Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court - Hardcover

Van Cleve, Nicole Gonzalez

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804790434 ISBN 13: 9780804790437

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Americans are slowly waking up to the dire effects of racial profiling, police brutality, and mass incarceration, especially in disadvantaged neighborhoods and communities of color. The criminal courts are the crucial gateway between police action on the street and the processing of primarily black and Latino defendants into jails and prisons. And yet the courts, often portrayed as sacred, impartial institutions, have remained shrouded in secrecy, with the majority of Americans kept in the dark about how they function internally. Crook County bursts open the courthouse doors and enters the hallways, courtrooms, judges' chambers, and attorneys' offices to reveal a world of punishment determined by race, not offense.

Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve spent ten years working in and investigating the largest criminal courthouse in the country, Chicago–Cook County, and based on over 1,000 hours of observation, she takes readers inside our so-called halls of justice to witness the types of everyday racial abuses that fester within the courts, often in plain sight. We watch white courtroom professionals classify and deliberate on the fates of mostly black and Latino defendants while racial abuse and due process violations are encouraged and even seen as justified. Judges fall asleep on the bench. Prosecutors hang out like frat boys in the judges' chambers while the fates of defendants hang in the balance. Public defenders make choices about which defendants they will try to "save" and which they will sacrifice. Sheriff's officers cruelly mock and abuse defendants' family members.

Crook County's powerful and at times devastating narratives reveal startling truths about a legal culture steeped in racial abuse. Defendants find themselves thrust into a pernicious legal world where courtroom actors live and breathe racism while simultaneously committing themselves to a colorblind ideal. Gonzalez Van Cleve urges all citizens to take a closer look at the way we do justice in America and to hold our arbiters of justice accountable to the highest standards of equality.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve is an Assistant Professor at Temple University in the Department of Criminal Justice, with courtesy appointments in the Department of Sociology and the Beasley School of Law. She is a recipient of the 2014-2015 Ford Foundation Fellowship, an affiliated scholar with the American Bar Foundation, and a former Research Director for Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice. She has provided legal commentary on the criminal justice system for MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, NBC News, CNN, and The New York Times.

Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve is an Assistant Professor at Temple University in the Department of Criminal Justice, with courtesy appointments in the Department of Sociology and the Beasley School of Law. She is a recipient of the 2014-2015 Ford Foundation Fellowship, an affiliated scholar with the American Bar Foundation, and a former Research Director for Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice. She has provided legal commentary on the criminal justice system for MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, NBC News, CNN, and The New York Times.

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Crook County

Racism and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court

By Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-9043-7

Contents

Preface, 
Introduction: Opening the Courthouse Doors, 
1. Separate and Unequal Justice, 
2. Of Monsters and Mopes: Racial and Criminal "Immorality", 
3. Race in Everyday Legal Practices, 
4. There Are No Racists Here: Prosecutors in the Criminal Courts, 
5. Rethinking Gideon's Army: Defense Attorneys in the Criminal Courts, 
Conclusion: Racialized Punishment in the Courts, 
Acknowledgments, 
Appendixes, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL JUSTICE

TO DRIVE TO THE NATION'S BIGGEST and busiest courthouse, take I-55 South from the "Loop" — the center of the city — as though you are making your way to Midway Airport. Drive toward poverty; until the neighborhoods get more racially homogeneous, more black and brown; until the regal Chicago skyline is small but visible in your rearview mirror. Exit at California Avenue, just a few exits shy of Cicero, and start navigating by artifacts of concentrated poverty: look for trash, broken glass, discarded hubcaps on the side of the road, worn gym shoes thrown over electrical wires, and bars on the windows of homes. Look for storefront churches advertising salvation and redemption for a modest fee adjacent to liquor stores offering another type of escapism. Look for graffiti on brick walls of buildings; spray-painted murals memorializing the honorable deaths of young men, women, and children who died in local violence — sacred shrines depicted upon the profane markers of deterioration and disadvantage.

The criminal courthouse is situated in a predominantly Mexican neighborhood with concentrations of violence, gangs, and drugs. Storefront lawyers' offices are among the few businesses in sight. With bars on the windows of their offices, even the few local lawyers who set up shop here seem imprisoned. Mothers push babies in worn umbrella strollers, and the elderly cart groceries home against a backdrop of cement walls, spiked barbed wire, and chain-link fences that surround the adjacent jail. Daily life goes by these fixtures of incarceration.

