebody who is maybe younger, maybe is anti-establishment, a man, and who fills a constituency gap she doesn’t already have (although, she has a lot of constituencies on her side at this point). You’re looking for someone who balances the presidential nominee out, and you’re also looking for someone who is not going to screw it up. You’re looking for somebody who’s a good candidate, who doesn’t make mistakes. It’s a very short window of time, three months, and you don’t want them to screw it up. If you’re the candidate, if you think you’re going to be president of the United States, you’re looking for somebody who can actually do the job if you can’t 34 | The Gate

do it. There are a lot of different things to juggle, and that’s why you usually have an entire operation devoted to selecting the vice-presidential nomination.

Gate: As someone who has been closely tied with Hillary Clinton through all of her major elections, what are the biggest differences you’re seeing in her approach to this current election versus in 2008 or her other campaigns?

Solis Doyle: The ground operation in Iowa is stellar. She’s taken a lot of the Obama people who worked in Iowa the last time around. Also she’s much more comfortable in the role. Like I said, you always learn more from losing than you learn from winning. She learned a lot of lessons in 2008. She wasn’t a very comfortable candidate back in 2008. This time around, she’s much more comfortable in her skin. I think the extra four years as secretary of state have made her even more confident and just more zen, in terms of how she’s running. So I think she’s just a better candidate this time around.

Gate: Before joining Hillary Clinton’s campaigns, you worked on Richard M. Daley’s campaign for Chicago mayor. What importance does Chicago have in a national election?

Solis Doyle: It’s a delegate-rich state and a Democratic state. And Chicago politics has always been so incredibly rich and colorful. For me, I learned a lot of lessons in Chicago politics that I have brought to national politics. And that is fighting hard, sometimes fighting a little bit dirty, and loyalty—loyalty to your candidate and loyalty to your team. I think all those things resonate on the national level. In this race, for Hillary Clinton in particular, she’s from Park Ridge, a suburb in Chicago, and she’s got a lot of ties to Chicago, a lot of friends in Chicago. In 2008, we lost Illinois to Barack Obama, but what was special to me was that she won Pilsen, where I grew up. She won that district because Chicagoans are loyal. And it was a tough call for Chicago given their home senator and their hometown girl. But Chicagoans are loyal so I think Illinois has a special place in Hillary’s heart.

This article was originally published on January 27, 2016. It has been edited and condensed for publication in print.

then, Hamernick believes, there is a lot to be done to keep businesses operating and ensure that community members can remain in their homes in the midst of huge economic change.

“You can call this gentrification, or you can call it an investment,” said Hamernick. “If you view it through the lens of gentrification, then the library is essentially going to come in and displace everyone who has lived here for years through rising property taxes, rental rates, and unrenewed vouchers. If you think of it as an investment, then there are things that can be done to ensure that the library brings about positive change, at least in part.”

Rollerson said that he sees a lot of private interests maneuvering to buy up local real estate in preparation for increased South Side property values. “Those who are in a position to do so and have resources are trying to acquire as much land as possible, probably secretly so they can get a better deal once the smoke settles,” he said. “A lot of things are happening under the table that are positioning people with a lot of resources to make some nice-sized profits once the opportunity comes.”

Though Rollerson acknowledged that he didn’t have proof for his claims, he assumed that the University of Chicago, as one of the biggest stakeholders in the project, is among the organizations trying to “gobble up” real estate.

A representative of the university’s Office of Civic Engagement declined to comment for this article.

The people trying to profit from property value increases are almost certainly not current residents of Woodlawn, which is among the poorest neighborhoods in the city. Hamernick estimates that more than 95 percent of Woodlawners do not own their homes. “As a result, when a renter’s property value spikes, they can’t afford to remain in their home,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out if we’re in a position to leverage community assets and persons to be able to put people into homeownership, because at the moment property value is relatively low.”

Low homeownership is a problem because the people who stand to benefit most from the library in the long term are current homeowners.

“In America, wealth is generated over decades as a result of owning or inheriting property,” Hamernick said. “Even if you come into a situation where the property tax rises so fast you can’t keep up, you’ll at least be able to sell your property and have some sort of windfall.” In theory, if a homeowner can ride out the property tax hike, their property will continue to rise in value, benefiting them in the long term.

For this reason, Hamernick and his team have been scaling up their homeownership efforts. Thanks to a large anonymous donation,

Sunshine Enterprises has been able to acquire and renovate its first single-family house over the last six months. “Ideally, we’d be interested in finding more individuals with an interest in philanthropic investing to enable us to give more South Side families the opportunity to own their homes before the library is constructed,” Hamernick said.

In all likelihood, however, only a few families will be able to own a home courtesy of Sunshine Enterprises. Securing affordable housing in the run-up to the Obama Presidential Library’s construction remains an important issue to many Woodlawners and other South Side residents.

Illinois already struggles to meet the demand for affordable housing: a 2014 study by the Institute of Housing Studies at DePaul University found that across the state, there are only fifty-nine affordable rental units for every hundred low-income rental households, and Hamernick is concerned that the new presidential library will only exacerbate this problem. “Usually when this sort of investment comes in, the number of remaining affordable units is substantially fewer,” he said.

