Serving UIC's Great Cities Commitment: Solutions for Today's Urban Challenges

Video and Photos Available from “Mother Earth Meets the Anthropocene” Event

We are happy to release the video and photos from an event that we hosted earlier this year on Mother Earth Meets the Anthropocene:  An Ecofeminist/Environmental Justice Assessment. Jane Caputi, Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Florida Atlantic University, joined us on February 20, 2024. After Professor Caputi’s talk, she and Great Cities Director, Teresa Córdova, engaged in conversation. In this video, you will be able to see both Jane’s presentation and the conversation afterwards.

“The Anthropocene,” or “Age of Man,” is a proposed name for the current geological age, one, its proponents claim to be a new era where “humans” have become a vast force capable of overwhelming the vast forces of “Nature.” This illustrated talk considered the sexed, gendered, racialized and otherwise political concept of “The Anthropocene” in dialogue with concept with the ancient reality of “Mother Nature” or Mother Earth, common to indigenous ecological knowledge as well as contemporary ecofeminist and environmental justice perspectives.

Jane Caputi has written four books, most recently Call Your “Mutha”: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene (Oxford University Press, 2020). She also has made two educational documentaries, The Pornography of Everyday Life (2006) distributed by Berkeley Media and Feed the Green: Feminist Voices for the Earth (2016), distributed by Women Make Movies. Dr. Caputi, in 2016, was named Eminent Scholar of the Year by the American Culture/Popular Culture Association and in 2020 the Association for the Study of Women in Mythology gave her their annual “Saga Award” for contributions to women’s history and culture.

Several co-sponsors joined us to host Jane: UIC’s Institute for the Humanities, The Anthropocene Lab, The Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, and Gender and Women’s Studies.

Click here if you want to see the downloadable PDF of the program from the event.

Video Available from Event Honoring John Hagedorn

As you may know, Great Cities Institute held an event on April 1, 2024, to honor the life and legacy of John Hagedorn. We are pleased to announce the availability of the video from the event, along with some photos, of the event. John was a James J. Stukel Fellow with the Great Cities Institute and Professor Emeritus of Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

We have also set up a John Hagedorn Memorial Fund. Please feel free to donate. We plan to use the fund to continue John’s work.

Hagedorn’s first book, People & Folks, Gangs, Crime, and the Underclass in a Rustbelt City, argued for more jobs than jails and applied William Julius Wilson’s underclass theory to gangs. He was the architect of a neighborhood-based, family centered social service reform in Milwaukee that became the subject of his dissertation, published as Forsaking Our Children: Bureaucracy and Reform in the Child Welfare System (1995).

He was editor (with Meda Chesney-Lind), of Female Gangs in America: Essays on Girls, Gangs, and Gender, the only edited volume ever published in the U.S. on female gangs. His interest in Chicago gangs led him to become immersed in the history of the Vice Lords and the importance of race. His global travels further informed his understanding of gangs, which led him to edit the volume Gangs in the Global City based on an international conference at the Great Cities Institute.

He was Principal Investigator of a Harry F. Guggenheim study at the Great Cities Institute of why Chicago’s homicide rate did not decline like New York City’s. He argued in 2007 that the decision to not invest in public housing but demolish it was a major correlate of high rates of violence.

In A World of Gangs (2008), he applied Manuel Castells’ work in analyzing gangs, arguing that understanding the cultural struggle for identity was crucial in working with gangs.

His 2015 book, The In$ane Chicago Way: The Daring Plan by Chicago Gangs to Create a Spanish Mafia, looks historically at gangs, organized crime, and corruption in Chicago.

Gangs on Trial dispels myths about gangs and recommends tactics for lawyers, mitigation specialists, and expert witnesses as well as offering insights for jurors. Hagedorn describes how minds are subconsciously “primed” when a defendant is identified as a gang member, and discusses the “backfire effect,” which occurs when jurors hear arguments that run counter to their beliefs.

The video is interesting, not just because of what you might learn about John and his work, but also what you might learn (or unlearn) about gangs, as well as insights on ethnographic research. Each of the speakers offered unique perspectives but all with the same message of how important John Hagedorn was to the world of gang research.

