I’ve been wondering a lot about ancient Rome’s transition from a Republic to an Empire and Rome’s first emperor Augustus Caesar, shrewd leader of the Pax Romana — that ancient version of the American Century –- who laid the foundation of Roman rule until its decline. How did men like Caesar cease and then wield their power? How did the institutions, set up and re-worked by men like him, either stand the test of history or fail in shades? Among Augustus Caesar’s many accomplishments is one I’ve been wondering about most: the creation of one of the first institutionalized police forces and prison systems in the western world. Historically, these Roman institutions have been celebrated, as I’m sure they were by the upper Roman class, but I wonder what those people who lived in the working poor neighborhood of the Aventine-–that ancient version of Humboldt Park, South Central, or the Bronx — felt about a newly formed police and jails system. In a matter of one generation, they had gone from neighborhood self-rule to state-rule, a power suddenly wielded on them without consent.

It is important to look back on history and see how institutions did or did not work. Our own modern day American police and jail system was created during the Reconstruction and mostly structured during the Jim Crow era, which lasted from 1876 till 1965. There was no Augustus Caesar (president, governor, or senator) solely responsible for Jim Crow laws – as a nation we collectively decided that we should keep a blue eye on freed-Blacks. You don’t have to be a ‘typical White person’ or Black conspiracy theorist (read: realist) to figure out that the rate of imprisonment for Black males is six times that of White males. While many societies historically have had failed prison systems that predominately include marginalized and/or poor peoples, the American prison system is unique in that it especially feeds off our public education system, the one civic institution we have as an advantage compared to our ancient Roman brethren; the one thing - an educated mass - that arguably keeps the transition from our own American Republic to a true American Empire at bay.

As a 12th grade English teacher and education advocate living in Chicago, I have learned that in order to convince people that institutions are intertwined — my job affects your job, my lack of resources affects your right to resources — I have to argue the dollar. It has been inferred that teachers teach, especially those in impoverished neighborhoods, from the ‘bottom of their good heart’ or to ‘help society.’ This is a naïve and unworkable view of the education system. So, instead, when speaking to small-business leaders, entrepreneurs, corporations, and political figures in Chicago, I rely on the two following figures:

1) According to Alternative Schools Network, ASN, the state of Illinois saves $125,000 for every student that finishes high school.

2) According to the 2007 IL state budget, it costs an average of $7,000 a year to send a high school student to school, while it costs nearly $60,000 to keep an adult imprisoned during the same fiscal year.

My students at El Cuarto Año High School at Association House, a re-enrollment, alternative high school in Humboldt Park, understand the consequences of an overvalued prison system and an undervalued education system very well.

My dad always told me to brush my teeth daily, to get an oil change every three thousand miles, to store enough food in the pantry to last through a nasty mid-February Chicago blizzard. The mark of sustained survival, for an individual as well as for a civilized society, is to be preventative. Increasingly, in our nation, we are not. And with our most important civilized asset – the education of our youth – we are fundamentally not. We are devastatingly short-sighted. To borrow a term from Chicago political writer Ramsin Canon, we are “nearly civilized”, possibly barely surviving, and, if I may, we are letting our wisdom teeth rot.

We have a simultaneous crisis of education and imprisonment. This crisis is not only devastating to the institutions of our society, but to the very best elements and values of our society, which was founded on the principles of the Enlightenment. The Dark Ages, between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Enlightenment, was considered so because the land-owner controlled the feudal system and the lack of (often blocked) Eastern trade routes kept career-enhancing technology and new ideas out. The light of the Enlightenment, which laid the foundation to our educational and legal institutions, was based on the inevitable equality of people, the will of the individual, collective bargaining, and eventual self-rule; all of which made it possible to limit the power of Caesars and increase the education of the working class.

However, it is becoming clear that a current lack of educational resources is leading to the bloating of our prison system (and, arguably, to the increase of the power of our Caesars). High school students have an extremely apt name for this: The School to Prison Pipeline.

In Humboldt Park I work closely with many students, predominately Latino and Black, who are working to escape the School to Prison Pipeline. The media often portrays these “urban” students as either prison fodder or as recipients of being saved. The reality – and back to our original dollar argument – is that millions of students are stuck in a section of the American Market that unforgivably offers a low-grade, cheap education and, a few years later, unforgivably puts them in a high-grade, expensive prison system when they are unable to adjust to a Market that demands higher levels of education. It is also important to note that the cost of one year of imprisonment for an adult male matches, or exceeds, the average salary of an educator as well as the earning potential of the prisoner himself. Our American students are being flushed of their most ideal and humanely available asset: an education, which is necessary to the ‘pursuit of happiness,’ the ability to collectively bargain, and the skills to participate in the Market and the Republic.

