Editor's note

Some issues seem to matter to nearly every elected official.

Take schools, for instance. Few can neglect them too long without risking political suicide. Whether you're rich or poor, access to quality health care seems to resonates widely. All families want decent parks, streets and other basic amenities. And nearly every constituency will kick out the lawmaker who raises their taxes.

Some things, however, are not viewed so universally, often in spite of their scope. Two of our stories this month focus on the formerly incarcerated, a group that happens to be predominantly black and disproportionately Latino. Recently, their supporters have won some important legislative victories.

But the wins rested largely on how well advocates could show white lawmakers what was in it for them when it came to reforms.

It begs the questions: When does a problem move from being a black issue to being one for all to consider? How widely must it reverberate for leaders outside African American communities to take action?

On its face, the challenges facing the state's ex-offenders seem pretty compelling. Right now, more than 42,000 men and women sit in Illinois prisons. Each year, 30,000 of them return home; 21 percent to Chicago's 10 poorest ZIP codes. And more than half end up going back to jail within three years, often because they can't get jobs. Over a third of those in Cook County end up finding work, compared to just over half in the rest of the state.

Taxpayers, meanwhile, continue to foot the bill for these efforts; it cost $1.3 billion to maintain the state's prisons in 2000, compared with $377 million in 1980. The cost of incarcerating just one person stands at about $24,000 a year, a 50 percent increase over the previous decade.

And yet, when it came to passing laws to try to improve those statistics, it took years for one African American lawmaker and a host of community activists to garner any support from those outside black communities.

Giving someone a second chance after they have done their time did not strike that lawmaker, state Pep. Connie Howard, as a controversial idea. But, in one of our stories, she admits she was "naive" about how difficult it would be to convince her white colleagues of that. Initially, her efforts to cloak the backgrounds of some former inmates--largely in an effort to help them find work--barely resonated in Springfield.

So Howard and others turned this issue from a black issue into a white one. Providing faces different from their own to give public testimony seemed to force others to pay attention.

To be fair, a few white lawmakers, including state Sen. Denny Jacobs from western Illinois, had already felt the impact close to home and supported such measures, bringing other colleagues along. But they remain in the minority.

The importance of universalizing an issue isn't the primary lesson to be learned from this effort. Howard's experience proves that new ideas about ways to handle entrenched problems aren't enough to change minds. Impressions about race and class, including perceived divisions based on differences in skin color, in income, in geography, continue to inform important public debate in our state. Often, they stifle that debate altogether, or at least slow it to a crawl.

Take our story this month on the employers who could hire this newly released population. We learned that hardly any takes advantage of the tax breaks and other offerings the government will give them for doing so. Few large business groups have discussed the issue or chosen to address it more widely. And more employers are relying on criminal background checks to eliminate some candidates earlier in the job hunt.

The activists we talked to said the main problem is simple: It is the stigma that comes with getting released from prison. While they won't give up on improving ineffective policies, they also acknowledge that stereotypes themselves must be challenged. Coaching ex-offenders to more effectively tell their stories, they hope, will help.

Meanwhile, the population of our prisons steadily rises, along with recidivism rates and the numbers of inmates released back into our neighborhoods.

Maybe when ex-offenders represent the majority of our population, every leader will be forced to take notice-and act swiftly.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Community Renewal Society
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group