The process in which affordable housing units are broken up in the wake of new infrastructure development does have its merits. “In theory, you don’t want massive concentrated poverty,” Hamernick said. “That’s not a good model for helping families get out of their current economic situation, so in a sense you do want rent-controlled or affordable housing spread out over a large geographic area where there are modest- to medium-income families.”

A 2010 study from the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Center found that low-income families living in mixed-income housing developments benefited from “improved housing quality, increased safety, improved property management, and improved mental health from a reduction in stress.” Most importantly, Hamernick said, low-income families receive community support while they attempt to find work and better their current economic situation.

Sunshine Enterprises is also equipping local entrepreneurs to survive imminent changes in the community. Hamernick sees an enormous opportunity for business owners to capitalize on the influx of tourism dollars, but also sees major obstacles. “The problem is that most business owners in this area are very disorganized,” he said. “If you want to benefit from a new presidential library you’re going to have to have your books in order—you’re going to have to be legal.” This is where Sunshine Enterprises and its community business academy comes in.

Entrepreneurs learn the basics of accounting, marketing, and corporate strategy in a classroom setting and then transition to one-on-one coach-

ing with established entrepreneurs. “We’re trying to equip business owners to make sure that they are able to capitalize on that community investment,” said Hamernick. “We want to put our business owners in a place to take advantage of that opportunity when it comes.”

Unfortunately, the library may not be the job creator that the South Side needs. Though the Barack Obama Foundation claims that the library will bring 3,280 temporary construction jobs and 1,900 permanent jobs to the South Side, Rollerson noted that South Siders are skeptical about the percentage of jobs that will be made available to members of the local community. “We already know that there is a going to be a small percentage awarded to the African American community, but we have to assume that those will be low-level jobs,” he said. “It’s not necessarily exciting for members of the community to know that there’ll be a huge enterprise coming in but they won’t benefit from it.”

Rollerson also expects that local companies, just like local residents, may be passed over by the library’s hiring managers. “With a project of this size, there are a number of contracts that could be doled out, both for construction and operations or vendors once the structure is place,” he said. He added that a number of local firms are vying to secure the contracts related to the library, but “unfortunately, those contracts aren’t typically awarded to minority vendors.”

Hamernick called upon the University of Chicago and the Barack Obama Foundation to play a key role in ensuring that the library will bring jobs and sustainable housing to the area.

Both organizations certainly have the funds and the ability to invest in the surrounding community. If the University of Chicago turns the South Side into a tourist attraction but fails to provide for established residents, it will pay a high price in the loss of the local culture that enriches students’ experiences, and it will destroy years of painstaking progress toward a good rapport with community members.

According to Rollerson, the university can begin by pledging to keep jobs and profits generated by the library in the community. “If an organization, including the University of Chicago, is going to benefit from the library, then they need to tell us that they’re not going to be the only ones benefiting,” Rollerson said.

“They need to tell us that they plan to give back. I think that would empower the city as a whole and get everyone excited for the library’s construction.”

This article was originally published on February 21, 2016.

The Gate | 33

HOMETOWN GIRL: An Interview with Patti Solis Doyle

by Danielle Schmidt The Gate: How did growing up on the South Side of Chicago shape your decision to go into politics?

Patti Solis Doyle: I grew up on the Southwest side in an area called Pilsen, which is basically the “Little Mexico” of Chicago where most Mexican immigrants came. We grew up very poor and didn’t have a lot—I had five brothers and sisters. My parents have a very powerful but common story: they came here with nothing but a third grade education, worked really hard (sometimes two or three jobs at a time), and raised a family. Because we grew up where people didn’t have a lot, our neighborhood was often forgotten. My oldest brother, Danny, became a community organizer when he was in his early twenties; he’s sixteen years older than I am. He really organized our community to advocate for itself, to get better healthcare and better schools. He was very inspirational to me. So when I graduated from college, he took me to rallies, door-knocking, and canvassing. He took me into people’s living rooms to hear what they were going through. That’s what got me going and wanting to get involved. And I did; I worked in local politics here in Chicago before I went off into national politics.

Gate: In 2008, you were the campaign chief of staff to Joe Biden.

What are your thoughts on the importance of a strong vice presidential candidate? Can the vice presidential candidate make or break a general election bid?

Solis Doyle: As a campaign staffer, which I am, you want a couple of things from your vice presidential pick. You want someone who can bring you what your existing candidate doesn’t already have, whether it’s a strong outreach to a specific swing state that you need, like Florida or Ohio, or in Hillary’s case, because she has experience, qualifications.

She’s an older woman, so we’re looking for somebody who is maybe younger, maybe is anti-establishment, a man, and who fills a constituency gap she doesn’t already have (although, she has a lot of constituencies on her side at this point). You’re looking for someone who balances the presidential nominee out, and you’re also looking for someone who is not going to screw it up. You’re looking for somebody who’s a good candidate, who doesn’t make mistakes. It’s a very short window of time, three months, and you don’t want them to screw it up. If you’re the candidate, if you think you’re going to be president of the United States, you’re looking for somebody who can actually do the job if you can’t 34 | The Gate

do it. There are a lot of different things to juggle, and that’s why you usually have an entire operation devoted to selecting the vice-presidential nomination.

