Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Does Anyone Care - 3/31/06

How much do you know about Natalee Holloway, the hard-partying Alabama teenager who disappeared on Aruba last year?

I’ll bet it’s more than you know about the 19,000 kids in Michigan’s foster care system. Ten thousand of those kids are black, and I’ll bet that you don’t know any of them. I don’t know any personally either.

But here’s what I do know, according to the non-profit agency Michigan’s Children. African-American kids tend to stay in foster care much longer than whites, and for those stuck in foster care, more than half had been shuffled from family to family more than 37 times. What kind of life is that?  You tell me. The older any child in foster care is, the less likely it is that they will ever be adopted or and end up with a permanent family.

Here’s a glimpse into the world of those adults who had to stay in foster care till their 18th birthday. Half of them don’t have a high school degree. One out of every four has been homeless. One out of every four boys has spent some time in jail – as has one out of every ten girls. And 70 percent haven’t had a job for a year. 

They are the invisible people who fall between the cracks of our society, the people who we never see, never think about. Not, that is, until their hopelessness and despair and poverty boil over in a way that suddenly impacts our lives.

Michigan’s Children was founded fourteen years ago to try and do something about all of this. They came into being to be a voice for the concerns of children and young people who can’t help themselves.

They are not just another big-government group, which sees public spending as the key to all our ills. Sharon Peters, the group’s CEO, regularly argues that the business community has a stake in this too, that they have to be part of the solution.

The hardest part is finding out what that solution should be. Michigan’s Department of Human Services is trying a new program called the Family to Family initiative. The idea is to keep kids who need foster care rooted in their home communities as much as possible.

That means helping other family members or close personal friends to care for them. The state wants to involve social workers, parents and neutral “facilitators” to try and make a home situation work.                                                      

Marianne Udow, director of the human services department, is enthusiastic, calling it “a whole new approach to foster care and child welfare.”

Promising that may be. It’s certainly worth a try. Yet there will always be some kids who have no family and whose neighborhoods wouldn’t be safe for the Incredible Hulk in the daytime. And they will need caring and decent and patient foster parents. And there never seem to be enough of those.

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Interview: Sharon Peters - 3/31/06

Life as a foster child is seldom an ideal situation. Yet African American children are far more likely than others to be placed in foster care. The child advocacy group, Michigan’s Children, says more than half of all children in foster care are black, even though they are less than a fifth of all the children in the state. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Sharon Peters –- the president and CEO of Michigan’s Children.

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Essay: Modern-Style Slavery - 3/30/06

We think of slavery as something that was abolished in the era of  Abraham Lincoln. Legally, that is more or less the case. De facto, the truth is something else again. They call it human trafficking now.

And nobody knows how many human beings are forced into some kind of slavery world-wide or in the United States. The U.S. State Department estimates that global human trafficking involves almost a million people every year. That figure may well be low.

Many are women forced into sexual slavery. This kind of trafficking gets the most attention, because it is easier to interest people in sex than almost anything else.

Indeed, we’ve sometimes seen the cops raid a so-called massage parlor in Michigan full of frightened illegal immigrant Asian women.  But I suspect that there are more slaves of other kinds today, in the agricultural and domestic and service sectors.

There are illegal immigrants from the Middle East who are forced to work long hours in the most miserable sorts of restaurant work, for far less than the minimum wage.

One wonders whether some of the migrant workers who come here every year are really indentured servants who are controlled by some patron who takes part of their meager earnings.

There are many reasons for human trafficking, but it boils down to this. We now have a global economy in which some people are more equal than others, and only a minority are treated as fully human at all.

Today, at the dawn of the supposedly enlightened 21st century,  relatively few people live under a system that protects their rights and their human dignity.

Most other people live under systems that are nasty, brutish, and designed to give them short shrift. The reason people traffic in other human beings is simple. They can make money at it.

Nor are the penalties sufficiently harsh, or sufficiently well enforced, to prevent them from buying and selling other human beings. Part of the problem is that too many of us don’t see people who aren't like us or as fully human. 

Otherwise, we couldn’t do what we do to them.

The Michigan House of Representatives has just passed two  bills designed to end human trafficking  by making human smuggling a crime in our state. How could anybody oppose that? I suppose it would be churlish of me to mention that the representatives sponsoring it are up for re-election this year.

