40 pages • 1 hour read
Crook County
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Preface-IntroductionChapter Summaries & Analyses
Preface Summary
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. She explains that her research, begun while she was an undergraduate student, sheds light on how court professionals view defendants, victims, and their families, turning the “lens on those in power as they do the marginalizing” (xiii).
Introduction Summary: “Opening the Courthouse Doors”
Gonzalez Van Cleve’s book opens with an anecdote about a wall of mugshots of Black and Latinx defendants at the State Attorney’s Office in Cook County-Chicago. Gonzalez Van Cleve, then an undergraduate student at Northwestern University, was the only person of color in the room. The anecdote serves as a point of departure for a discussion of racial colorblindness in the criminal justice system. Colorblind racial ideology, or racial neutrality, has not done away with racism, but simply made it more covert. Gonzalez Van Cleve holds that the court is racially divided and that this divisiveness fuels a culture of racism. Most defendants are poor, uneducated people of color, whereas most lawyers and judges are upper-middle class, educated, and white. Court professionals must reconcile the de facto racial segregation of the courts with their moral and institutional imperative to process defendants through the system, most of whom are poor people of color. Gonzalez Van Cleve argues that colorblindness shifts the blame for criminality away from race and onto immorality. In other words, the disdain court professionals hold for defendants is not based on the color of their skin, but on their moral violations.
Gonzalez Van Cleve describes the genesis and evolution of her book. She began her research at the Cook County-Chicago courthouse as an undergraduate with an eye on law school. Noting the disproportionate number of Black and Latinx defendants, her interest shifted away from studying law to studying punishment and race. During graduate school, Gonzalez Van Cleve revisited her study of the Cook County Courts. Working with the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice, Gonzalez Van Cleve became a court watcher tasked with observing professional norms and decorum at the court. She combined her observations with those of other court watchers to produce a sociological study of the institutional racism at the Cook County Courts.
Preface-Introduction Analysis
In her Introduction, “Opening the Courthouse Doors,” Gonzalez Van Cleve touches on three interrelated themes that reappear throughout her book: 1) Racial Colorblindness in the Courts; 2) The Role of Court Professionals in Racialized Justice; and 3) The Intersection of Race and Class in the Criminal Justice System. Working over a 10-year period and combining a range of methodological and analytic approaches, including traditional ethnography, comparative ethnography, historical research, archival work, and large-scale, semi-structured fieldwork, Gonzalez Van Cleve not only sheds light on racial divisiveness in the Cook County Courts, but also contributes broadly to the understanding of institutional racism and the role of the courts as sites of racialized punishment.
Racial Colorblindness in the Courts is central to Gonzalez Van Cleve’s book. A modern form of racism, racial colorblindness allows court professionals to shift the emphasis away from race as the reason for the mass incarceration of people of color. Gonzalez Van Cleve thus outlines The Role of Court Professionals in Racialized Justice because stressing immorality instead of race allows court professionals to preserve the idea of race neutrality, even in the face of the overt racialization of their workplace. Gonzalez Van Cleve sheds light on the role of individual actors in racialized justice, as well as elucidating how unequal justice is practiced within the institution of the court. This inequality speaks to The Intersection of Race and Class in the Criminal Justice System. For instance, the prison population has grown exponentially in the last four decades, and this growth is concentrated among poor people of color. As Gonzalez Van Cleve observes, Black and white incarceration rates are unmatched compared to all other social indicators of inequity: “Racial disparities in unemployment (two to one), nonmarital childbearing (three to one), infant mortality (two to one), wealth (one to five) are all significantly lower than the eight to one black-white ratio in incarceration rates” (2). Racial inequity in incarceration rates fuels the cycle of poverty, increases structural inequality, and raises (rather than lowers) crime rates. As Gonzalez Van Cleve recounts in the opening anecdote of her Introduction, racial inequality is overt and inescapable in the Cook County Courts, with the mugshots covering the walls of the State Attorney’s Office serving as a “striking, racialized backdrop to the practice of criminal law” (1). Gonzalez Van Cleve couples these concrete stories and anecdotes with her sociological research to unmask the tacit dynamics that underpin the racial inequalities that exist in the Cook County Courts.
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