Cook County Jail is a reminder of how we tend to be prisoners of our prisons. We warehouse people in dungeons, throw away the key and rarely take seriously even the vaguest notions of rehabilitation. Reports of overcrowding and guard brutality surface, prompting lawsuits and court orders. We let inmates out and, like Claude Rains in “Casablanca,” tend to be shocked, shocked, that they return to what country singers once called the Crossbar Motel.

And that’s just with the adults.

The juveniles really get shafted, with the juvenile correctional center a testament to incompetence and administrative deceit, all of which have forced a federal judge to step in as a monitor. (more…)

It’s too bad that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; Representative John A. Boehner, the United States House minority leader; and other big-time politicians couldn’t find time on Monday to show up at the Dirksen Federal Building while they were in Chicago.

But as hard as it might be to fathom, these other politicians were out raising money. Would you believe it? Raising money. (more…)

The audience attending an international music festival in Millennium Park offered mostly pro forma applause Thursday evening for a brief announcement of winners in an online video contest. It’s too bad there wasn’t time for the assembled to watch the winning entries, including the $20,000 grand-prize recipient, “1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslim.”
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I attended my first Chicago Board of Education meeting in decades Tuesday and my first Chicago Public Schools kindergarten graduation the next morning. The inadequacies of the former were underscored by the inspiration of the latter. (more…)

Amid the trial of former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich, we may reflexively equate government with skulduggery. But government can be far more benign, even if at times confounding, as the Federal Register reminds daily — in ways sure to drive libertarians bonkers. (more…)

We should give Representative Mark Kirk the DVDs of the wonderful, if fictional, cable television series “Mad Men.”

The protagonist is a smart, tormented and philandering New York advertising executive of the late 1950s and early 1960s. He rises professionally and has a nice family despite fabricating his entire past after stealing the dog tags and identity of an Army superior who died next to him in a freakish Korean War accident.
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Chicago’s most theatrical politician must have wished he had been on stage at the Cadillac Palace Thursday morning, given how the A-list of the theater community convened to pay homage to an elected official.

But that politician, former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich, was stuck a few blocks away, preparing for jury selection in his self-produced legal drama. Instead, it was Mayor Richard M. Daley basking in the plaudits, a testament to the relevance of real performance, not mere acting.
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With the trial of former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich set to begin Thursday and drag on for months, I suggest a fall curriculum for students at the esteemed Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. Here’s a sneak peek:
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The activity inside a bank of austere offices on the North Side belies the assumption that our early and anemic Feb. 2 primary gave way to a needed campaign respite. It’s a window on a political and legal drama challenging the Democratic Party establishment, a drama that could easily wind up in the United States Supreme Court.
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Helen Olbrecht, 54, of Oak Lawn, lost her office manager’s job and is left with two daughters, a grandchild, a dog and a stiff mortgage. She searches fitfully for work and gets by on $318 a month in welfare and $286 in food stamps, while dealing with a foreclosure notice on her home.
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