Crook County (eBook)

Racism and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court

Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2016
272 Seiten
Stanford University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8047-9920-1 (ISBN)

Infos

Winner of the 2017 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award, sponsored by the Society for the Study of Social Problems.Finalist for the C. Wright Mills Book Award, sponsored by the Society for the Study of Social Problems.Winner of the 2017 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award, sponsored by the American Sociological Association's Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities.Winner of the 2017 Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book, sponsored by the American Sociological Association's Sociology of Culture Section.Honorable Mention in the 2017 Book Award from the American Sociological Association's Section on Race, Class, and Gender.NAACP Image Award Nominee for an Outstanding Literary Work from a debut author.Winner of the 2017 Prose Award for Excellence in Social Sciences and the 2017 Prose Category Award for Law and Legal Studies, sponsored by the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, Association of American Publishers.Silver Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (Current Events/Social Issues category).Americans are slowly waking up to the dire effects of racial profiling, police brutality, and mass incarceration, especially in disadvantaged neighborhoods and communities of color. The criminal courts are the crucial gateway between police action on the street and the processing of primarily black and Latino defendants into jails and prisons. And yet the courts, often portrayed as sacred, impartial institutions, have remained shrouded in secrecy, with the majority of Americans kept in the dark about how they function internally. Crook County bursts open the courthouse doors and enters the hallways, courtrooms, judges' chambers, and attorneys' offices to reveal a world of punishment determined by race, not offense.Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve spent ten years working in and investigating the largest criminal courthouse in the country, Chicago Cook County, and based on over 1,000 hours of observation, she takes readers inside our so-called halls of justice to witness the types of everyday racial abuses that fester within the courts, often in plain sight. We watch white courtroom professionals classify and deliberate on the fates of mostly black and Latino defendants while racial abuse and due process violations are encouraged and even seen as justified. Judges fall asleep on the bench. Prosecutors hang out like frat boys in the judges' chambers while the fates of defendants hang in the balance. Public defenders make choices about which defendants they will try to "e;save"e; and which they will sacrifice. Sheriff's officers cruelly mock and abuse defendants' family members. Delve deeper into Crook County with related media and instructor resources at www.sup.org/crookcountyresources.Crook County's powerful and at times devastating narratives reveal startling truths about a legal culture steeped in racial abuse. Defendants find themselves thrust into a pernicious legal world where courtroom actors live and breathe racism while simultaneously committing themselves to a colorblind ideal. Gonzalez Van Cleve urges all citizens to take a closer look at the way we do justice in America and to hold our arbiters of justice accountable to the highest standards of equality.

Autor

Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve is an Assistant Professor at Temple University in the Department of Criminal Justice, with courtesy appointments in the Department of Sociology and the Beasley School of Law. She is a recipient of the 2014-2015 Ford Foundation Fellowship, an affiliated scholar with the American Bar Foundation, and a former Research Director for Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice. She has provided legal commentary on the criminal justice system for MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, NBC News, CNN, and The New York Times.