Yet I wonder whether what they are trying to do is a little like trying to outlaw tornadoes. What these bills forbid is illegal already.  The brutal men who transport frightened people in windowless vans don't fear the Michigan Legislature.

  We live in a world with largely open borders. We live in a country where even the poor are rich by Haitian standards, and we live in a world where few things are as cheap as human life.

Finding a way to really end human trafficking won’t be easy.

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Interview: David Farhat - 3/30/06

Last week, the Michigan House passed bills that make it illegal to subject another person to forced labor or services, and prohibits transporting minors for sexual exploitation. Representative David Farhat is a republican from Muskegon County.  He sponsored one of the bills aimed at stopping human trafficking. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Play Ball - 3/29/06

Babe Ruth played there. As did Ty Cobb and Joe DiMaggio and every other baseball star who ever graced the American League.

Millions of Michiganders saw their first major league baseball game in Tiger Stadium, a place that may be home to more memories than any other spot in our state. Yet for six years, it has sat empty.

The Detroit Tigers moved on, to a new stadium filled with expensive luxury boxes and corporate suits. That sparked a lot of protest, and some die-hard Tiger Stadium purists still refuse to go to the new stadium. Financier Harry Glanz isn’t one of those. He thinks the Tigers needed to build a new ballpark, economics being what they are. But he thinks there is a lot that can be done with the old stadium, He wants to renovate it into a place where grownups can have conventions and youth leagues can come to play ball.

That makes a great deal of sense. Others have had similar ideas that have made far more sense than leaving the ballpark to crumble.

Yet the city has shown no interest. And I think I know the reason why:  Mike Ilitch, who owns the Tigers, the Detroit Red Wings, the Fox Theater, and the Little Caesar’s Pizza empire.    I don't think Ilitch, who is first and last a businessman, wants anyone using Tiger Stadium as a place to hold any events, most of all not baseball. Not if it would compete with his new ballpark.

Comerica Park, in fact, is among the nicest of the newer baseball stadiums. But the baseball team that plays there stinks. When it comes to building a successful team, Ilitch has been a failure. The Tigers have done worse under his ownership than under any other regime in history. The last thing the Tigers want is for someone to put a plucky minor league team in Tiger Stadium, charge maybe six bucks a ticket, and lower his revenues. The city knows this, and has worked had to placate Mr. Ilitch. He made noises about leaving for the suburbs before Detroiters voted to increase their own taxes to help build his new ballpark. There is still some fear he might take his hockey team away. 

So even though the city actually owns Tiger Stadium, they are reluctant to do anything with it Little Caesar wouldn’t like. In fact, until this year they were paying Ilitch $400,000 a year to “maintain” the old facility, which meant cutting the grass.

The plan, so far as I can tell, is to let the stadium deteriorate to the point where the city can justify tearing it down, leaving one more parking lot on the moonscape of Southwest Detroit.

Harry Glanz has a plan to do something exciting instead; something that would make a statement that Detroit wants to be a real city that celebrates its heritage and puts it to work for the future.

And if they build it, I think people just might come. Otherwise, there will be one less reason to bother coming, at all.

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Interview: Harry Glanz - 3/29/06

For a hundred years, professional baseball was played in Detroit at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull. But Tiger Stadium has sat vacant since 1999, when the city built Comerica Park. Now a financier named Harry Glanz  has an idea for the stadium. Scale the old ballpark back to the way it was when it first opened in 1912. Let kids play baseball – and turn the rest of it into a place with conference rooms, shops and a museum. But the financier can’t get the mayor’s office to call him back. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Harry Glanz about his idea.

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Essay: Michigan Economics - 3/28/06

There’s an old joke about two lawyers who get lost in the woods and accidentally stumble over a sleeping grizzly bear.

Terrified, they begin running as fast as they can, but the bear is quickly gaining on them. “It’s no use! We can’t possibly outrun a grizzly bear.” The other lawyer sprints past him, looks over his shoulder, and says, “I don’t have to outrun the bear.” “I only have to outrun you.”

That joke comes to my mind often when we talk about the economic differences between east and west Michigan, between up north and downstate, and between Detroit and its suburbs.

We are facing a major economic crisis in this state, one that isn’t about to be solved even if General Motors comes up with a hot new Chevy and Ford unveils another new Mustang.

Grand Rapids is doing better right now than the Detroit area. Yet if the state keeps falling behind economically, Grand Rapids will suffer too. There are far less than six degrees of separation between an auto job and nearly everyone else in Michigan.