Gate: As someone who has been closely tied with Hillary Clinton through all of her major elections, what are the biggest differences you’re seeing in her approach to this current election versus in 2008 or her other campaigns?

Solis Doyle: The ground operation in Iowa is stellar. She’s taken a lot of the Obama people who worked in Iowa the last time around. Also she’s much more comfortable in the role. Like I said, you always learn more from losing than you learn from winning. She learned a lot of lessons in 2008. She wasn’t a very comfortable candidate back in 2008. This time around, she’s much more comfortable in her skin. I think the extra four years as secretary of state have made her even more confident and just more zen, in terms of how she’s running. So I think she’s just a better candidate this time around.

Gate: Before joining Hillary Clinton’s campaigns, you worked on Richard M. Daley’s campaign for Chicago mayor. What importance does Chicago have in a national election?

Solis Doyle: It’s a delegate-rich state and a Democratic state. And Chicago politics has always been so incredibly rich and colorful. For me, I learned a lot of lessons in Chicago politics that I have brought to national politics. And that is fighting hard, sometimes fighting a little bit dirty, and loyalty—loyalty to your candidate and loyalty to your team. I think all those things resonate on the national level. In this race, for Hillary Clinton in particular, she’s from Park Ridge, a suburb in Chicago, and she’s got a lot of ties to Chicago, a lot of friends in Chicago. In 2008, we lost Illinois to Barack Obama, but what was special to me was that she won Pilsen, where I grew up. She won that district because Chicagoans are loyal. And it was a tough call for Chicago given their home senator and their hometown girl. But Chicagoans are loyal so I think Illinois has a special place in Hillary’s heart.

This article was originally published on January 27, 2016. It has been edited and condensed for publication in print.

Correcting Corrections Reform and recovery in cook county jail

BY DYLAN WELLS AND KAELI SUBBERWAL WITH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM GABRIELA LASTRES AND SOPHIA ZALLER On Friday, April 8, the Gate sent a group of reporters to Cook County Jail, the largest single-site jail in the United States. At Sheriff Tom Dart’s invitation, we met with inmates, guards, and administrators. The visit and weeks of additional research culminate in this article.

T

he halls leading to Cook County Jail’s processing room, dubbed “Receiving,” are lined with mismatched patches of worn linoleum. A painted yellow line running down the middle of the floor divides the camera-marked path from the jail’s entrance to the receiving area. The corridor winds past pink tiled bathrooms with doorless stalls and austere cells with yellowing cinderblock walls. Most of the people walking these halls are men in beige jumpsuits, and the majority seem to know their way without direction from their guard escorts. In the receiving room, those who have been arrested the previous night are screened for mental health problems. The process is fast-paced and systematic; Hanke Gratteau, who serves as the director of the Sheriff’s Justice Institute, describes the scene as “or-

ganized chaos.” Ben Breit, director of communications at the Cook County sheriff's office, likens the operation to “an assembly line.” After the booking process, inmates are taken to a bond trial where, as Breit puts it, “a judge determines how much money [their] freedom is worth.”

Most of the detainees, however, seem unconcerned with the procedure ahead of them. Many of them laugh and joke with one another, while others sit in silence and one takes a nap. The majority look at ease. “This is their normal,” Breit emphasizes, noting that a large portion of those in the cavernous room are repeat offenders—men who are familiar with the receiving process. Many detainees have been evaluated by Cook County mental health professionals before. However this

mandatory screening process is necessary to ensure that all arrestees are made aware of the resources and treatment available to them at least once during their time in the facility, given that those who can make bail will be released immediately after their bond trial.

The room buzzes with activity. Some men pace aimlessly in front of a wall lined with barred holding cells; others chat casually near an unlocked cell door. On a nearby bench, fourteen men wait to be screened before meeting their public defenders for the first time. When they hear “next!” each man stands and walks to a counter in the corner of the room, where he is screened by a member of the Sheriff’s Office of Mental Health Policy and Advocacy team. Leading the screening efforts is Elli The Gate | 35

Petacque Montgomery, a slight woman with glasses and a warm smile, equipped with a clipboard holding the morning’s mental health stats.

The Largest Mental Instituion in the State Montgomery stresses that the decrease in funding for mental health programs in Illinois has contributed to Cook County Jail’s growing role as a mental health facility. In a recent interview with the Gate, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart echoed this concern: “[The jail has] become the largest mental institution in the state.” This transition is largely due to the closure of six city-run mental health clinics and three state-run facilities, mostly in 2012. These closures have even spurred the sheriff’s choice to reopen a mental health clinic on his own initiative and with his own department’s funds. Dart explained that he recently “worked out an agreement” with the city in order to “reopen one of their clinics . . . [and] operate it.” Breit notes that the jail saw “an immediate spike” in the number of mentally ill people it was admitting after many lost the ability to obtain medication from their mental health care providers. In Breit’s view, “the way the government has treated mental illness is disgraceful.”

There has been over $100 million in cuts tostate-funded mental health services in Illinois since 2009, and Gratteau argues that the jail’s newfound role as mental health care provider has been “hideously expensive.” Breit agrees, contending that “not only [are cuts] morally wrong, but [they are] fiscally insane.” The jail spends, on average, $143 per healthy inmate per day; for those with mental health problems, the cost is double and sometimes triple due to extra charges for medicine, equipment, and security. For example, one man recently ripped out one of his eyes in an attempt to end his severe

hallucinations and required full-time supervision by two officers during the first several weeks of his time at Cook County Jail. His treatment and security measures required excess costs far beyond the average $143 per day.

