At the end of last year Karen Clark heard about a job opening at a nursing home in Rogers Park. The job–overseeing dietary charts so 118 senior residents would get their required diabetic or low-calorie or pureed meals–seemed perfect for her. It was half a block from her apartment, it was full-time, it paid $11.25 an hour, and she was a trained sous chef with 20 years of experience in the food industry, including cooking for a nursing home.
About four months later, on March 24, Clark and her roommate, Betty Prevo, are riding in a gray Ford van headed south on I-55 to Springfield to lobby for Senate Bill 3007. If the bill becomes law, people like Clark and Prevo, who’ve been convicted of prostitution and minor drug offenses, will be able to appeal to have their criminal records sealed after completing their sentences, which they believe will help them avoid having to admit to their felonies in job applications and give them access to school loans.
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Prevo, 48, is a large woman with a deep, throaty laugh. She’s wearing a red terry-cloth shirt and black slacks. Her hair, braided into cornrows along her scalp, is pulled back into a ponytail. She wears a gold cross pendant around her neck and five gold hoop earrings. A thin scar over her right eyebrow is a remnant of the day a pimp clocked her with a two-by-four. “I’d be so doped up half the time I wouldn’t feel the nicks,” she says. She turned tricks on the west side for 22 years. One time, not long after breaking both of her arms, her pimp ordered her to go pick up johns. “Can you imagine?” she asks Clark. “In casts! Both my arms!”
A few years ago, they say, police cracked down on prostitution, especially in gentrifying neighborhoods, and began charging repeat offenders with felony prostitution instead of solicitation, a misdemeanor. Before Prevo’s felony conviction in 2002 she’d had dozens of solicitation arrests. The most time she ever did for a solicitation charge was two weeks, and usually she was just in jail overnight. For felony prostitution she wound up doing eight months in the penitentiary. Clark had 25 misdemeanor arrests before her felony convictions, each resulting in a day or two in jail, tops. After serving time for their felonies, both were referred to Genesis House, a residential program for women trying to get out of prostitution, where they met and became friends.
Goswami felt that Clark, Prevo, and the other survivors at the December meeting had powerful stories to tell to legislators. Since then he’s held training sessions on public speaking for the survivors, who he says generally are adept at reading people–a skill he attributes to their having to assess men in 30 seconds and determine whether they’re likely to be killed if they go for a ride with them. Goswami says the people on PART’s survivors committee also know when to push someone and when to back off–a good instinct to have when lobbying.
Clark says she met with Haine about a month ago in his Springfield office and that he seemed dead set against the bill. “For him to outspokenly say he was a Christian–he didn’t have any compassion for what we were trying to do at all. He was like, we committed these crimes, these are the consequences of our crimes, and deal with them.”