The event featured the following speakers:

Keynote: David Brotherton
David Brotherton is professor in sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is also the director of the Social Change and Transgressive Studies Project. Among his recent books are: Routledge International Handbook of Critical Gang Studies edited with Rafael Gude (Routledge 2021); Immigration Policy in the Age of Punishment: Detention, Deportation and Border Control with Phil Kretsedemas (Columbia 2017); Las Pandillas Como Movimiento Social with Luis Barrios (University of Central America Press 2016); Youth Street Gangs: A Critical Appraisal (Routledge 2015); Banished to the Homeland: Dominican Deportees and Their Stories of Exile, with Luis Barrios (Columbia 2011); Keeping Out The Other: A Critical Introduction to Immigration Control, edited with P. Kretsedemas (Columbia 2009); and  The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation: Street Politics and the Transformation of a New York City Gang, with Luis Barrios (Columbia 2004). He is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Critical Criminology: An International Journal and the founding editor of the “Studies in Transgression” book series at Temple University Press.

David Brotherton Introduced by Avelardo Valdez
Avelardo Valdez is professor of social work and sociology at the University of Southern California. He is a nationally and internationally recognized scholar with an extensive publication record in his field of research, which is in the intersection between substance abuse and violence and health issues among high-risk groups. His most recent book is Mexican American Girls and Gang Violence: Beyond Risk. He is also a director of the NIDA Interdisciplinary Research Training Institute on Hispanic Drug Abuse, has served as a member of the Committee for National Academy of Sciences Study of High Rates of Incarceration in the United States (2013-2014), and served on Governor Gavin Newsom‘s Blue Ribbon Commission on Marijuana Law and Policy in California (2015) and appointed to the Advisory Cannabis Working Group by the Los Angeles County Office of Cannabis Management.

Robert Aspholm
Roberto Aspholm is assistant professor in the school of social work at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. He has spent more than a decade working in community practice and research capacities on issues affecting young people in marginalized urban neighborhoods, particularly street gangs, community violence, and violence prevention. His work in these capacities has taken place primarily on the South Side of Chicago and in East St. Louis, Illinois, an industrial suburb of St. Louis and the city with the highest homicide rate in the United States. He recently wrote a book titled, Views for the streets: The transformation of gangs and violence on Chicago’s South Side (2020), as well as co-authored several publications on gun and gang violence in Chicago: Interpersonal gun violence research in the social work literature (2019); The fracturing of gangs and violence: A research based reorientation of violence prevention and intervention policy (2019); and How the coronavirus and Chicago’s gun violence are related (2020).

Lance Williams
Lance Williams is professor of urban community studies at the historic Jacob H. Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies at Northeastern Illinois University. He currently works with Chicago area violence prevention groups that serve young men who are at high risk for being shooting perpetrators or victims. For over 20 years, Dr. Williams has worked as an expert witness in Federal and local gang and violence-related cases. He is the author of Culture and Perceptions of Violence Related Behaviors Among Adolescents (2009), co-author of the book titled The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Fall, Rise and Resurgence of an American Gang (2011) and author of King David and Boss Daley: The Black Disciples, Mayor Daley and Chicago on the Edge (2023).

Words from Meda Chesney-Lind
Meda Chesney-Lind is professor emeritus in women, gender and sexuality at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. She is nationally recognized for her work on women and crime, and her testimony before Congress resulted in national support of gender responsive programming for girls in the juvenile justice system. Her most recent book on girls’ use of violence, Fighting for Girls (co-edited with Nikki Jones), won an award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency for “focusing America’s attention on the complex problems of the criminal and juvenile justice systems.” She also co-edited, with John Hagedorn, Female Gangs in America: Essays on Girls, Gangs, and Gender, which is the only edited volume ever published in the U.S. on female gangs.

Alistair Fraser
Alistair Fraser is professor of criminology at the University of Glasgow, and director of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research. Alistair is the author of two books: the first, Urban Legends: Gang Identity in the Post-Industrial City (OUP, 2015) was shortlisted for the BBC/BSA Ethnography Award and co-awarded the British Society of Criminology Book Prize. His second book, Gangs and Crime: Critical Alternatives was published by Sage in 2017. He is on the International Advisory Board for the Journal of Youth Studies, and is an Associate Editor of Criminology & Criminal Justice.

