Letters to the Law: A Review of The Torture Letters

An Open Letter to All Present and Future Scholars

I am a researcher, sociologist, and scholar of carceral studies in Chicago who has been asked to write a review of Laurence Ralph's The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence. Though I cannot be certain of exactly who you may be, I am certain enough that you care something about people, given that readers of this journal are scholars of the human condition. So I am also certain enough that this book will—or should—matter to you, given its artful, generous, and critical exploration of the human condition at its very best, and at its very worst. ¹

The Torture Letters presents a searing account of police torture in Chicago. Ralph develops a theoretical framework that he calls the torture tree, an apt metaphor that he uses to articulate the historical, institutional, and cultural conditions that made torture a central feature of U.S. policing as explicit, extreme violence against Black people. He writes that “torture persists in Chicago because of the complicity of people in power, and it persists in the United States because of our history of violence against populations we perceive as threatening to us” (p. xv). Ralph notes that he is both cautious and intentional in using the word “torture” to articulate, in painful detail, the experiences of Black Chicagoans brutalized by the Chicago Police Department's (CPD) Area 2 precinct officers from the mid-1970s to the 2000s. He demonstrates that the term is directly emergent from the accounts of survivors themselves and true to the tools and tactics that CPD weaponized against them.

Ralph has crafted a text in which any reader—across academic and popular spheres—can find much to appreciate. Though I cannot call a book about police torture an “easy” read, it is undeniable that Ralph's prose is poetic and inviting, and the significance of his contributions is not buried in inaccessible jargon. Much of the text's versatility can be credited to a methodological approach that Ralph calls ethnographic lettering, which he broadly describes as a layered mechanism of presenting findings from his archival research, court proceedings, focus groups, and interviews, addressed to a host of different actors, including leaders of Chicago political institutions, youth organizers, individual torture survivors, activists, and police officers implicated in torture cases. Both the Prologue and the Appendix offer more detail on this method, including an extended discussion of the political aims that prompted its development, its situatedness in Ralph's home discipline of anthropology and more broadly within critical ethnography, and the way it reconfigures traditional dynamics of knowledge production and academic expertise. The Torture Letters belongs, in my perspective, as a core text in graduate methods courses across sociology and criminology.

One clear theme that emerges from The Torture Letters is that the abuses of law enforcement, whether in Chicago or Guantanamo, produce threats to the legitimacy of governance because they so clearly act in contravention of producing safety and instead create profound and often fatal danger for those who are Black, disabled, and otherwise multiply marginalized. Unlike many scholarly accounts of police brutality and anti-Blackness, The Torture Letters does not capitulate to the tropes of innocent victims ² and bad law enforcement apples to explain why CPD's recent history of torturing the city's Black residents merits our attention. Instead, Ralph offers a deeper and more complex account of policing that names the Area 2 Violent Crimes Unit, led by Lieutenant Jon Burge, as emblematic, rather than an aberration, of American law enforcement.

Core to the argument that he makes is the use-of-force continuum: “guidelines that the police are supposed to abide by when determining how much force to deploy during an encounter with a civilian” (p. xx). Reformist approaches often look to tinker with the conditions under which the use-of-force continuum is invoked; body‐worn cameras, anti‐bias training, and harsher penalties against cops who kill civilians—especially those who are Black—are all among the proposed policy interventions and foci of academic studies on policing. Yet, as Ralph's Black Chicagoan interlocutors identify, the very premise of the use-of-force continuum is flawed: “They argue that because of their skin color, the police judge them as threats prematurely, and then use that prejudice to ascend the staircase too quickly . . . the police often face no consequences whatsoever for their role in escalating violence. They have to state later only that they felt scared” (p. xxi). Ralph demonstrates that the use-of-force continuum is only possible because of the torture tree: the presumption of Black criminality, coupled with legal statutes that govern the degradation of those who are criminalized, mean that the police murder and torture of Black civilians can always be legally marked as justified violence.

Despite the profound implications of this work, Ralph positions the book as amplifying what so many Black residents in Chicago take for granted rather than something he “discovered” through research. This is, perhaps, one of the core elements of The Torture Letters that I would encourage sociologists to closely consider. He writes:

I began from the premise that I would take what my interlocutors told me seriously . . . . and what they told me, again and again, was clear: . . . Police torture is not an accident at all. It is intentional, predictable, and expected. Most Chicagoans I talked to for this research project already understood my subject better than I did: they knew that police torture has existed for a long time and that the city government has historically done little to stop it. I did not “discover” this phenomenon—far from it. What I have done, I hope, is clarify the shape and structure of police torture as a way to amplify the concerns of the people who have lived it. (p. 187)

The Torture Letters therefore ontologically and epistemologically sits apart from many other studies of police violence and abuse. This is in part because the unmarked whiteness of common academic approaches to studying state racial violence often seeks to confirm or deny the extent to which those who experience state violence can reliably understand and relay its conditions, or takes a “both sides” approach to policing that obscures the enormous power imbalances between law enforcement and civilian populations. And while The Torture Letters does not bow to “both sidesism,” Ralph's ethnographic lettering approach enables him to explicitly write to police officers who are implicated in Area 2 torture cases. He acknowledges the pressures and conditions that produced their collusion without absolving them of their abuse. I suspect that Ralph's careful investigation of the history, norms, and culture of policing speaks volumes about the capacity, or lack thereof, for reformist reforms ³ to produce meaningful change.

In short, The Torture Letters is one of those rare books that speaks beyond disciplines and subfields to strike at the heart of essential questions about justice, safety, violence, and hope. And despite my firm belief that this is a must‐read, a nearly 250‐page text will not be an option for everyone. Fortunately, Ralph further elevates the reach and impact of The Torture Letters in a striking, award‐winning, freely accessible animated short ⁴ of the same title. Whether on the page or screen, The Torture Letters is an unmistakable and compelling call to action for all of us to build a future without the torture tree in it.