This inmate’s case and others like it are often used as evidence of the flaws in the nation’s penal system, but Breit emphasizes the limited capacity of Cook County Jail to control the number or health of the inmates who are sent to the jail. The jail must accept every detainee brought in, regardless of the sheriff’s view on their case, including the mentally ill. Caring for these inmates costs more due to their illnesses, and many struggle in the jail environment.

Some inmates, for example, become violent due to their poor mental health, but instead of receiving help or treatment, they accrue additional charges, known as “jail cases.” These cases can extend their sentences or lead to further consequences.

Breit laments that “no one cares about” the people coming through Cook County Jail and sharply states that “it’s easy [for Rauner and Emanuel] to cut services to people [they] don’t have to face.” In his words, “the easiest thing to do is to cut mental health services because no one cares about these people.”

But Breit, Gratteau, Montgomery, and the rest of the Cook County Jail staff serve the men and women awaiting bond every day. Each screening lasts around five minutes, and covers standard biographical questions—year of birth, charge, medical history, drug and alcohol use. A twenty-oneyear-old black male confesses that this is not his first time “in Division Two [a group of dormitories that house minimum and medium security men] with the dumb sick people,” while an older man at the counter next to him states that he has attended anger management classes. Beyond these basic procedural questions, the screening team asks about

mental health history, searching for signs of schizophrenia, severe depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, bipolar disorder, bereavement, and other mental illnesses. Some questions are targeted to elicit more information about potential symptoms. For example, Montgomery asks people how they sleep and how they feel on the Fourth of July to try to determine whether they may suffer from PTSD. Female arrestees are typically more forthcoming about PTSD, especially if they have been trafficked. Those who have been stabbed, shot, or have witnessed someone’s death are also flagged as at risk for PTSD. During the screening process, Montgomery’s team ranks detainees on a numerical scale from one to six that also takes into account past criminal history and failure to appear in court.

The information gathered in the pre-bond screening is essential. Depending on the outcome of the process, some arrestees may be granted different amounts of bond. Others may be sent straight to Cermak Health if, for example, they exhibit intense symptoms of drug withdrawal or are otherwise in need of medical attention. Those who are acutely psychotic will be placed in single cells, and some may be placed on suicide watch. During the screening, the team recommends community mental health resources. Montgomery states that she is particularly concerned about young adults and individuals entering their thirties, common ages for psychotic breaks. However, she underscores that mental illness can affect people “everywhere, anywhere, and at any time.”

About 38 percent of the 8,200 inmates currently housed in the jail are mentally ill, and 30-50 percent self-identify mental health concerns on any given day. On April 8, thirty-three out of eighty men and seven out of fifteen women screened by Montgomery and her team were found to have mental health issues—42 percent overall. Gratteau argues that many of the inmates with mental health challenges “shouldn’t be here,” and that the “mentally ill are landing in jail instead of hospitals.”

The Price of Freedom Except for those accused of high-level offenses like murder, the majority of arrestees who go through the pre-bond mental health screening will be granted bond. However, the set cost of bond often exceeds what the men and women awaiting trial can afford. The information gathered from the screening is sent directly to bond court in the hope that judges will grant lower bonds to those with clear mental illness who are in need of assistance. According to Breit, this policy backfires in some cases when the stigma of mental illness causes certain judges to impose higher bonds out of fear that these people would pose a threat to society if not kept in jail. Dart complains that in consequence, some “public defenders stopped giving the mental health

36 | The Gate

information to judges” during the already brief twenty to thirty- second hearings.

To many people, the idea of a jail brings to mind convicted inmates serving their time. However, 95 percent of people in Cook County Jail are simply awaiting trial or conviction. According to Dart, some detainees may wait up to eight or ten years for trial. This prolonged waiting period causes many to lose their jobs and homes or to fall out of contact with their families and children. Five percent of the jail population is serving “county time” of under one year. The average stay for an inmate at the jail is hard to determine due to a number of variables—some people can immediately pay their bond and others are quickly released on probation.

However, those in jail for “crimes of survival” like retail theft or criminal trespass generally stay between 90 and 120 days. According to Breit, the bulk of people in Cook County Jail are housed in the facility purely because they “cannot make the bond” that has been set for them. Although bond can be as low as one hundred dollars, that might as well be a fortune for many of the men and women who enter the system. Yet other inmates commit petty crimes in order to be placed in the jail and receive services such as food, shelter, and medicine that they would not otherwise be able to afford.

Some have been known to loiter at local police stations until they are taken to Cook County Jail, which, according to Breit, provides some of them with “the only treatment they’ve ever had.” Some inmates have cycled through the jail for years, bearing witness to a series of challenges and reforms.

Demographics and the DOJ In 2007, the year Tom Dart took office, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) flagged Cook County Jail for “life-threatening deficiencies in sanitation and safety measures.” In 2008, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division claimed that the jail had systematically violated the constitutional rights of inmates. Eight years later, in 2016, the Cook County Board agreed to pay over $1.4 million to settle civil rights cases dating back to 2011.

