There is a great quote by Henry Adams that I often return to: “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” I’ve always appreciated this quote.

I have taught hundreds of young people (in high school and college) over the years. Most I cannot fully remember but even years later a few do stand out. I received an e-mail on Friday from one of my memorable former students. I taught a college senior seminar about race, gender and youth violence in 2002. She was enrolled in the course. She is an African American young woman which made her stand out at Northwestern. She was funny and very engaged in the subject matter. At the end of the quarter, she collected money from her peers to present me with a gift card from Target for the youth in an organization that I helped to found.

A couple of years later, I received a letter from my student telling me that she had been motivated by the course to seek an internship at the Department of Juvenile Justice in Florida. This led her to decide to go to law school. She eventually became a juvenile defender. Until Friday, it had been years since we’d last been in touch.

She wrote to tell me that she is receiving an award from her local bar association for her juvenile justice-related work. She said that she wanted to reach out to thank me for helping her to find her path in life. She wrote that she was planning to dedicate the award to me but that most importantly she hoped that she would one day be able to make a difference in someone else’s life like I did in hers.

So, first let me say that I have no words. I am profoundly humbled that she thinks me worthy of such an honor. This is one of the reasons that I will never fully give up teaching. It keeps me perpetually young and gives a home to my endless curiosity.

However, I am writing about this not because I think that I did so very much to “help her find her path.” She did the work herself. Instead, I wanted to underscore another point. She has now become a mentor to several young women. I want to say how incredibly thrilled that makes me. I am grateful that these young women of color can look to my former student for support, encouragement, and guidance. I am moved to tears about that.

So I thank my former student for reaching out to me and letting me know how she is. I want to congratulate her on what I know is a well-deserved honor recognizing her contributions. Finally, I want to tell her how proud I am that she is teaching other young women about how they can succeed. A teacher can never tell where her influence stops, indeed.

In the spirit of recognizing the value of mentorship, I invite all of you in Chicago to attend a free screening of the film “the Interrupters” at the Chicago Cultural Center on December 17th from 2 to 5 p.m. The film is followed by a panel discussion featuring women who mentor young women. You’ll want to come just to hear the amazing Ameena Matthews (who is featured in the film) speak about her experiences (yours truly is also on the panel but that is not the reason to attend). Below is a clip from the Interrupters which features Ameena doing what she does every day, teaching and mentoring young people:

A big part of my mission on this blog is to feature examples of alternatives to incarceration. It is often difficult to find such stories reported in the news. The news prefers subscribe to the “if it bleeds, it leads” motto. Back in January of this year, I featured a story of restorative justice involving a mugging victim.

Now comes this story from the Cincinnati Enquirer:

Wearing his hard hat and a sheen of sweat, Danny Pabst stepped away from the locomotive and watched as Michael Morgan swung a sledgehammer like a baseball bat, smashing it into a metal rod held by his older brother, William Morgan.

Grunt, clang. Grunt, clang. Grunt, clang.

The Morgan brothers, Pabst and others were trying to dislodge a rusted, bent, 3-inch-thick metal pin. It was connecting a piece to the exterior of a 60-year-old locomotive being renovated in a Norwood rail yard.

After 30 minutes of sledge swinging and oath uttering, the pin finally was freed.

“I like the work that they do,” a panting Pabst said of William, 34, and Michael Morgan, 30.

He likes their work so much, he’s decided to hire them.

But Pabst wasn’t as enamored of them in April, when the brothers broke into the rail yard – where Pabst restores privately owned, historic passenger railway cars at his Cincinnati and Ohio Railway Services company – and stole $7,000 in copper cables.

The seven cables, so heavy that the brothers also stole a plastic 55-gallon garbage can to carry them in, are the electrical umbilical cords that connect rail cars.

Police were unaware of the theft when they saw the Morgan brothers at about 4 p.m. April 28 on railroad tracks burning rubber coatings off cables to get to the copper wire. But when Pabst reported the theft the next day, police immediately made the connection.

They went to a nearby scrap yard, where workers told police they had paid $454.50 for copper brought in by William Morgan, who signed the receipt and was on video scrapping the copper.

The copper cables were being hauled by William Morgan in a gray garbage can just like the one Pabst said had also been stolen, scrap yard workers told police.

Arrests weren’t new to the brothers. William Morgan, a former iron worker, had been to prison once. Michael Morgan, who did odd jobs, had been twice. All were theft-related convictions.

They stole from Pabst, William Morgan said, because their father is ill and receives hospice care.

“Our dad’s dying of cancer and we’re trying to keep the (family) house,” William Morgan said.

The brothers, who live just blocks away, know the rail yard well.

“They’ve been running us out of here since we were kids,” William Morgan said with a laugh.

When they came to court in August, Pabst asked if they had cash to repay him the $7,000.

Because they had no money, Pabst offered a suggestion.

As attorney Greg Nolan, who represented Michael Morgan in his receiving-stolen property case, put it: “The words out of Danny’s mouth were, ‘These jerks, if they just would have only come to me in the daylight hours, I would have hired them. I’m desperate for help.’

“Given the number of copper thefts and the amount here, there was a good chance both of these gentlemen were going to jail.”

Pabst, though, persuaded Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Robert Ruehlman to place the brothers on probation so they could work off their debt to him.

“That’s amazing,” the judge said. “That’s a first. We don’t have that very often, where guys steal stuff and then actually come back and work for the victim, pay them back by working for them.”

The judge put the brothers on probation for a year so they could pay off the debt.

Read the rest of the story here.

by Kevin "Rashid" Johnson

For more information about artist and prisoner, Rashid Johnson’s work click here.

