Abstract
Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court offers a well-researched and rare glimpse into the two separate and unequal justice systems found in Cook County, Illinois, one major American court system. Written by Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, an associate professor at the University of Delaware in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, the book explores the criminal court and the courtroom workgroup actions that create an environment of racialized punishment. From the beginning, Van Cleve notes that her research places the spotlight on the professionals with power as they create injustices in the courts. The research highlights the underbelly of the court system that regularly and systematically discriminates against minorities and the poor. Each chapter highlights the overt and subtle expressions of racism that exist despite claims of due process and being color-blind. But despite the focus on the criminal justice system, Van Cleve offers a caution that this research is really about how modern forms of racism are practiced within social institutions generally, and they are likely in other places, as well. It is definitely a must-read for anyone interested in racism and discrimination and the criminal justice system.
The book draws on Van Cleve’s experiences and observations from working in both the prosecutor’s office and the public defender’s office. It is written as a narrative, but it isn’t purely stories. She takes her own observations, as well as thousands of hours of observations from courtroom observers, and aggregates them to find the patterns of institutionalized racism that pervades the courts. The main focus is that there are two separate and unequal systems of justice, one for the poor and people of color and one for everyone else. She goes further than this, though, to examine what those systems actually look like and how they are continuously reproduced from case to case and year to year.
The book is structured as a series of five chapters with an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction, called “Opening the Courthouse Doors,” begins by introducing the court itself and the inescapable racial divide within it. This racial divide creates a culture of racism that is so pervasive that it exists on its own, even before specific courtroom members enter their roles. The culture forms within the gap between the formal law and how the law is applied to people. This culture has to do with the social interactions and exchanges that occur within the courthouse. Importantly, though, much of the culture is coded and more subtle than in the past.
Chapter 1, titled “Separate and Unequal Justice,” plunges into how the two systems of justice work. It focuses on the different populations of people and how the processing of defendants is racialized through informal actions, like time and space. The chapter really lays out the feelings of us versus them, which create the divides in the system. With time, she focuses on how white professionals have the privilege of controlling time, while the poor and people of color are at their mercy. Space is also controlled by those in power in the culture. There are physical space constraints, like soundproof barriers, to block people from the formal proceedings, but people are also threatened with violence in order to maintain the space. The split system is evident in all aspects, including how the poor and people of color enter the courthouse versus the white professionals. She describes the line of people waiting to enter the courthouse through security as “what looked like a Depression-era breadline” (p. 16).
Chapter 2, “Monsters and Mopes: Racial and Criminal ‘Immorality,’” focuses on the subtleties of how people are separated. Specifically, Van Cleve observes a great focus on morality and its connections with criminality. By using morality as a weapon, it allows people to be seen as deserving of punishment. The terms mope and monster are used to refer to types of defendants. Mopes are seen as unmotivated and deserving of punishment and humiliation. They fill the majority of the system and take time and resources away from prosecuting the monsters. Prosecutors see themselves as moral warriors that are strapped for time because of mopes, who cause them to miss out on the real monsters. This use of terminology also allows prosecutors and the entire racialized culture to rationalize the sidestepping of protections of due process as needed in order to keep the system moving efficiently.
Chapter 3, “Race in Everyday Legal Practices,” looks at how attorneys, specifically defense attorneys, have to adjust their practice to accommodate the racialized culture. They must be knowledgeable about how the culture works in order to use it to their benefit. For example, attorneys know how morality is used within the courts; therefore, they must justify why they would help someone who is morally undeserving. Additionally, attorneys may feed into the narrative about their client being subhuman in order to get a better deal. The attorneys have to rely on a variety of tools to work within the racialized system.
Chapter 4, “There Are No Racists Here: Prosecutors in the Criminal Courts,” examines the role of prosecutors and how they can maintain the idea that there may be bias in the system but that they personally aren’t part of the problem. When asked about inequality in the system, prosecutors did identify that there is bias, but when they acknowledged it, they generally say that it lies in other parts of the system, like the police. The prosecutors shift the blame to other criminal justice actors as a way to separate themselves from the culture. Many prosecutors see the police as law benders who take part in abuse and perjury. Still, the truth remains that prosecutors need the police as witnesses; therefore, they turn a blind eye to what may or may not unlawfully occur with the police. It is important to note that Van Cleve does contend the culture is certainly bigger than one person or one actor, but it’s so pervasive that it isn’t clear that you can be a moral person and still work in the system.