I am not making an argument completely against the Market. The Market can work for the majority, but only if the masses have access to fair labor, fair health systems, and fair education. There are those with reasonable arguments who say an uneducated mass is the point, but let me be clear about how this crises affects you; whether in taxes, crime rates, state services, community assets (cultural and financial), or even an Enlightened sense of freedom and equality (visceral or abstract), there is a very real cost here. Your wallet and your community is worse off (i.e. nearly civilized) because millions of teenagers reside between the school and the jail:

The United States incarcerates more people than any country in the world, including the far more populous nation of China. At the start of the new year, the American penal system held more than 2.3 million adults. China was second, with 1.5 million people behind bars, and Russia was a distant third with 890,000 inmates, according to the latest available figures. Beyond the sheer number of inmates, America also is the global leader in the rate at which it incarcerates its citizenry, outpacing nations like South Africa and Iran. In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the U.S, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000”

-from the Pew Center on the States 2008 study “One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008”

In a nation of entrepreneurs and investors, we are wasting, if not completely destroying, our best capital. This is a sad, sad thing. It is also very bad business (except for those who run the jails).

 — -

My co-worker and I are walking down Kedzie Avenue in mid-September. It is still hot out and the remaining cicadas of the season, sounding like sad Spanish violinists, are playing from sidewalks, Elms, sewage drains, vines capered to brownstones. We are making a house visit to the home of a student who has suddenly stopped showing up to class, a smart kid who tags, who loves the novel Catch 22. We talk with him and his mother about the benefits of coming back, the necessity of coming back. We’re there for an hour and the mother makes us arroz con carne en paella and we eat and listen to the kid tell us that he’ll think about it, that he’ll think about coming back on Monday, but really there’s some things he has to deal with first. This is the first house visit I’ve ever made – my heart is breaking because, really, this kid is a talented kid, he just has to finish high school so he can be a damn talented kid. I tell my co-worker this as we make that walk back down Kedzie and he says that we’ll come back, that we’ll make some calls. He says that sometimes it works and sometimes not. “But you start local,” he tells me, “that’s what you can do.”

Start local. That’s how a Republic can work. Our very own Chicago, often a national leader in social justice programming, has a wealth of local community organizations and non-for-profits that seek to destabilize, if not destroy the School to Jail Pipeline. At the center of this fight are re-enrollment Alternative Schools such as ASN schools, which serve as a second chance for high school students, (full disclosure- I work at an ASN affiliated high school) as well as organizations such as Community Justice for Youth Institute, which seeks to implement restorative justice, an educational and social justice method that works to repair the harm caused by youth crime. According to CJYI, “Too often, punishment and referral to the juvenile justice system are the first responses to these complex social issues (high rates of poverty, arrest, school dropout, unemployment, and violence) , despite the fact that the system is known for its gross inequities, high rates of recidivism and skyrocketing costs.” Schools, community organizations, and, ultimately, public policies that work need to be structured by individuals who understand that failure in one institution leads to failure in others.

 —  — -

“The only people who hang out or help high school students are the people who get paid to do so.”
Junot Diaz, author and educator.

My father, an Ecuadorian immigrant, and my mother, a Russian-Jew by descent, value the American Dream and, most of all, value public education. For them it is the greatest American experiment and asset – a good and fair education allows social mobility and access to our nation’s finest resources. I have often had faith in the American Dream, as many first generation Americans do, because I have witnessed how access to an education can work. I have also witnessed how lack of access can very easily lead a person to jail. I work daily with students who exist in the School to Jail Pipeline, but I also get paid to do so. I consider myself fortunate in that my job aligns with my core beliefs, but it is still my job, as it is the job of thousands of people in Chicago and a few hundred thousand in our nation to try and make sure the School to Jail Pipeline does not work. But often, this is not enough. This does not a true Republic make. Ask any community organizer or educator, and they will tell you that one of the biggest impacts is the continued help of those who do not get paid to do this work: parents and community members whose fundamental, fully-civilized beliefs and actions can shift the balance away from an abusive Market or Caesar.