Crook County

Chapter 1, “Separate and Unequal Justice,” focuses on how racialized justice operates at the Cook County Courts. Gonzalez Van Cleve stresses the issue of division, starting with the spatial separation of the courthouse from downtown Chicago. Her opening anecdote paints a vivid picture of the drive from the center of the city:

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 […] 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 (15).

Gonzalez Van Cleve treats the divisions of the court in a similar way. She compares the line at the public entrance of the courthouse to “a black and brown breadline” that contrasts starkly with “the VIP lane for white professionals” (16). This “Jim Crow-style social arrangement” outside the courthouse mirrored the organization of the interior of the building (16), where physical and symbolic barriers divided the predominantly white court staff from visitors, primarily Black and Latinx defendants, victims, and their family members. Pairing the hard data of her ethnographic research with such images and strong word choices give the text a tone that deviates from conventional scholarly neutrality. This is consistent with and serves to reinforce one of Gonzalez Van Cleve’s central claims, namely, that insidious bias and prejudice can masquerade as neutrality, as in the case of racial colorblindness, which repackages racial bias in the seemingly neutral language of immorality.

Gonzalez Van Cleve, however, provides extensive data to buttress her claims. For example, she cites several statistics to capture the court’s racialized environment. On the one hand, 74% of trial judges, 84% of prosecutors, and 69% of public defenders are white (17). On the other hand, 86.2% of felony defendants are male, 69% are Black, and 11.2% are Latinx. Only 17% are white (17). Most defendants are young Black men between the ages of 21 and 30. Most come from Chicago’s South Side and West Side, two of the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods. These data undermine the possible criticism that Gonzalez Van Cleve lacks objectivity. In addition, this statistical information begins to fill in Gonzalez Van Cleve’s analysis of The Intersection of Race and Class in the Criminal Justice System by outlining the correlations between race and class and the demographic breakdown of the various populations dealing with the court system.

The Role of Court Professionals in Racialized Justice is another central theme in Gonzalez Van Cleve’s book. In Chapter 1, she focuses on how court officers participate in this dynamic by creating and maintaining the racialized boundaries of the courthouse spaces. The security guards controlling access to the building’s parking garage, for instance, typically stop Black and Latinx drivers while waving white drivers through, even those who don’t work at the courthouse. Inside the building, armed sheriffs use intimidation to prevent visitors from crossing physical and symbolic boundaries, notably the division between the court proper and the gallery. Gonzalez Van Cleve describes the firmness of this boundary: “Sheriffs exert a constant threat of violence that polices the professional space from the public gallery with symbolic boundaries as impenetrable as the bulletproof glass itself” (34). The sheriffs “act as henchmen as they aggressively police this racial line” (34), limiting public access to the proceedings for the people in the gallery, for whom “waiting was an exercise in subservience and power [with] little respite from the tedious nature of sitting obediently” (31). Presenting these specific details helps Gonzalez Van Cleve paint a larger picture of how court professionals’ relatively minor behavior and expectations collectively converge to create a system of racial disparities and injustice.

Gonzalez Van Cleve combines personal observation and the observations of others in her ethnographic account of the Cook County Courts. For example, she witnessed many examples of inappropriate behavior by court officials, including a judge playing with his young daughter while deciding whether to sentence a defendant to prison or death (38). Gonzalez Van Cleve describes witnessing this backstage behavior in memorable terms: “As the door opened and shut, it was like the curtain being pulled back on the ‘wizard’ in the Wizard of Oz—revealing the pretense of somber, serious justice that was exposed for all to see” (38). Later in the chapter, she quotes a white court watcher who notes the privilege race provided during backstage interactions with a judge: “‘Once we were on the inside, he [the judge] was friendly and talkative. Asking what law schools we went to’” (45). As Gonzalez Van Cleve argues, the special treatment of white court watchers underscores the extend of racial divisiveness at the Cook County Courts. By combining both general ethnographic data and personal observation, Gonzalez Van Cleve presents comprehensive support for these claims.