Chapter 5, “Rethinking Gideon’s Army: Defense Attorneys in the Criminal Courts,” focuses on defense attorneys and the math that they do to determine the worthiness of each potential client. Through this calculation, attorneys decide how much capital they want to spend on the client. Defense attorneys eventually become another piece of the racialized system, where they are simply reproducing the inequalities. For example, if a client is determined to be unworthy, it is easier for the attorney to ignore the client’s requests and cloud his or her perspective, resulting in seeing the defendant as hustling the system instead of trying to save himself or herself.
The conclusion, “Racialized Punishment in the Courts,” begins by refocusing on the people who are negatively affected by the system. In this final section, Van Cleve also points out that the system likely leads to a large number of wrongful convictions that have significant effects on the lives of the poor and people of color. Last, she offers a call to action by encouraging readers to visit their local courts in order to challenge the insularity and culture.
Crook County could certainly be incorporated into both undergraduate and graduate sociology and criminal justice courses. It would be particularly useful in a graduate seminar on American courts or race in the criminal justice system. For a course on the court system, instructors could assign the book as a reading and have the students explore the roles of the defense attorney, prosecutor, and judge to see how each role shapes the racist culture that Van Cleve identifies. Additionally, students could examine how the court structure influences the power dynamics in the courts. For a course focused on race in the criminal justice system, this book would pair well with Feeley’s ([1979] 1992) The Process Is the Punishment: Handling Cases in a Lower Criminal Court. Throughout the book, Van Cleve makes comparisons between her observations and Feeley’s findings about the hardships that defendants face even before trial. However, Crook County goes beyond individual hardship to examine the informal culture that adds to the structural challenges that the accused face.
Additionally, chapters 1 and 2 could be assigned in a Social Inequality course or undergraduate Race and Ethnicity course to explore institutionalized racism. It is often challenging for many undergraduate students to identify how institutionalized racism can and does exist in the world, even when someone may not be individually racist. These chapters would allow students to examine the culture and policies that exist in the courts that lead to differing outcomes based on an individual’s social background. The chapters thoughtfully highlight the subtleties of current racism. These chapters would pair well with Bonilla-Silva’s (2017) Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. The book could also be used to initiate a discussion surrounding organizations and race and ethnicity. Additionally, it would pair well with Ray’s (2019) newly published article, “A Theory of Racialized Organizations.”
While this is a well-written, well-researched book, it is not without some limitations. The main weakness is the organization. As previously stated, the book is separated into five chapters, but it isn’t clear how they were divided. It may have been more clear if each chapter focused on the roles of each courtroom workgroup member and how each constructs the culture or maybe if each chapter focused on a different chronological point of interaction that the defendant has with the system. If reading the book as a whole, the reader is definitely left with a solid understanding of the racialized culture and separate systems, but if trying to assign specific chapters of the text, it may become confusing as the systems aren’t clearly differentiated. This organizational structure was challenging even while writing the above summary. Importantly, though, the book wasn’t necessarily intended for the purposes of classroom use, and it is an important enough addition to the scholarship that I suggest that faculty adapt the readings for classroom use when possible.
Overall, this text does offer an engaging and anger-inducing account of the culture found in the Cook County court system and likely courts throughout the United States. Van Cleve’s narrative writing style is fluid and easy to read, often leaving me with a vivid image in my head. The time that it took to collect all the courtroom observations is certainly commendable, as well. Last, I appreciated the specific examples of interactions and decision points where racism enters the system. Many studies of racism in the criminal justice system focus on the overall patterns but don’t offer detailed examples. Because of all of these points, I highly recommend incorporating Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court into graduate and undergraduate sociology and criminal justice courses.