Crook County

Content Warning: The source material addresses racism and racial inequity in the US criminal justice system. References to racial degradation, including the use of the N-word, and racial violence appear throughout the text.

Gonzalez Van Cleve’s preface draws attention to inequality in America’s criminal courts. She begins with the claim that white police officers who kill unarmed Black people are rarely brought to justice, as evidenced by the high-profile cases of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice. These cases exemplify the two-tiered criminal justice system, which offers protection to some members of society and not others. Gonzalez Van Cleve states that the de facto segregation of America’s courts is evident in the long line of Black and Latinx visitors to the Cook County courthouse, which contrasts starkly with the separate line of predominantly white court professionals. As Michelle Alexander points out in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), although segregation legally ended, it continues to define the country’s criminal justice system. Gonzalez Van Cleve argues that the predominantly Black and Latinx defendants of Cook County are denied due process, punished, and otherwise abused by a system that clothes racism in the language of morality.