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| Jesse Jackson Raises Issues About Illinois Prison |
| By Chicago Tribune |
| Published: 03/05/2003 |
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As a $100 million women's prison rises in impoverished Pembroke Township, local leaders worry that it may not become the cash cow they have hoped. The prison will eventually employ 750 full-time workers, and 300 construction workers will be hired to build it in a snowy meadow east of Pembroke's dormant downtown. But leaders in the predominantly black community joined Rev. Jesse Jackson Sunday in raising a host of concerns about the project's real local benefits. 'A new jail in Pembroke is going to be a boom for whom?' said Jackson to a cheering crowd of local residents, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition volunteers, ministers and a few politicians at a rally in Church of the Cross, a modest congregation in the town of 2,784. The question has a special resonance in Pembroke, in eastern Kankakee County. It is one of the country's poorest communities, with 30 percent of the township's families at or below the poverty level. More than 55 percent of those with jobs have incomes of less than $25,000 per year, according to U.S. census data. Jackson and a select group of activists took a bus on Pembroke's soft roads and dropped in on residents. They crowded first into the aluminum trailer of Homer Laster, 70, and his wife, Erma, 61. 'I'm not against the prison at all,' Erma Laster told visitors. 'But I just don't want them to forget about me.' Among Jackson's concerns are that the prison will spur land development on acreage around it, raising property taxes and crowding out locals. He said that during construction, local businesses such as a black-owned Pembroke hardware store are being denied a piece of the action. He also urged lawmakers who attended, including state Rep. Philip Novak (D-Bradley), state Sen. Barack Obama (D-Chicago), to consider pushing for legislation to finance small local businesses. And he complained that a road connecting the 1,800-bed prison to the outside world will run through a rural area and not along Pembroke's faltering commercial strip. Dr. Rodney Alford, a physician who runs a clinic in Pembroke, is the man who alerted Jackson to the stakes involved with the prison project. He said another concern is that the Corrections Department will run a gas line to the facility without serving residents along the way who now heat and cook with trucked-in tank gas. Corrections officials were not available for comment Sunday. As Jackson called for better prison spinoffs, he also attacked the system that has put thousands--including a disproportionate number of blacks--behind bars, often for non-violent drug offenses. 'Second-class schools are the feeder systems of first-class jails,' he said. The only business open in central Pembroke Sunday night was Mr. Curt's Lounge, where Curtis Butler, proprietor and a Pembroke Township trustee, had his TVs tuned to the Super Bowl. He has been running the bar with his wife for 28 years, he said. His wife, Cleatie, said: 'We need some things so we could keep some young people in our neighborhood--currency exchanges, drugstores, all of it. Our kids, when they graduate, they have to leave. If we had some jobs we could keep them here.' Erma Laster said Pembroke is still an improvement on her former neighborhood, Chicago's South Side. 'I'd rather be in peace than to be up there running,' she said. 'You don't hear nothing but birds singing and crickets.' |
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