Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court. By Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. 272 pp. $24.00 hardcover.

Abstract

Crook County: Racism, and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court. By Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. 272 pp. $24.00 hardcover.Crook County is a powerful sociological exploration of the largest unified criminal courthouse in the United States-Cook County, Chicago-a telling excavation of America's separate and unequal system of racialized criminal (in)justice. Based on 10 years of ethnographic fieldwork, Van Cleve dramatically reveals the role of the courts, and what she calls their working groups, judges, sheriffs, prosecutors, police, public defenders and private attorneys, in reproducing racial inequalities, in ways that remind one of Diane Vaughan's powerful thoughts on bureaucratic-organizational cultures. Portrayed here is a Goffmanesque world in which justice is absent, racial animus ever present, and bureaucratic rules of efficiency prioritize quantity over quality, all at the expense of defendants, their families and victims, mostly of color.Van Cleve opens the courthouses' doors to show the legal habitus behind Durkheimian rituals of ceremonial racialized degradation that separate the criminalized poor from the sacred supposedly law-abiding White citizenry and concomitant White suburban legal establishment processing them through the system. Most defendants are charged with lower-level nonviolent offenses, too poor to obtain adequate legal representation or make bail. Hence, as in the film, the Lincoln Lawyer, they are guilty until proven innocent. Van Cleve uses her ethnographic gifts to underscore the culture and code of the courts, where a largely White professional class, including the substantial majority of Cook County's state's attorneys and judges, process defendants, overwhelmingly of color, with pictures of successful court cases won put up like prize fights. The title of the book comes from the nickname given to the court by persons of color who are the primary persons going through its halls in the segregated ghetto of Chicago where it resides, alongside the massive jail complex, dubbed the Hotel California by residents-you can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave-of which it forms the larger part.The spatially and racially segregated nature of Chicago is mirrored in the complex, with front-stage and backstage performances of those at the bottom of the legal bar expertly and richly described, most especially for the persons of color that are the majority entrants to its hallowed halls of justice. In her ethnographic exploration, Van Cleve illustrates the central role of the White courtroom as a gateway for the much higher rates of incarceration among disadvantaged communities of color that Robert Sampson has dubbed punishment's place. In a justice system dominated by plea bargains-some 95% of all cases-Van Cleve shows how procedural justice becomes a charade. Particularly telling are the racial and moral codes that reinforce the distance between the largely White suburban professionals who staff the courtroom and the racialized, criminalized other, adding nuanced ethnographic detail to the changing racial demography and political geography of the criminal justice system outlined so powerfully in the scholarship of William Stuntz and the music of hip-hop artist extraordinaire, Tupac Shakur. …