Though jail guards have not been armed with guns for decades, there have still been issues related to violence between inmates and corrections officers in recent years. As part of a push for greater transparency, Dart released footage associated with six cases in which jail officers used excessive force against inmates, which led to the discipline of thirteen officers.

Before 2013, overcrowding in the facility and a shortage of beds forced some inmates to sleep in shifts or on the floor. Breit said that shortly thereafter the jail staff “sounded the alarm and judges got the message,” sending detainees home with ankle bracelets to await trial. However, the jail remains the largest single-site jail in the country, and during the

summer it routinely reaches maximum capacity at 10,000 inmates. Breit confesses that during his first few months working at the jail he “was blissfully unaware how broken the system was.” Today, he acknowledges the “benign neglect” that still permeates the system.

The population of the jail is disproportionately composed of members of racial minorities and people of low-income backgrounds—those most likely to commit crimes of survival, be arrested, and be unable to pay bond. In 2011, 66.9 percent of inmates admitted to the jail were black, 19.6 percent were categorized in the report as “Hispanic or other,” and 13.5 percent were white. A plurality of inmates were between twenty-one and twenty-five years old. Over 50 percent of inmates came from the South and West Sides of Chicago. Of the discharges in 2011, 32.5 percent posted bond; the rest either served time in prison, were sentenced to probation, or had their charges dropped. Although there have been fluctuations in these numbers over the years, the population of the jail has historically been black, poor, and from the South or West Side.

“We Are Still Human Beings” Inmates in Dorm 2 of Division 2, the men’s minimum security facility, have varying perceptions of Cook County Jail and the greater criminal justice system. Two rows of bunk beds line the men’s deck on the second floor, and inmates line up to use a microwave, play chess, and watch The Price is Right.

When Breit, Gratteau, and Sergeant Robert Zaccone enter the deck, the men abandon their activities and gather by the door, eager to share their perspectives on the jail and the system that has failed many of them.

The first inmate to speak immediately points to the Chicago Police Department as the source of un-

just incarceration, claiming that “the first problem is police putting narcotics on people.” Another man echoes this accusation, asserting that “the Chicago Police Department should be held accountable for falsifying documents.” One man describes how a $4 theft can put someone in jail for seven months.

Others seem angry, arguing that they are incarcerated for crimes that they did not commit, and that they are forced to advocate for themselves due to ineffective public defenders. Dart notes that when he visits with inmates, they often act as if he is “their lawyer, their public defender” and ask him for help, since they are aware of his work to reform the jail and hope he will fight on their behalf.

Many inmates speak about the psychological and emotional stresses of incarceration, calling their treatment “belittling.” One man bemoans how the system “makes you lose self-confidence.” and a different inmate adds that all they need “is a second chance.” Another argues that “you should do time for one crime and get it over with,” meaning the courts should stop allowing past offenses to influence present sentencing. A fourth man simply states, “We are still human beings.”

Many of the men in this dorm suffer from mental illness or have other health concerns. When Breit asks how many inmates in this deck were affected by the closure of mental health clinics over the past several years, around a third solemnly raise their hands, and one man mentions that “the school closures, too” have adversely affected them. Another is quick to suggest that more rehabilitation facilities should be created throughout the city. Others complain about the food prepared in the jail’s kitchen, the largest in the country. A man notes that they don’t get hot meals, just “bologna every day,” and another jumps in to complain that inmates are fed non-nutritious “cookies and cakes for breakfast.”

When a jail administrator makes a quip about the The Gate | 37

food, one inmate interjects, “Don’t joke about the food. We have to eat that shit.”

Yet despite moments of disconnect between inmates and guards and administrators, the men in this particular dorm do not seem to blame the jail staff specifically for their situation. One inmate points at Sergeant Zaccone and says, “I don’t fault them because it’s higher than them.” Zaccone tries to express support for the men. “You’re a man before you’re an inmate,” he tells them. “If you let them make you, you’re not you.” Breit says of such good-hearted gestures that the Cook County Sheriff’s office is simply “doing right by them because it’s the right thing to do,” for although the jail has no discretion in accepting detainees, the staff can at least treat them as well as possible. As Dart told the Gate, “the humanizing part for me is easy, because the underlying criminal event that brought them in is so inconsequential.”

Breit argues that if every man in this building were released, “there would not be a threat to the community.” The men have many plans for their lives following release. When asked what they would do if they could walk out of jail today, all of the inmates who respond mention furthering their education or working. One says he would like to go to college, while another shares his desire to enter the Chicago Transit Authority’s Second Chance Program.

In order to achieve their goals and reduce their likelihood of recidivating, a majority of the men in this deck participate in the jail’s Mental Health Transition Center (MHTC) programming, which has garnered national attention for revolutionizing mental health treatment for incarcerated individuals. When the conversation turns to this topic, the tone shifts. One inmate says he is “benefiting a whole lot” from the program, and another reminds his peers that they “shouldn’t be [participating in the program] to better their cases, but to better themselves.” When the majority of the men on deck break out into a rehearsed, perfectly synchronized pledge about mental health and changing their lives, most seem caught up in the passion for the MHTC, though some snicker and choose not to participate.