On my first day driving to the courthouse on 26th and California Avenue (Leighton Criminal Court Building), the Chicago weather served a brutal bite. It was ice-raining horizontally so that the rain transformed into painful BB pellets that relentlessly and percussively pounded on the windshield of the car. The ice-rain crystallized a perimeter of separate and unequal arrangements that may have been ignored if the sun had been shining or if my first visit had been on a warm spring day.

Beyond the white structure of the Greco-Roman courthouse was what looked like a Depression-era breadline. Umbrellas were tilted and angled, making the breadline appear like a shantytown fortress in defense of the weather. Those without umbrellas huddled under newspapers and jackets, extended in contorted directions like a modern sculpture, to protect themselves from the wind and ice. It was the 8:30 a.m. courthouse "rush hour" and the breadline was the security queue for the general public — a line that included defendants, families, witnesses, and children. This group, which stretched far outside the building, was almost entirely comprised of people of color.

Adjacent to this line was a separate entrance for attorneys and personnel who had identification badges. While the general public was left to withstand the elements, the flow of professional traffic moved swiftly through, flashing credentials with sheriff's officers nodding and helping to expedite and to avoid inconvenience. The personnel and professionals in this group tended to be white.

Such adjacencies of a black and brown breadline braving the elements and a VIP lane for white professionals instantly demarcated a Jim Crow–style social arrangement on the outside perimeter of the courthouse. This visual of a black and brown entrance and a separate entrance for whites was my first clue of a double system of justice — one for people of color and the poor, and one for wealthy whites.

The Chicago cold heightened the visibility of racial inequality and made such waiting not just inconvenient or racially segregated but particularly cruel, and perhaps unusual in a modern era where we are culturally trained to ignore racial difference. Silently, I watched from a warm, leather-seated sedan, driven by my supervising prosecutor. The windshield wipers acted like a metronome, keeping time of the oppressive duration of the public's wait.

In these early days of visiting the courts, my supervising attorney drove me to the courthouse in that leather-seated sedan from one of the wealthiest North Shore suburbs in Chicago. She said it was for my own safety. On the surface, such a gesture was kind, but it also encapsulated the prevailing stigma held by professionals about where they do justice and whom they do it for: in their view, their commuting to "26th and Cal" was a journey into the trenches of justice where they dealt with the underbelly of society.

Introducing the All-White Cast

A small population of mostly white attorneys must commute to this space and manage a system foreign to their personal lives and communities. Cases in Cook County are handled by an "all-white cast." Eighty-four percent of state's attorneys (SAs), 69 percent of public defenders (PDs), and 74 percent of trial court judges are white. This is in stark contrast to the cases and people they process. In 2004, 86.2 percent of felony defendants were male, 69 percent were African American, 17 percent were white, and 11.2 percent were Latino. The Public Defender's Office represents about 23,000 indigent defendants each year. These individuals are determined by a judge to be too poor to secure private counsel.

Such an imbalance quickly presents in visual terms as racial segregation in and around the courthouse. Even outside the building, I observed that segregation was not just spatially arranged but extended to separate and unequal rules and practices between white professionals and the people of color who defined the consumers of criminal justice. On the east side of California Avenue (facing the courthouse) is a five-story parking garage known for the aroma of urine and for being the only free parking in the area. This lot is restricted for jurors, lawyers, cops, and courthouse employees. An older sheriff sits at the gate. On some days, the security gate is propped up and you can find the sheriff napping. Like the courthouse entrance, white drivers with flashy cars are assumed to be lawyers and rarely get stopped — except if the driver chooses to stop. Usually, those who stop are "outsiders" or jurors who believe the posted sign that states that a courthouse badge is necessary for entry.

Courthouse insiders will tell you a separate set of rules. If you drive with authority and give a wave to the sheriff, you should have no trouble passing through to the garage — regardless of what the sign says. Such advice travels through social networks of mostly white attorneys, interns, and students. This tip speaks nothing of race, but the unspoken privilege is delineated along a racial divide. The professionals who give out the tip tend to be educated and white. The jurors and outsiders who stop, then pass through the gate with little...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804790434
• ISBN 13: 9780804790437
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland