EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK
The 25th anniversary
afforded us the chance to take stock
by Peggy Boyer Long
It's been quite a run. Jon Marshall informed us that Illinois has created two states for our children, separate and unequal. Anne Keegan reminded us we're all at risk of going hungry, losing a job. Stephanie Zimmermann advised us that commuters in the metropolitan Chicago region must choose between congested roadways and spotty public transportation. And Lee Bey warned us that the most fertile farmland on earth is yielding a crop of subdivisions.
Six months ago, Illinois Issues launched the celebration of the magazine's 25th anniversary by undertaking a series of essays examining our progress on significant policy questions. We wanted to give our readers a status report, an assessment of where the state has gone in the past quarter century. And where it's headed. This month, we cap that major project by coming full circle, taking another look at the lives of Illinois' children. It's appropriate, we believe. After all, Illinois' children hold our future in their small hands. The quality of their lives will determine what this state will be like 25 years from now.
We began this policy series last November with Marshall's evaluation. "Illinois," he reported, "has begun to make progress over the past three or four years on some of the issues that matter most to children." Yet he offered this warning: We still have a long way to go.
We live in bountiful times, to be sure. As a result, we've managed to create amazing opportunities for our children in the last quarter of the 20th century. Still, we've left some of Illinois' children behind.
"With the click of a mouse, kids can explore the world through computers," Marshall wrote. "They can get advanced medical care undreamed of a generation ago. From almost the time they can walk, they can study violin, take tot ballet classes and join soccer, T-ball and a multitude of other leagues. A lucky few can even go to preschools with computer labs, tennis courts and television studios."
But this story offered no guarantees of a happy ending.
"By almost any standard," Marshall added, "the Land of Lincoln continues to fail hundreds of thousands of its kids. Over the last 25 years, Illinois' children have suffered from growing economic disparity, deteriorating family and community structures and just plain negligence. As a result, more children are poor, targets of violence and victims of abuse and neglect."
Marshall asked, have we let our children down? Some of them, he answered. And attention must be paid if these children are to have a chance at a bright future.
This month, writer Alex Kotlowitz echoes that theme in the final essay of our 25th anniversary series.
"The juvenile court is pulling further and further from its founders' intent," he says in his piece, "Who is watching out for the children?" Over the past couple of decades, "the juvenile justice system has become more punitive and adversarial, a miniature of its adult counterpart. The line between childhood and adulthood becomes blurred, and the special protections we've always accorded children slowly wear away."
That assessment, which begins on page 18, should have a special irony
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for Illinoisans. A little more than a century ago, Chicago was the birthplace of this country's juvenile court. And that court was founded on the premise that childhood should be treated as a separate and distinct province from adulthood. To Jane Addams and others at Hull House, there was still hope for children who had gone astray. Thus, a child-centered court, they believed, should be rehabilitative, not punitive; it should see itself "as a kind and just parent" to wayward youth.
That 100-year-old premise has crumbled, Kotlowitz argues. And everyone can take some responsibility -- social conservatives who want to get tough on crime, and liberals who want to protect the rights of children.
"The juvenile court must certainly, when appropriate, punish -- and at times harshly, especially those children who maim or kill -- but if that's its only purpose, there's no need for a system separate from the adult criminal courts," he writes. "What it comes down to in the end is whether we believe there's a need for a justice system that operates under different assumptions than its adult counterpart, whether we believe that the very nature of youth is more than just a chronological fact."
The juvenile court's reach, he concludes, should be expanded, not shrunk, "so that it becomes a place of healing as well as a place of accountability."
Kotlowitz is well-qualified to draw conclusions. He's the author of There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America, an examination of the lives of children in Chicago's public housing. The book was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the 150 most important books of the century. His essay for us was funded through donations from our readers.
And that has been the biggest reward of this series. Reader contributions, along with donations from the Woods Fund of Chicago (for the first package on the lives of children, as well as the lives of the vulnerable) and The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (for the pieces on transportation and land use), afforded us not only the chance to take stock, but the
wherewithal to tap a talented group of writers, photographers and artists to accomplish that task.
Anne Keegan was one of them. Over and over, readers said they had cut their teeth on Keegan's reports. Her piece for us last January was both inspiring and cautionary. "Who is it," she wondered, "that we must address our attention to as we leave an old and tired century and face a new one?" We assigned Keegan, a free-lance journalist who spent, as it happens, more than a quarter century writing for the Chicago Tribune about the state's most vulnerable and most invisible people, to venture an answer to that question. Her conclusion: We are all vulnerable.
Labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan's conclusion in February was just as blunt. Illinois workers, he argued, are not winners in this booming economy. Instead, they face longer hours, new job requirements and fewer benefits.
In March, Stephanie Zimmermann pointed out that some, if not many, of those workers in the Chicago metropolitan region must spend what amounts to three full weeks a year in their cars just to get to and from work. Unless, of course, they want to hazard the piecemeal public transportation system. That's because, as Lee Bey noted in April, many Illinoisans live farther and
farther from urban centers.
Yes, Illinoisans have made significant strides in advancing the state's social and physical infrastructure. Yet, there's much to be done.
Some of these essays made many of our readers uncomfortable, but we hope they will agree that, overall,
the series made a thoughtful and compelling contribution. And we hope it will suggest some possibilities for our collective future.
A project like this requires the efforts of many people, and special thanks are due. Fred Zwicky's and Nathan Mandell's photographs, Sigrid Wonsil's and Daisy Juarez's illustrations as often as not arrived at their own powerful and complementary conclusions.
Recognition is due, as well, to projects editor Maureen McKinney, who orchestrated the writing of most of these essays, sometimes against difficult odds. Thanks to our graduate assistants Josh Bluhm and Rosalie Warren, who conducted the research that enabled us to illustrate the essays with additional data. Associate editor Beverley Scobell double-checked a stunning array of facts each month. And publication designer Diana Nelson added her own distinctive style to the series, with beautiful results.
Thanks, too, to publisher Ed Wojcicki, who came up with the idea for the series in the first place, then convinced a lot of other people to pay for it, sight unseen.
And special thanks must go to the members of our advisory board of directors, who shared the vision behind this project and contributed their insights along the way.
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