In contrast to the men on the deck in Dorm 2, some of the 684 inmates in Dorm 4 share a large 350-bed room, which is separated from the

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building’s entrance by a row of wired windows and a metal door guarded by an officer. The close quarters can facilitate the spread of illness, and earlier this year, a flu forced the entire dorm to go into quarantine. During times of quarantine, inmates are not allowed visitors or court visits, which potentially extends their time in jail. The inmates crowd to the windows: some gesture at a group of detainees sitting on a nearby bench with their belongings at their feet, a few turn to talk to each other, and others watch silently. Few of the minimum security inmates who live in Dorm 4 take part in the MHTC programs, as many choose to spend their time working for money rather than participating in classes and therapy sessions. To qualify for work, an inmate must typically have a bond of under $200,000, but many complain about the arbitrary nature of this cutoff, since bond can vary widely depending on the day and the judge.

Welcome to Division 4 Unlike the stark simplicity of the men’s facilities, the walls of Division 4—the women’s dorm—are decorated with murals, National Poetry Month posters, Easter signs, and prints proclaiming “God Still Loves Me.” The dorm contains a beauty shop as well as a law library. In one of the hallways, a mural has been painted on the cinderblock wall, with the inscription “Welcome to Division 4,” surrounded by flowers and a dove in flight. Typically, women in Cook County Jail are nonviolent offenders: many are victims of trafficking, and a large proportion are arrested for crimes of survival. This division has recently been combined with Division 17 as part of a large-scale jail consolidation project.

The group of minimum security females housed in Division 17 was merged with Division 3, whose inhabitants were classified at all security levels except super maximum. They were all relocated to the recently renovated Division 4, where the women from Division 17 retained access to vocational, drug rehabilitation, and mental health counselling. These treatment programs, some of which are mandated to women by their judges, are located on the first floor of Division 4. Pregnant women, who receive extra programming and care, are housed on this floor as well.

Pregnant inmates receive parenting lessons and

prenatal care, and those who successfully complete the Babies and Mothers Surviving (BAMS) program are allowed contact visits in the building’s playroom after their children are born. Last year, ten babies were born to Cook County Jail inmates.

They stayed with their mothers for several days before being relocated to live with relatives or as wards of the state.

Although women have their own in-house programming, female inmates do not have access to the MHTC because it is still in a pilot phase for men only. Instead, they are treated using a “gender-specific and trauma-informed treatment plan,” according to Director of Programming Caitlin Williams, who says she is sensitive to the fact that “pathways into the criminal justice system for women look a lot different from those for men.” Recently, an accommodations committee has made efforts to address the special needs of transgender inmates as well. Regardless of gender identity, all inmates in Division 4 have access to the same programming.

Lisa, a former prostitute, spent time as an inmate in Cook County Jail and is now a peer specialist who also runs a Prostitutes Anonymous group.

Lisa strives to show how her healthy choices have paid off and to provide an example for current inmates by sharing her story of getting sober and surviving homelessness and sexual abuse. One of the initiatives Lisa works on, the Dream Catchers program, attempts to target at-risk girls, especially those who have been trafficked, and emphasizes healthy choices, self-care, and mentorship. Other services offered to female inmates include counseling meetings, post-treatment planning sessions, meditation exercises, dance therapy classes, and coping skills workshops. While staff members would prefer that every female inmate receive personal counseling, one-on-one therapy is reserved for the most at-risk women due to a lack of resources.

Some women chosen from a long wait list are also able to participate in special programming like book clubs, yoga classes, a sewing program, and GED lessons, but demand outstrips availability.

Inmates under twenty-one can go to high school five days a week, but not all choose to participate.

In the words of Superintendent Kelly Baker, adding programs can “keep [the female inmates] busy, keep them out of trouble.” Williams recommends a detainment of 120 days for women, because after

this time there is a significant drop in “how many come back.” Despite this, current recidivism rates for women and men are roughly equal.

The maximum security inmates housed on the second floor do not have access to many of the division’s special programs. These are the women who used to be housed in Division 3, and who are awaiting trial for more serious crimes or are deemed dangerous to the general inmate population. When a corrections officer passes the deck housing the maximum security women, the inmates flock to the door, knocking on the wire-crossed safety glass window, hoping to speak to someone about their cases.

Because of their different needs and smaller population, the women of Cook County Jail live very different lives than their male counterparts.

The staff attempt to guide them through the unique trials of pregnancy, drug addiction, and recovery from sexual abuse, but they still face a host of challenges in their path back to the outside world.

“The Crown Jewel of Cook County’s Restorative Justice” While the poster-lined halls of Division 4 and the bunk-filled decks of Division 2 may seem indistinguishable from those of any other jail around the United States, the Mental Health Transition Center (MHTC) is entirely unique to Cook County. The program, also known as Division 16, is a standalone compound located a short drive from the main jail complex. Referred to by Breit as “the crown jewel of Cook County’s restorative justice program,” the MHTC is intended to combat recidivism among the mentally ill, a population with especially high rates of re-arrest. Approximately 8 percent of the overall jail population participates, but Dart ultimately aims to make the compound residential and open to all genders and to increase overall involvement. Dart wants to send information regarding the program to every jail in the country so they can learn from Cook County’s efforts.

As Breit argues, “If the largest jail in the country can pull it off, anyone can.”