Benneth Lee
Benneth Lee is instructor in justice studies at Northeastern Illinois University, educating students about inner city gangs; prisons and jails; ex-convict recidivism; and prisoner reentry systems. He is also the founder and CEO of the National Alliance for the Empowerment of the Formerly Incarcerated (NAEFI), which is a community-based organization working in the state of Illinois to empower formerly incarcerated men and women to work towards restorative citizenship. The program involves partnering of male and female formerly incarcerated individuals with trained mentors, providing one-on-one mentoring, through counselling, life skills workshops, leadership development training and support from trained mentors.

Kaitlin Devaney
Kaitlin Devaney is faculty in criminology at DePaul University. She received her Ph.D. with distinction and her M.A. in Criminology, Law and Justice with a concentration in Violence Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research lies broadly in neighborhood-level violence, community-level anti-violence strategies, critical race studies and comparative racialization, and outsider qualitative methodology. She is currently engaged in work that explores the drill rap subculture of violence in Chicago and evaluative prison education research on Northwestern’s Prison Education Program, where she did her postdoctoral research fellowship.

Tribute by Former Students Led by Xavier Perez
Xavier Perez is faculty in criminology at DePaul University. His research interests address two broad areas of study: criminology and latino(a) crime. Specifically, what distinguishes Latinos(as) from other ethnic/racial groups in America? Second, his research interests explore variation in legal traditions around the world and the implications of such variation on crime policies. Specifically, Xavier examines the impact of this training on police behavior and community relations in Puerto Rico, thus exploring how and why countries punish criminal offenders differently and how those differences are often the result of cross-national variation in culture, politics, economics, religion, and social organization. Julie Globokar, a member of the Prisoner Review Board, and Iris Rivera, Juvenile Probation Officer at Cook County Juvenile Court, both former students of John, paid tribute to him.

Moderated by Teresa Córdova
Teresa Córdova is the Director of the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois Chicago.  She is also Professor of Urban Planning and Policy in the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs at UIC. Dr. Córdova received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Throughout her career, Teresa has engaged with communities in and outside the university and is an expert in community/university partnerships and methodologies of engaged research. In addition to strategies for community and economic development, her work focuses on global/local dynamics and the impacts of global economic restructuring on local communities, including impacts of resource extraction. She has been instrumental in affecting economic development policy and projects, the provision and design of infrastructure, local governance, and neighborhood change. She currently sits on the Cook County Economic Development Advisory Committee, The Board of Directors of Grand Victoria Foundation, and the Board of Illinois Humanities Council. She publishes extensively in the fields of community development and Latino/a Studies.

GCI Releases New Youth Jobless Report

As part of its continued commitment to providing the latest available research and data on the youth employment situation in Chicago, Cook County, and Illinois, Great Cities Institute just released a new data brief, “Uneven Recovery and Sustained Inequality after the COVID-19 Recession: Employment for Chicago’s Youth and Young Adults.” This data brief, commissioned by the Alternative Schools Network, examines youth employment recovery after the COVID-19 recession. The brief examines jobless rates (the percentage of individuals who were unemployed and individuals not in the labor force) and out-of-school-and-jobless rates for 16-to-19-year-olds and 20-to-24-year-olds in Chicago, Illinois, and the U.S. by race/ethnicity and sex; and explores spatial concentrations within areas of Cook County to spatial inequalities.

The main findings of the research include:

Chicago’s joblessness rates were significantly higher than those in Illinois and the U.S. in 2022.

• • • White jobless rate in Chicago of 76.2% being 16.3 percentage points higher than in the U.S.,
    • Black jobless rate of 86.4% being 16.3 percentage points higher than in the U.S., and the
    • Hispanic or Latino jobless rate of 72.9% being 5.7 percentage points higher than in the U.S.

Jobless rates for Black 20- to 24-year-olds in Chicago had a substantial decrease from 2021 to 2022 decreasing from 57.4% to 40.4%.

• • • There was a 17.4 percentage point decrease in the jobless rate between 2021 to 2022 for Black 20- to 24-year-olds in Chicago, decreasing from 57.4% to 40.4%.

There were 11,559 out-of-school and jobless 16- to 19-year-olds in Chicago in 2022.

