A Sorry Excuse for a Decent Living

In 2002, Chicago racked up 599 murders, the most of any city in the nation. The following summer, the Chicago Police began to roll out “Operation Closed Market,” a new “violence reduction” policing plan that had been evolving since 1998. A similar program helped New York City cut its homicide toll from 2,245 in 1990 to 580 by 2003. In Chicago, they called it putting more “cops on the dots”–keeping mobile patrols in places where violent crimes often occur. The strategy amounted to a redeployment of officers into high-crime neighborhoods, and in operations referred to by the community as “block sweeps,” in which narcotics tactical units, standard beat cops, and a contingent of about 200 temporarily reassigned administrative personnel would all converge on these “open-air drug markets.” The department also used the city’s new high-powered, remote surveillance camera vans, nearly 1000 cameras mounted on light poles, undercover operatives posing as dealers, and squad cars parked on every known corner to “disrupt and discourage” drug commerce.

This saturation strategy was custom-designed for places like the Harrison district on the city’s Near West Side. Just west of the Medical District and the frontier of gentrification, the Harrison district is marked by crumbling high-rise projects, abandoned businesses, broken-windowed three-flats, and empty lots strewn with garbage. The population is almost exclusively poor and black. In “hot spots,” gang members stand three deep in recessed doorways turning over bag after bag of crack and heroin to a steady stream of customers of all races. They always stand in threes: one transacting, one holding, one watching. The customers arrive in cars, on foot, on bicycles, money ready, in and out in the span of a few seconds, always checking over their shoulder and leaving faster than they arrived. 

Homicides declined as expected–by 25 percent. As 2004 came to a close, the murder total was 445, falling below 500 for the first time since 1965. And for the first time in several years, Chicago had fewer homicides than both New York and Los Angeles, according to Chicago Police Deputy Director of News Affairs Patrick Camden.

“The end result of ‘Operation Closed Market’ and other saturation policing strategies was a decrease in violence,” he said. “There were 1000 less shootings and 154 less homicides, and we put together 38 ‘street corner’ drug conspiracy cases, many of them Federal.” Camden doesn’t offer figures on how drug commerce was impacted, but reiterates that “the goal was reducing violence, and we reduced violence.”

One Town’s Prison Industry

Thompson, a small Mississippi River town in northwestern Illinois, spent the 1980s and 1990s in economic freefall. An Army Depot located fifteen miles to the north employed 400 people in the town until it shut down in the early-‘90s. An International Paper plant employed a couple hundred more until it closed around the same time. In search of new economic development opportunities, town leaders turned to one of the few growth industries in rural Illinois: prison construction.

“Historically, Thompson and Carroll County have run the 2nd to 4th highest unemployment rate in the state,” says Village President Merri Jo Enloe. “The main reason we built a prison was because everyone needed a job.”

The Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) has an annual budget of $1.2 billion and employs 22,989 people in 26 prisons, 6 work camps, 2 boot camps, and 25 fully staffed parole offices. Building a prison brought Thompson $210,000 in Economic Development Administration grants from the U.S. Department of Commerce, $110,000 from the Illinois Department of Transportation to upgrade roads to the prison, a grant from the Interstate Commerce Commission to upgrade rail crossings, and a very lucrative local water and sewage contract worth roughly $615,000 annually to serve the prison.

The Village of Thompson is also permitted to add the 1800 residents of the prison to their population count. Since the Village receives $110 a year per resident from the state as a reimbursement on taxes paid, the prison population increases town revenue by another $200,000–a lucrative bonus to a town with a municipal budget of $328,000. Most importantly, the prison promises to deliver 750 permanent jobs.

These additional jobs, and other prison jobs in Illinois, are end products of the system created by urban drug initiatives like Operation Closed Market. IDOC reports that drug arrests represent 57 percent of the total annual arrests in Illinois, and nearly 110,000 non-violent drug offenders pass through the Illinois system a year, a figure that includes probated offenders as well as those incarcerated.