The center serves not only current inmates but also graduates of the program. The MHTC offers alumni sessions each month so those who have been released can speak to current inmates, and also operates a 24/7 hotline in order to help graduates navigate the world outside the jail. Dart lauds these resources, but also notes that it is “frightening that the best way for [those who have been released from jail] to receive further help is by returning” to the facility. One graduate of the program now even works as a Cook County Jail employee. The recidivism rate has “plummeted” for program alumni, although Breit notes that recidivism figures are notoriously imprecise because the concept is difficult to define. However, when it comes to the MHTC,

Breit says that only a few of the men who completed the program have returned to Cook County Jail.

MHTC programming includes job and vocational skills, resume help, classes in fields like cooking, and a variety of other options. Guest speakers occasionally come in to talk to inmates. In Breit’s words, “we kind of throw everything at them” to expose inmates to a diverse set of skills. From day one, inmates in the program are guided through the process of creating a discharge plan, since they do not necessarily know when they will get out.

The halls of Division 16 are plastered with handwritten essays on diversity and photos from a small photography program. Some of these photos include headshots of inmates wearing blazers and ties with a professional background—in sharp contrast with their Department of Corrections pants. Others show flowers and plants growing in the yard, while a few exhibit experimentation with light and portraiture. A sign renames the MHTC: Making History Through Cameras.

In a classroom in the MHTC, six men participate in an anger management course, listening to a lesson focused on “Steps for Responding to Anger.” At the instruction of their teacher, inmates roleplay tense situations as they escalate. During key moments in the interaction, they offer suggestions to one another about coping techniques such as deep breathing and counting to ten. Afterwards, the inmates debrief and debate the proper way to respond to a variety of tense scenarios. Many of the men offer suggestions like extending comfort, asking questions, and providing validation as ways to help diffuse a situation. One man describes the anger he sees on his deck: for example, two other inmates recently argued for an hour over whether “there was a McDonald’s at Laramie and 3rd Ave,” a dispute he found “stressful.” The men discuss how anger can often mask underlying emotions, such as hurt, humiliation, frustration, fear, and rejection,

and conclude that this man can become a conflict mediator on the deck instead of allowing these disputes to bother him.

Down the hall, twenty-two inmates from Dorm 2 of Division 2, two guards, and a teacher—Ms. Sharon—are participating in a book club.

Seated in beige plastic chairs arranged in a semi-circle and prepared for group discussion, the inmates hold copies of Do Good After Prison by Michael B. Jackson. This is the second book the group of inmates has read, following Letters to Incarcerated Brothers by Hill Harper. The walls of the room are covered in homemade motivational posters, proclaiming messages like “Speak it Into Existence,” “Don’t Let a Bad Attitude Ruin Your Day,” and “Team Achievers.” At the front of the room, under signs lauding the benefits of keeping a personal journal, Ms. Sharon commands the attention of the inmates, stating that her “job is to ensure that they don’t [come] back.”

Ms. Sharon notes that “the volunteer basis of the program shows that [these inmates] are trying to make change within themselves.” Those attending the program have monthly progress reports sent to their judges, though many initially came simply to avoid the monotony of life on the deck. Ms. Sharon stresses that “recovery doesn’t begin the day you walk out, it begins the day you walk in.” In May, to celebrate Mental Health Awareness Month, the program hosts a rally and graduation, featuring balloons and a large celebration. Ms. Sharon says that it’s the first time many of the inmates have worn graduation robes.

One inmate who says he originally came to the program just to leave the deck says that since then it has “helped me realize that I wasn’t alone as far as mental problems.” A heavily tattooed man agrees with this sentiment, confessing that he thought the program was not for him since he was “only in here for a DUI, just one mistake.” Since starting The Gate | 39

the program, however, he has realized that “everyone has thinking errors, it’s about recognizing them … wrong thinking leads to wrong living.” One inmate describes how before joining the MHTC, he “wouldn’t consider going to a therapist, getting help, or taking meds; instead I’d turn to alcohol or weed.” One man told the class that he previously assumed he would reoffend after release, but that now he “thinks about doing something different, to further [his] education.”

The room erupts into laughter when another detainee explains that the MHTC program convinced him to stop making an illicit ketchup-based liquor, known as “hooch,” on the deck. He had been caught making hooch, and after guards threatened to kick him out of the MHTC, he realized, “I need this program.” “I felt like a bad apple” within the cohort, he says, which led him to give away forty-eight unopened packets of ketchup to other inmates after he shut down his operation.

Ms. Sharon tells him his story “was powerful,” a guard pats him on the back, and the class claps to celebrate his achievement.

The men in the room seem to agree that the programming will affect the rest of their lives. One man seated next to Ms. Sharon says, “I’ve been coming in and out for twenty-nine, thirty years …

This is the first time I’ve experienced rehabilitation … Now I can see my abilities and attributes.” Ms. Sharon explains that this inmate almost quit the program when he was offered a paid work assignment. After speaking with her, however, he decided to stay in the MHTC and is now one of biggest advocates for the program.

“When you guys come in, what do you see?” another inmate asks. The question hangs in the air for several moments, emphasizing the divide between the inmates and the outside world. The detainees seem eager for a response, anxious to learn how society perceives their efforts to reform.