• • • This figure is only slightly less than during the 2020 peak due to the pandemic-induced recession when the figure was 12,342.
    • The out-of-school and jobless rate for Black 16- to 19-year-olds in Chicago increased from 9.4% to 17.5% from 2021 to 2022 while the number more than doubled from 3,197 to 6,527.

There were 33,759 out-of-school and jobless 20- to 24-year-olds in Chicago in 2022.

• • • This figure is about 7,000 lower than in 2020 when the number peaked due to the pandemic-induced recession.
    • However, while the out-of-school and jobless rate decreased for Black 20- to 24-year-olds in Chicago by 9.6 percentage points between 2021 and 2022, large gaps remain between racial/ethnic groups.

Substantial inequalities exist in jobless and out-of-school rates in Cook County for 20- to 24-year-olds in 2022, ranging from 1.5 to 48.3%.

• • • The PUMA including Austin, North Lawndale, East Garfield Park, and West Garfield Park had the highest out-of-school and jobless rate for 20- to 24-year-olds in Cook County of 48.3% and the PUMA including Chicago Lawn, West Englewood, East Englewood, and Greater Grand Crossing had a similar rate of 43.8%.

The data brief underscores the persistent inequalities in employment recovery post-COVID-19 among Chicago’s youth. Black and Latino youth face particularly high joblessness and out-of-school-and-jobless rates, highlighting the need for targeted interventions to promote equitable employment opportunities. Summer youth employment programs have proven to reduce crime, enhance job readiness, and foster a sense of community. By implementing targeted programs and investing in youth development, Chicago can foster a more equitable future, ensuring that all young people have the opportunity to thrive and succeed in the post-pandemic economy.

The Benefits of Expanding Health Coverage for Immigrants in Illinois

On April 26, 2024, a symposium was hosted by the Healthy Illinois Campaign that brought together immigrant rights advocates, health policy experts, and community leaders to discuss health coverage for immigrants in Illinois. At the event, Great Cities Institute released and presented findings from a research brief titled, “The Benefits of Health Coverage for Immigrants in Illinois.” The research brief was commissioned by the Healthy Illinois Campaign and highlights the importance and impact of state-run healthcare programs that benefit noncitizens, demonstrating the diverse economic and health benefits, as well as the financial hardships faced. 

The event featured speakers who emphasized the need for fully funding health care programs for noncitizens, particularly, the Health Benefits for Immigrant Seniors (HBIS) and Health Benefits for Immigrant Adults (HBIA) in Illinois. These programs provide essential health coverage to low-income noncitizens who do not qualify for Medicaid due to their immigration status. The attendees discussed the programs’ successes, ongoing challenges, and the critical need for legislative support to ensure sustainability. 

Below are key findings from the GCI research brief:

1. Program Costs:

• • In fiscal year 2023, the combined cost of HBIA and HBIS was $621 million, representing 1.8 percent of the state’s total budget.
  • Put in the context of the entire state budget, HBIA and HBIS accounted for only 0.6 percent of the total budget.

2. Economic Contributions:

• • Health coverage improves labor force participation, expanding the tax base and reducing the need for further financial assistance.

3. Health and Financial Benefits:

• • Access to health coverage reduces financial strain and medical debt for uninsured noncitizens.
  • Insuring noncitizens improves their children’s developmental outcomes in terms of their socioemotional development and educational attainment.

4. Preventive Care and Cost Reduction:

• • Health coverage leads to increases in early disease detection, reducing long-term medical costs.
  • Access to medical coverage improves health outcomes and leads to increases of routine checkups and preventive care.

Tovia Siegel, the Director of the Healthy Illinois campaign, called for continued support and full funding for these vital programs. “We recognize the real fiscal challenges facing the state but urge both the General Assembly and the governor to pass an FY25 budget that fully funds the existing HBIA and HBIS programs as they currently exist in statute, with no caps and no co-pays,” Siegel stated.

The event and accompanying research brief highlight the ongoing debate over noncitizen health care in Illinois. Advocates stress that providing comprehensive health coverage to noncitizens is not just a matter of health equity but also an investment in the state’s economic and social well-being. As lawmakers deliberate future budgets, the findings of the research brief underscore the importance of maintaining and expanding these critical health programs.