At the end of 2003, IDOC reported an adult prison population of 43,418 inmates–well above the system’s stated capacity of 31,702–with another 33,702 offenders on parole. In the last ten years the prison population had grown by 18.8 percent. The prison population was 61 percent black, 27 percent white, and 11 percent Latino. Nationally, even though white drug users outnumber blacks by a five-to-one margin, the U.S. Department of Justice reported that in 2003 blacks comprised 56.7 percent of all drug offenders admitted to state prisons while whites comprised only 23.3 percent.

Thompson residents recognized this dynamic. Describing some of the initial resistance to the prison, Enloe said: “This is a predominantly white area, and there was a lot of objection to minorities coming through the community, particularly [from] white transplants from the Chicago area who felt that the prison would bring to the community the kind of people they were trying to get away from by moving out here.”

To counter this fear, Enloe says, IDOC assured her colleagues that the residents of Thompson wouldn’t see many of the family members of prisoners traveling through their town because the inmates are regularly moved around from prison to prison. To assuage unsubstantiated fears of increased drug trafficking in the area, the state also promised increased funding for the Thompson Police and Carroll County Sheriff’s Department.

Making the Connection

Historically, Illinois had two solid economic engines employing millions: manufacturing and agriculture. The state used to produce the most corn and soybeans in the nation, and Chicago took those raw materials, processed, and shipped them, as William Cronon famously detailed in Nature’s Metropolis. Over the past 30 years, however, those engines eroded–exponentially so in the ‘90s after the lowering of trade barriers via passage of the North American Trade Free Agreement and creation of the World Trade Organization–and the symbiotic relationship between Chicago industry and Illinois agriculture largely faded. According to World Business Chicago, half of Chicago’s current work force of just over 4 million are employed in trade and business, education, and health services–compared to only 463,400 employed in traditional manufacturing sectors. In the rural areas, as in much of the country, large agribusiness firms have consolidated most older farms, reducing the number of jobs available. According to the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana College of Agriculture, the number of Illinois farms reached its maximum at 260,000 in 1900, declined gradually at first to 200,000 in 1950, and then dropped precipitously to 82,000 in 1990. Today that number stands at 76,000 and falling.

Many of those left behind in this economic transformation, unable or unwilling to find work in conventional jobs, have turned to drugs, or to the fight against them, for economic sustenance–creating a new link between Chicago and rural Illinois.

Chicago’s low-income black ghettos, such as the Harrison district, are particularly stark and direct symbols of those the economic transformation left behind. As law professor Richard Sander notes, blacks in early 20th century cities lived in far less segregated areas than they do today. Sander’s research shows that ghettos today are mostly concentrated in those cities where industrial jobs drew millions of blacks north during the Great Migration. When those jobs were exported to other countries, and when drugs were imported into inner-city neighborhoods–most notably during the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic–the modern black ghetto resulted.

“When there are no jobs, the schools are in deplorable condition, college is out of the equation for most, and racism permeates every aspect of society, in order for many people to survive, they get involved in drugs and gangs,” says Kelsa Rieger, a community organizer in Chicago who works closely with gang youth. “In a society that worships money and the access it grants, gang members and drug dealers who have respect on the streets and money to spend become the idols that these young people aspire to be.”

Meanwhile, in the economically devastated, rural downstate, the War on Drugs is an indirect godsend to almost anyone holding a prison job. “At the local level, the people aren’t thinking about a global drug economy, they are trying to make ends meet to feed their families,” says Dianna Brickner of Illinois NORML, a legislative reform group attempting to decriminalize marijuana.

Brickner’s husband, Bryan, grew up only a few miles away from Thompson. “I’m a small town boy from Scales Mound. I played basketball against Thompson. In those kinds of towns the people think, ‘we’re helping out, we’re housing the criminals of the state.’ They don’t really think that they may be living in the exact same situation as poor people living in the inner cities. They aren’t likely to connect the two, particularly when it might threaten their job security, of which they have little. Drugs sales and prison jobs are sorry replacements for a decent living, and our government has built this into a regular economic cycle.”