Rocket Docket and Phones in Breit’s Pocket In addition to the MHTC, the jail has taken other steps to rectify what Gratteau calls “unjust incarceration,” a term she prefers to “mass incarceration,” because “it’s about the people,” not the numbers.

According to Gratteau, Dorm 4 of Division 2, the dorm housing hundreds of working inmates, exemplifies the “revolving door” of the jail system, with many detainees coming back after being released. The majority of the men in this dorm are low-level offenders, but their past crimes may influence the bonds they are set and their eventual sentences. Gratteau and her team are currently working to help one such man to get his job back.

He was found with a joint and two Viagra without a prescription and slapped with a $50,000 bond mainly because, despite having had a clean 40 | The Gate

record for thirteen years, he had a past conviction for armed robbery.

One piece of legislation that aims to reduce unjust incarceration is the Rocket Docket, Illinois Senate Bill 202. The Rocket Docket allows for people with nonviolent records who are convicted of petty retail theft and criminal trespassing, considered crimes of survival, to be released within thirty days if their cases have not already concluded.

Additionally, their records are expunged after five years. The bill passed in the state legislature with little opposition, and now advocates are working to include people convicted for using expired or revoked driver’s licenses (provided drivers have not been charged with a DUI or were not involved in bodily harm). Dart also hopes to add class four drug possession—the number one charge in bond court—to the convictions the Rocket Docket covers. Reform advocates are also fighting to create fee waivers for those who can’t pay the $120 fee to have their records cleared, a process that Dart describes as “something that will give you no faith in government whatsoever.” Dart hopes to transform expungement into “a more thoughtful, fluid process that a five-year-old could put together.”

The sheriff’s efforts to improve the lives of the inmates of Cook County Jail have come at the cost of a contentious relationship with City Hall and Springfield. Dart asserts that “the Illinois government has always been dysfunctional,” and that as a result of their budget cuts “they’re shutting down these [diversion] services on the street and then we’re getting more people coming to the jail.”

However, the sheriff and his team have worked to effect change independently of the city and state government; as Dart says, “we’ve been able to do everything in-house within existing laws,” without relying too much on the discretion of Governor Rauner and Mayor Emanuel. Speaking of his recent efforts to reform eviction policies, Dart said, “I didn’t need to have any legislation to do it; I just needed to care.” Because Dart pays little heed to local or state government intervention, he is able to reform his jail for the better. "When you truly just don’t care [about the government]—and I do not care—it’s the most liberating thing in the world,” he said. “We can advocate for inmates, we can advocate for poor people, we can advocate for people who've been convicted … Who's going to stop us?”

Though it is clear that Cook County Jail has made great strides in recent years, problems still persist. For example, Breit mentions the prevalence of “dead days,” which occur when when someone spends more days in jail awaiting trial than he or she is eventually sentenced to. This problem results from the lack of a case management or triage system, leaving murder cases to be treated with the same urgency as minor theft. When trials for major crimes are given the same priority as minor offenses, detainees may spend more time in jail than

needed. An April 2016 decision to ban cellphones from court has already had negative consequences: some people have missed court appearances because they aren’t able to store their phones securely and are unwilling to come without them. Breit has tried to help mitigate this problem by standing outside the courtroom and holding phones for people in his pocket, but his individual effort cannot fix this institutional problem.

While Breit asserts that the jail is “getting better and better” and has “really transformed” since the DOJ’s civil rights accusations in 2008, Cook County Jail still faces a number of challenges. From the inmates to the sheriff, everyone connected to the jail emphasizes the need to correct the definition of corrections—to redefine the country’s penal system. One inmate laments that “somewhere along the line, the idea of correction was lost,” and another agreed that if he could change one thing about the system it would be “the concept of corrections.” Breit concurs, expressing his regret that there are “a lot of people who don’t care.” “So many aspects of this system are designed to make it hard for people without money [and] are designed to be punitive toward poor people,” he says. Dart agrees.

“The way that our criminal justice system operates, whether you are poor, mentally ill, or both, the cards are so stacked against you on so many different levels that you will end up in the criminal justice system frequently, and you will frequently end up in there for indeterminate periods of time that are not based on what your action was that got you there,” he told the Gate. He maintains that the disproportionate impact of the prison system on the poor and mentally ill creates a situation “in which the wrong people are put into criminal justice settings and are stuck there forever.” This conviction contributes to Dart’s difficulty “making friends in city hall” as he fights against both Governor Rauner and Mayor Emanuel’s budget cuts to try and keep the poor and mentally ill from returning to the jail.

From Breit’s regret that the jail has no discretion in accepting inmates to one inmate’s remark that the dysfunctions in the criminal justice system go higher than the jail administration, many involved parties insist that reform has to extend beyond the sheriff’s office. In short, Dart says, “The system is pretty screwed up.”

The inmates do not appear to fault the sheriff for the hardships they face. "When I go [to the decks],” Dart says, “they're really engaged. They think that I care, which I do." Though serious challenges persist at the jail, Dart is optimistic: “We’re on the cusp of really good things right now.”

Julian Duggan, Chelsea Fine, Daphne McKee, Danielle Schmidt, Liz Stark, and Tom Wood contributed reporting. The photos featured in this article were taken by Chelsea Fine.

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