Inhalt

Contents and AbstractsIntroduction: Opening the Courthouse Doors chapter abstractThe Introduction outlines the ethnography of the criminal courts in Chicago–Cook County,which examines how the racial segregation that defines mass incarceration manifests within our criminal courts. In these sites, the mostly black and Latino defendants confront a workgroup of white professionals who are charged with deliberating on the criminality of a racialized offender pool. Despite due process protections and professionals who espouse colorblind ideologies, judges and attorneys use racialized tropes regarding the immoral character of defendants to efficiently process the backlog of cases. By mobilizing a moral rubric to encode racial difference, professionals maintain court processes as "race-neutral." Ultimately, this account reveals the courts as a gateway for the racialization of criminal justice, where racism and discretion collide. The introduction raises questions about modern forms of colorblind racism and the claim that they are gentler and different from overt forms of the past.1Separate and Unequal Justice chapter abstractThis chapter examines the blurred boundaries between punishment and due process, and geographically places the courts and accompanying jail within an impenetrable moat of impoverishment and violence. Through narratives of the community surrounding the court and jail, this chapter elaborates how the criminal courts became a complex of punishment. Chapter 1 journeys inside the criminal courthouse to see the racial segregation that results from generations of social and spatial isolation. Here, the author describes the structural segregation that separates minority consumers of justice from white professionals who dole it out. These arrangements are parallel to the prescribed divisions of historic Jim Crow and translate to boundaries of behavior that define the racialized court culture. The author shows a type of complicated legal habitus defined by whites with elaborate cultural rules and practices that govern the courthouse and reinforce separate and unequal racial divides within it.2Of Monsters and Mopes: Racial and Criminal "Immorality" chapter abstractChapter 2 interrogates the racialized ideology that informs professionals' interpretation of justice in the courts. This chapter addresses how professionals view race and how this informs who is deserving of justice, and what form and experience that justice takes. Prosecutors and judges in particular view the courts as a "race-blind" space, despite practicing law in a setting that is racially demarcated. This is contrasted with defense attorneys' awareness of racial bias but their admitted complicity in the court culture. The author analyzes the moral frameworks applied to defendants that subvert racial divides between professionals and defendants. The construction of defendants as criminally (and racially) immoral valorizes a host of abuses and violations of due process as just and fair. These abuses and violations have haunting parallels to the Jim Crow "justice" of the Deep South and show how traditional racism is practiced in a supposedly post-racial era.3Race in Everyday Legal Practices chapter abstractChapter 3 shows how racialized ideologies are practiced and institutionalized in criminal procedures and even in defining the advocacy strategies of the criminal defense. The data for this chapter chronicle ethnographic observations of backstage and front-stage courtroom exchanges, including plea bargains etched out in judges' chambers and outside of the formal court record. These data address how racism becomes hidden in court culture and the contours of justice. Criminal defense attorneys construct a defense within the boundaries of racialized court culture. Zealous advocacy is more about navigating the cultural laws that govern the courtroom workgroup than it is about a sophisticated management of legal evidence, trial work, or pursuing legal motions. As a result, defense attorneys admit to becoming complicit in a system they find reprehensible.4There Are No Racists Here: Prosecutors in the Criminal Courts chapter abstractWhile the previous chapters outline a pervasive culture of racialized justice, Chapter 4 delves into the complex notions of justice and law that define our criminal courts, as seen by a central adversarial player: the prosecution. While racialized cultural logics govern and legitimize how professionals sort and dispose of cases, prosecutors retain thoughtful critiques and frameworks of fairness, justice, and reform. Ideologically, prosecutors express a desire (and capacity) for race-neutral justice—even creating boundaries between themselves and police officers when overt bigotry becomes apparent in the system. Prosecutors identify what the author describes as a "thin blue line of bigotry," and locate racial bias as adjacent to (rather than within) their professional culture. In the same manner that defense attorneys are dependent upon prosecutors, prosecutors describe their dependency on the police as undermining justice. Prosecutors draw boundaries between themselves and the "real" bias in the system.5Rethinking Gideon's Army: Defense Attorneys in the Criminal Courts chapter abstractWhile defense attorneys often take a heroic stance against racialized justice, Chapter 5 frustrates the simplicity of the account by delving into the complex notions of justice and law as defined by the defense attorneys. Despite their expressed sympathies for defendants and their disdain for being complicit in a system that abuses their clients, they often act as willing ambassadors of racialized justice. They use the rubrics and logics of racialized justice to determine which defendants are "worthy" of their time and resources while helping to translate the cultural laws of the workgroup to their clients. In the same way that racialized rubrics act as an efficient institutional tool for workgroup decision making, these rubrics help defense attorneys efficiently vet the large pool of marginalized clients that they are tasked with defending.Conclusion: Racialized Punishment in the Courts: A Call to Action chapter abstractThe final chapter examines the implications of racialized justice on criminal law, procedural justice, and the consumer experience of criminal courts. The conclusion challenges the notion that colorblind racism or modern racism is different from the violence of traditional racism. Coupled with institutional authority, the promise of procedural justice, and the guise of bureaucratic protocols, colorblind racism is equivalent to state-sanctioned violence, even assuming some of the punitive fury of "popular justice" or torture lynchings in the South. In addition, the procedural shortcuts endemic to racialized justice are likely producing mass wrongful convictions, with factually innocent defendants serving time in jails and prisons. The lifelong consequences are discussed. From a policy standpoint, the author offers a call to action to disrupt the culture of the courts by holding them accountable through oversight, be it pro bono assistance, court watching, or voting for judges.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 24.5.2016
• Zusatzinfo: 2 tables
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► EU / Internationales Recht
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Privatrecht / Bürgerliches Recht ► Berufs-/Gebührenrecht
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Strafrecht ► Strafverfahrensrecht
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Schlagworte: colorblind racism • criminal courts • criminal justice • Criminal Law • Criminal Procedure • Defendants • Due Process • ethnography • Mass Incarceration • wrongful conviction
• ISBN-10: 0-8047-9920-2 / 0804799202
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8047-9920-1 / 9780804799201