According to the Office for National Drug Control Policy, the United States spends $30 billion a year combating the War on Drugs, and over $4 billion incarcerating drug offenders. This funding has fueled the growth of the prison industry in places like Thompson, and in over 400 other places in America where new state prisons have opened in the past 25 years. The funding, perhaps unintentionally, may also help sustain drug dealing as an economically attractive choice in inner-city neighborhoods like the Harrison district. When drug dealers are arrested, steady demand for drugs in urban areas means the remaining dealers can often command a higher price, and additional people are enticed into dealing to serve demand. This cycle might mean that drug dealing can be even more lucrative, if riskier, in the inner city than it is in the wealthy, mainly white areas where most drug use occurs but is often unprosecuted.

Forging a New Relationship?

In Thompson, and in many other suburban and downstate towns such as Barrington, St. Charles, and Bloomington-Normal, there are signs of economic life besides prisons. Vast acres of farmland have transformed into sprawling residential subdivisions of people who commute to Chicago’s suburbs, or who telecommute with firms in Chicago’s strong information economy. Back in Chicago, that same economy has gentrified neighborhoods including Wicker Park, South Loop, Near West Side, and Pilsen.

People left behind in Chicago’s ghettos and the small towns and small farms downstate may need to find a place in this new economy–which spreads out over a large area despite having no inherent connection to the land. It appears questionable whether economies based on the drug war can survive in an era of declining government resources.

Thompson, for example, has yet to see the economic boon it believed its prison represented. While the prison was completed three years ago, due to a near $4 billion budget deficit the state of Illinois does not have the funding to open it. Of the 26 full penitentiaries in Illinois, the state recently attempted to close down two older facilities, Vandalia and Pontiac, in order to open the new prison in Thompson. There was such an outcry about closing the prisons, because it meant further economic devastation for the two communities, that the state chose to keep them open. Thompson, however, wasn’t left to rot entirely: despite a staggering budget deficit, the state subsidizes the town to the tune of $365,000 a year as insurance payments on the bonds issued for construction.

Back in Chicago, movements to reform the drug laws and scale back the War on Drugs have found unexpected supporters: the city’s police department and Mayor Richard Daley. The heavy cost to government is the motivating factor: there were 47,682 marijuana arrests in Illinois in 2003, and each one of them takes officers off the streets, adds another case to the courts, and uses taxpayer money.

“While officers are doing everything to keep the streets safe, the offender gets arrested and is walking the streets in just a few hours,” Sgt. Thomas Donegan wrote in a recent report. “To me, this is a slap in the face to the officers.” Donegan concluded that a system of fees and fines, as Mayor Daley is proposing, could have collected more than $5 million for Chicago in 2003.

Daley’s proposal would decriminalize marijuana possession, making the offense similar to an ordinance violation rather than a criminal action, with violators subject to fees and fines instead of jail time.

“If 99 percent of the (marijuana) cases are thrown out (of court), and we have police officers going to court to testify in the cases, why?” Daley told the Associated Press. “It costs a lot of money for police officers to go to court.”

Recently, the Village of Thompson decided to open the empty prison up for public tours in an effort to bring in badly needed revenue. Illinois’s drug and crime problem thus has been reduced in Thompson to an ongoing source of government-subsidized entertainment. Surely this once proud agricultural center, the Harrison district in Chicago, and thousands of urban and rural communities that were once connected by industry but are now only connected by drugs, would do better to focus scarce government resources on creating real economic opportunity.

www.drugwarfacts.org

The Illinois Dept. of Corrections www.idoc.state.il.us

Chicago Police

www.cityofchicago.org/police

Illinois Drug Education & Legal Reform. www.idealreform.org

Charles Shaw. “The Vice Lords of the Replacement Economies.” Newtopia Magazine.

www.newtopiamagazine.net