Two years ago, UChicago students Ethan Ostrow (A.B. ’24, A.M. ’24) and Harley Pomper (A.B. ’24, A.M. ’24) sued Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart after he revoked their security clearances at the Cook County Jail (CCJ), where they had participated in the Institute of Politics’s (IOP) Bridge writing workshop program.
The IOP suspended the creative writing workshop cohort that Ostrow and Pomper had participated in in May 2024, citing violations of the CCJ code of conduct by student volunteers.
Last April, the lawsuit ended in a settlement. Pomper told the Maroon that the agreement included equal financial compensation for the plaintiffs, which they both plan to donate to organizations that work with incarcerated individuals.
In the Bridge program, students lead creative writing and civic education programs for people incarcerated at the CCJ and the Illinois Youth Center detention facility. The creative writing workshop at CCJ remains paused, though the voter education and book club cohorts there, as well as writing workshops at the Illinois Youth Center, continue to operate.
According to attorney Tayleece Paul, who represented the plaintiffs, the terms of the settlement did not prevent the writing workshop from resuming.
Matilda Thornton Clark, the IOP’s assistant director of civic and student engagement, write in a statement to the Maroon that the “decision [to pause the Bridge writing workshop program] was not made lightly and gave us an opportunity to consider and update our policies and practices when working with incarcerated individuals. We re-evaluate our partnership with CCJ every year and will continue to do so to make sure we are providing the best programming for this population and our student volunteers.”
Ostrow and Pomper alleged in the lawsuit that the sheriff violated their First Amendment rights, claiming that they were removed in retaliation for an op-ed they published in the Chicago Sun-Times criticizing the CCJ’s restrictions on paper use. The students argued that paper, including legal documents and personal objects, was essentially banned within the jail.
Dart responded with his own op-ed, arguing that drug-laced paper was a method of smuggling illicit substances and posed a threat to inmates’ safety. He contested the claim that incarcerated individuals could not access legal documents.
Paul said she did not think Dart intended to discontinue the entire cohort by revoking Ostrow and Pomper’s clearance, but that he had a strong emotional response to their op-ed.
“The decision to settle should not be misconstrued as any admission that the Sheriff’s Office was wrong in its handling of the serious safety threat presented by drug-soaked paper,” Matt Walberg, the director of communications at the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, wrote in a statement to the Maroon. “The Sheriff’s Office elected to settle this lawsuit to avoid lengthy and expensive litigation.”
He added that the IOP independently paused the creative writing program after students “committed severe violations of rules and restrictions enacted to protect the safety and security of the students, jail staff, and individuals in custody.”
Dart alleged in a May 7, 2024 court filing that Pomper and other UChicago students broke agreements they had signed before participating in the workshops by sharing personal phone numbers with detainees and contacting them from outside the jail.
“These violations had nothing to do with the Plaintiffs’ public misrepresentation of the Sheriff’s Office’s efforts to prevent the drug-soaked paper from entering the Jail,” Walberg wrote.
“We did not agree that [Pomper] was in violation of the policy,” Paul told the Maroon.
The students initially sought injunctive relief and hoped to regain their security clearances, which were revoked without warning. Though immediately refused reauthorization themselves, Pomper said the sheriff entertained the idea of reinstating Ostrow’s clearance. However, according to both Paul and Pomper, the process of reauthorization took too long for Ostrow to return before his graduation in spring 2024.
Paul said that, after failing to obtain injunctive relief, the plaintiffs decided to depose Dart. “He was arguing that we weren’t allowed to take his deposition,” Paul said. “Once we started to litigate whether we were going to take Tom’s deposition, they started entertaining a settlement.”
Paul said that Dart used the alleged rule violation as pretext for the clearance denial, when the denial was done in retaliation for the op-ed.
“It was clearly backfilling a reason,” Pomper added. “The claims that they made were entirely about me violating policy—I disagree with those, I should be clear—but [Ostrow] was also banned, and they had literally no evidence for him.”
In a January 9, 2024 statement to the Hyde Park Herald, the sheriff’s office wrote that “[t]he jail cannot allow individuals access when they have previously demonstrated a clear intent to use that access to spread disinformation in a way that undermines the safety of staff and individuals in custody.”
Ostrow and Pomper cited the comment in their lawsuit as evidence that the revocations were retaliatory rather than stemming from alleged policy violations.
“Neither of [the plaintiffs] were a threat to safety,” Paul said.
Pomper still works with incarcerated individuals but said the revocation of their clearance has limited their ability to organize at CCJ. “I’m pursuing chaplaincy and hoped at one point that I could continue to facilitate programs inside [CCJ] as a chaplain or through programs beyond Bridge,” Pomper said. “None of that is a possibility anymore… but what the sheriff can’t do is stop outsiders from building relationships and solidarity with people inside.”