By Josh MacPhee

In 1955, James Baldwin wrote an essay titled “Equal in Paris” which was published in Commentary Magazine. I really love this piece of prose. Baldwin recounts the eight days that he spent in French prisons after he was accused of stealing bedsheets from a hotel. Ultimately, Baldwin was released. He had in fact not “stolen” the sheets; a friend of his (also an American) had. Relying on the themes of injustice, imprisonment, abuse of power, and police brutality that are so prevalent in all of his work, Baldwin offers a searing description of his time behind bars. Below I offer a couple of the excerpts that stayed with me after reading them nearly 20 years ago:

“For, once locked in, divested of shoelaces, belt, watch, money, papers, nailfile, in a freezing cell in which both the window and the toilet were broken, with six other adventurers, the story I told of l’affaire du drap de lit elicited only the wildest amusement or the most suspicious disbelief. Among the people who shared my cell the first three days no one, it is true, had been arrested for anything much more serious—or, at least, not serious in my eyes. I remember that there was a boy who had stolen a knitted sweater from a monoprix, who would probably, it was agreed, receive a six-month sentence. There was an older man there who had been arrested for some kind of petty larceny. There were two North Africans, vivid, brutish, and beautiful, who alternated between gaiety and fury, not at the fact of their arrest but at the state of the cell. None poured as much emotional energy into the fact of their arrest as I did; they took it, as I would have liked to take it, as simply another unlucky happening in a very dirty world. For, though I had grown accustomed to thinking of myself as looking upon the world with a hard, penetrating eye, the truth was that they were far more realistic about the world than I, and more nearly right about it. The gap between us, which only a gesture I made could have bridged, grew steadily, during thirty-six hours, wider. I could not make any gesture simply because they frightened me. I was unable to accept my imprisonment as a fact, even as a temporary fact. I could not, even for a moment, accept my present companions as my companions. And they, of course, felt this and put it down, with perfect justice, to the fact that I was an American.

There was nothing to do all day long. It appeared that we would one day come to trial but no one knew when. We were awakened at seven-thirty by a rapping on what I believe is called the Judas, that small opening in the door of the cell which allows the guards to survey the prisoners. At this rapping we rose from the floor—we slept on straw pallets and each of us was covered with one thin blanket—and moved to the door of the cell. We peered through the opening into the center of the prison, which was, as I remember, three tiers high, all gray stone and gunmetal steel, precisely that prison I had seen in movies, except that, in the movies, I had not known that it was cold in prison. I had not known that when one’s shoelaces and belt have been removed one is, in the strangest way, demoralized. The necessity of shuffling and the necessity of holding up one’s trousers with one hand turn one into a rag doll. And the movies fail, of course, to give one any idea of what prison food is like. Along the corridor, at seven-thirty, came three men, each pushing before him a great garbage can, mounted on wheels. In the garbage can of the first was the bread—this was passed to one through the small opening in the door. In the can of the second was the coffee. In the can of the third was what was always called la soupe, a pallid paste of potatoes which had certainly been bubbling on the back of the prison stove long before that first, so momentous revolution. Naturally, it was cold by this time and, starving as I was, I could not eat it. I drank the coffee—which was not coffee—because it was hot, and spent the rest of the day, huddled in my blanket, munching on the bread. It was not the French bread one bought in bakeries. In the evening the same procession returned. At ten-thirty the lights went out. I had a recurring dream, each night, a nightmare which always involved my mother’s fried chicken. At the moment I was about to eat it came the rapping at the door. Silence is really all I remember of those first three days, silence and the color gray.”

Update: Here is a PDF copy of Equal in Paris.

Yesterday afternoon, I trudged over to the Cook County Building downtown to support an action organized by the Audy Home Campaign which is led by youth from Generation Y/Center for Change and Fearless Leading by the Youth. The Campaign aims to develop the leadership of youth directly impacted by juvenile incarceration to improve conditions in the detention center, and shut it down and replace it with alternative community-based programs.

The young people’s action took place in front of the office of Cook County Board President, Toni Preckwinkle. Preckwinkle has been vocal about her belief that the War on Drugs has been a failure. Who can argue with her about that? It is certainly good to hear a public figure speaking forcefully about the need for alternatives to incarceration particularly for non-violent drug offenders (in Preckwinkle’s case).

In October, Ms. Preckwinkle unveiled her budget for the County and she proposed cutting the population of the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (JTDC) by half over two years in an effort to save money. Here is some of what she had to say as she unveiled the budget:

“Detaining defendants in the jail while they await trial is very expensive for the county and is detrimental to our communities,” Ms. Preckwinkle told county commissioners on Tuesday. “The war on drugs has failed to eradicate drug use. Instead, it has resulted in the incarceration of millions throughout the nation — 100,000 annually right here in Cook County, at a cost of $143 per inmate per day.”

Locking up young people at the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center is even more expensive, upward of $600 a day per person, Ms. Preckwinkle said, with little benefit to the offender or society.

“So we’re spending four times what it would cost to send a child to Harvard to keep juveniles locked up,” said Ms. Preckwinkle, a former high school history teacher. “This just doesn’t make sense.”

The youth leaders who were demonstrating in front of Ms. Preckwinkle’s office yesterday were there to demand QUALITY alternatives to incarceration. They are worried that youth voices are currently absent from the debate and are also concerned about the fact that electronic monitoring might figure prominently in the County’s decarceration strategy. While the youth support the move to significantly reduce the numbers of their incarcerated peers, they also want to make sure that the resources are actually diverted back into high quality community-based programs. I shot some terrible video at the action but you can hear the youth express their concerns in their own words:

Also, here are the youth chanting when they first arrived. I always enjoy some good chanting…

Last week, I put together a fact sheet using 2010 data about the Cook County JTDC for those who might be interested.