Our state's major universities have already been hurt financially by our manufacturing decline. Cut their funding, lower the quality of what they teach and what they offer, in terms of extension programs, and we all suffer, even those who live year-round on Beaver Island.

Sometimes, it is easy to glide over the suffering of others. Mitchell Stapley, Fifth Third’s economic analyst, thinks manufacturing wages in the auto sector are about twice what market forces indicate they should be. Perhaps he is right.

I don‘t work on an assembly line either. But think about what it would mean if your family‘s income was cut in half. There is another old Michigan saying: A recession is when your neighbor loses his job; but when you lose your job, that’s a depression.

Depressions are coming, to a family near you. But what worries me even more is the layoff and buyout mentality. Our major employers are acting as if the men and women who were loyal to them for years are out-of-fashion beach sandals in October.

They can’t wait to get rid of them. Too many of the workers they have left are hunkering down, praying to be overlooked when the next round of executions come. That’s not exactly the climate that‘s going to encourage people to do their best work, and foster great creativity and innovation.

Seventy-three years ago, when virtually all of us were mired in an even deeper Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told us that we were all in it together, and that we needed to find a way out together. New Deal economics may be out of fashion.

But don‘t you think a little bit of that spirit might be a good idea? All we need now is a leader who can give us a good DVD-side chat.      

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Interview: Mitch Stapley - 3/28/06

General Motors is laying off several hundred salaried workers today. It's part of a plan to make its profitable again. GM plans to cut seven percent of its white-collar work force of 36-thousand this year, so more cuts are expected. Job losses like this have an impact on the state’s economy.  But Michigan is more than the auto industry. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Mitchell Stapley.  He’s an economic analyst with Fifth Third Investment advisors in Grand Rapids about the problems facing our economy.

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Essay: Prison Blues - 3/27/06

One out of every two hundred people in Michigan is currently behind bars in a state prison. That’s 50,000 people, the number all of Michigan had when it qualified to be a state.

That’s awful. Simply awful. What’s worse, is that this is almost four times as many people as were locked up in 1982. We have had a prison population explosion in this state, and we are paying for it. Financially, socially, and in every other way. Nor are things apt to get any better any time soon. The prison population may be stabilizing, but many long-term prisoners are aging, and require more medical care, which in turn costs more money.

Do you really know what goes on inside Michigan’s prisons? Do we make any attempt at truly rehabilitating the convicts?

Everything I know makes me doubt it. And here’s proof.

Every year about ten thousand prisoners are released, most of them on parole. Statistics show that within two years 62 percent of them, or nearly two-thirds of all those paroled, will be back in prison.

The state has now launched what they are calling a Prisoner Re-entry Initiative to try and cut that rate down.

But how much chance, really, does a paroled convict have in Michigan these days? These are largely people without many employable skills or a lifestyle based on the work ethic. They are being released into a state that has few jobs available, and fewer employers who want to take a chance on hiring a convict.

In the end, criminologists know that some prisoners who serve out their terms will commit crimes to try and get back into prison. That ghastly world has become, for them, their only home.

Years ago, a census of the city jail in Memphis, Tennessee, discovered a vagrant who had been forgotten about. He had been there for years, which was a violation of his rights and all sorts of laws. Attorneys smelled a fat lawsuit, and flocked to him. But he wasn’t interested. He liked being in jail, where he was out of the rain and got fed every day, and he was mad at the reporters who he blamed for being put back on the street.

I don’t know what we can do to try and reform him, or the thousands who now in Michigan prisons. But I think we should do everything we can to make sure it is the last place our kids end up.

I think we should take every class of high school juniors on a tour of a maximum security prison, They should see what it looks like and what it smells like. They should see what the prisoners are like and how they really live, in all its gritty reality. I am convinced that would be the best prisoner no-entry initiative anyone could devise.      

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Interview: Christopher Maxwell - 3/27/06

Prisons are now by far the largest item in Michigan’s general fund budget. The state spends 40 percent more on its prison system than surrounding states. The prison population is skyrocketing, and it costs more to keep someone in a Michigan prison for a year than it would cost to send them to Harvard Law School. Christopher Maxwell is a professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University and he runs the National Archives of Criminal Justice Data based at the University of Michigan.  Michigan Radio's Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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