A Conversation with Toni Preckwinkle

By Genevieve Buthod This past Tuesday afternoon, I, along with a handful of other students interested in politics, got to meet Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. She talked a little about her history and why she works for the city of Chicago, but she mostly just wanted to have a conversation with all of us. Someone asked her what she thought the biggest challenge for the next generation might be, and she answered with a quote from Reagan, which was pretty funny. He said, “Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem,” which she thinks is “a great poison in people’s thinking. She believes we are in a time when people simply don’t want to pay taxes and don’t like government influence on many things, which means that there are declining resources in the government, and a declining role of what the government is expected to do. I had read that Preckwinkle is very concerned with prison reform in the Chicago area, which I strongly support, so I asked her why she thought our prisons were so overcrowded and what she wants to do about it. She gave an incredible answer, both in its honesty and in its accuracy. She began by explaining the current state of education in the city. Over the course of any given four years (like the span of a high school education) Chicago only graduates 54% of its kids. This low level shows exactly how much of a priority schools are to the city, and given that the presence or absence of a high school degree is typically used as a screening device in most workplaces, it is highly unlikely that many of these kids will go on to achieve good careers. She believes that this lack of concern for failures in public education steadily feeds our jails. While it costs about $45-50,000 to keep someone in jail for a single year, it only costs ~$12,000 to keep up our public schools. It is clear that education is a better choice, but we need to make it known! I was wonderfully surprised that she was bold enough to mention the fact that our prison system is a crystal-clear example of institutionalized racism. Prisons are full of Latino and black men, and in Cook County, the numbers are even higher. In most of the U.S., a black man is 3 times more likely to do time for a charge of minor drug possession than his white counterpart, but in Cook County, he is 8 times more likely to go to jail. She also pointed out that rehabilitation is much cheaper than incarceration, and she plans to enact more programs to rehabilitate people rather than making them spend more time in prison. Perhaps most importantly, she wanted us all to fully understand just how crucial voting can be, especially for young people. She won by 109 votes out of 11,000 in the election for Cook County Board President. Voting is necessary! It can make the difference between our city being run incredibly well or incredibly badly, and that matters in almost everything we do! It can determine whether or not unions are respected, or schools get the funding they need. Speaking of, I hope you all remembered to vote on Tuesday… Catch you later, Cougs! --Genevieve Genevieve Buthod is a freshman from St. Louis, MO. She is computer science major and a women's studies minor. Buthod is a vegan and part of the Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) at Saint Xavier.