40 pages • 1 hour read
Crook County
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Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “There are no Racists Here: Prosecutors in the Criminal Courts”
Chapter 4 focuses on the role of prosecutors in perpetuating colorblind racism. Gonzalez Van Cleve begins by describing three photographs in her supervising prosecutor’s office: a Black mother reenacting the murder of her newborn, a Black man in an electric blue suit arguing his innocence in a murder, and a closeup of a dead Black man’s hand. Gonzalez Van Cleve uses these pictures as a point of departure to discuss conflicting ideas of justice in Cook County. On the one hand, the prosecutor emphasizes the human context of the photos, stressing the cruelty of the system for not taking the personal circumstances of the woman who killed her child into account. On the other hand, the prosecutor presents the dead Black man as deserving of the vigilantism that killed him.
Gonzalez Van Cleve argues that racialized justice is not just the product of a few bad actors, but also of an entrenched culture. Prosecutors at the Cook County Courts toggle between knowing what is right and practicing law in biased ways. Although prosecutors acknowledge bias in the court, they don’t see themselves as part of the problem, instead pointing to other courtroom professionals, the police, and lawmakers. Similarly, defense lawyers blame prosecutors and judges for racializing justice. The shifting of blame to other actors allows court professionals to separate themselves from the racialized court culture. Judges and attorneys also describe separating their personal perspectives from court practices, which allows them to keep their hands clean in the racialized system. Most claim they don’t agree with the racialized practices of the court but are duty-bound to participate in the system. In other words, court practices do not reflect their beliefs, leaving them with a clean conscience. Focusing on systemic contributors to racialized justice, such as the war on drugs, which disproportionately targeted poor people of color, also allows prosecutors to disperse blame, even to defense attorneys.
Gonzalez Van Cleve holds that prosecutors and police veil their racialized practices in the language of colorblindness, emphasizing the immorality of defendants rather than their race. However, unlike the police, prosecutors openly address the unequal treatment of Black and white defendants, affirming both their moral integrity and race neutrality. Although prosecutors are quick to identify racial bias and misconduct in policing, they comply with the racialized cultural rules of the court and benefit from racialized policing. Prosecutors turn a blind eye to racialized police practices, including police brutality and perjury, because they need the police to serve as witnesses in their trials. The use of euphemisms, such as using the terms “shading” and “fudging” instead of “lying,” allows prosecutors to benefit from perjury by earning convictions, which are necessary for career advancement. The codependence between police and prosecutors not only silences potential critics of police misconduct, but also promotes the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ organization of the court.
Chapter 4 Analysis
In Chapter 4, Gonzalez Van Cleve revisits the themes of Colorblind Racism in the Courts and The Role of Court Professionals in Racialized Justice, approaching the subjects from the standpoint of prosecutors. The chapter opens with a description of three photographs adorning Gonzalez Van Cleve’s supervisor’s office: a Black mother reenacting the murder of her child, a Black man proclaiming his innocence, and a close-up of a dead Black man’s hand, each meticulously described to elicit a visceral response from readers:
Two of the photos dramatized the intense anger, fear, and uncertainty of being photographed by police officers just before arrest. The third photo was a picture of the hand of a dead man, with the body barely visible in the background […] Each photo was vivid, saturated with color, and emotionally dramatic. While the gang unit was like a wall of corpses, these pictures were tragedies in motion, distilled to a single moment in time (127).
Gonzalez Van Cleve uses the prosecutor’s photos as concrete images of the juxtaposition she wants to convey; these images serve as a springboard for Gonzalez Van Cleve’s observations about conflicting ideas of justice in the Cook County State Attorney’s Office. She argues that prosecutors have to reconcile the incongruity of racialized justice and their ideals of race neutrality. Gonzalez Van Cleve’s research shows that prosecutors generally recognize the existence of racial bias in the criminal justice system. However, these attorneys locate racial bias in other parties within the court system, rather than in themselves: “For the attorneys, bias is in proximity to their work, but located with adjacent professionals—whether it is the other courtroom workgroup members, the police, or lawmakers criminalizing more facets of everyday lives” (135). This defense mechanism, a core aspect of colorblind culture, allows prosecutors to identify inequality, incompetence, lying, the social needs of offenders, and the lack of resources to address these needs without having to take ownership of racialized court practices, thereby displacing the blame away from themselves and onto the system. Gonzalez Van Cleve’s analysis therefore suggests that a major mechanism perpetuating the colorblind racism of the court system is plausible deniability: Because prosecutors are able to explain the injustices of the court system in a way that frees them of any personal responsibility, they believe they have no capacity or ethical obligation to intervene in this system, and as a result the unjust system remains in place.
The covert nature of racism in the court is another mechanism by which the court system is perpetuated. Gonzalez Van Cleve describes colorblindness in the courts as “racism without epithets” (143). Prosecutors and the police officers who serve as their witnesses stress the immorality of Black people, viewing them as “immoral to the point of criminal” (143). However, prosecutors maintain the illusion of race neutrality by avoiding overtly racialized language, in contrast to police. As Gonzalez Van Cleve argues, the use of race-neutral language not only affirms the moral integrity of the prosecutors’ work, but also creates a boundary between prosecutors and police officers. Prosecutors collaborate with police and share a moral belief system with them, but they also differentiate themselves as race neutral. According to Gonzalez Van Cleve, this differentiation allows prosecutors to ignore the racial bias that connected them to police in practice and turn a blind eye to police misconduct, including perjury. Prosecutors’ use of euphemisms to describe perjury supports Gonzalez Van Cleve’s claim that they are complicit in dispensing unequal justice. Because prosecutors are able to distance themselves from police officers on the basis that police use language that is explicitly imbued with racial bias, prosecutors are able to deny their complicity in the system’s racial colorblindness because their complicity is veiled in race-neutral language.
Examples are central to Gonzalez Van Cleve’s arguments about prosecutorial practices. Cook County prosecutors condemn police misconduct and racial bias, yet they benefit from these practices in the court room. Gonzalez Van Cleve cites the case of Chicago police commander Jon Burge, one of the most egregious examples of police misconduct in Cook County’s history. Burge, who is white, led what Gonzalez Van Cleve describes as “a torture ring” from 1970s to the early 1990s (144), coercing confessions out of more than 120 Black men. Gonzalez Van Cleve describes the victims’ testimony to convey the brutality of Burge’s actions: “One by one, they described the modern-day atrocities that they endured during torture sessions. Their testimony revealed that suspects were suffocated with plastic bags and cattle prods were used to shock their genitals” (144). Anthony Holmes testified that Burge used the n-word while he tortured him. Holmes falsely confessed to murder and spent 30 years in prison. By contrast, Burge never faced criminal charges in Cook County, only serving four and a half years in federal prison for perjury and obstruction of justice. Gonzalez Van Cleve argues that this case attests to the two-tiered system in America’s courts. By presenting concrete examples like this one, Gonzalez Van Cleve bolsters the arguments of her book by going beyond the simple presentation of data from her ethnographic research and giving and sharing a more personal perspective of the human impact of colorblind racism and racial injustice.
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