Introduction: Opening the Courthouse Doors
1. Separate and Unequal Justice
2. Of Monsters and Mopes: Racial and Criminal "Immorality"
3. Race in Everyday Legal Practices
4. There Are No Racists Here: Prosecutors in the Criminal
Courts
5. Rethinking Gideon's Army: Defense Attorneys in the Criminal
Courts
Conclusion: Racialized Punishment in the Courts: A Call to Action
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.
"Gonzalez Van Cleve's account of the American criminal justice
system, based on thousands of hours of careful observation behind
the doors of the Chicago–Cook County courthouse, reveals the
paradoxes and pain of our modern legal culture, including the
effects on the punished and punishers alike. As Van Cleve's
investigation so startlingly lays bare, just because legal
institutions profess to be colorblind does not make it so. Reading
Crook County helps us see the difference."—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University
"Beautifully written and keenly insightful, Crook County is a
horror story I couldn't put down. May Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve's
masterful book do for the Chicago criminal court what Upton
Sinclair's The Jungle did to the meat packing industry: clean it
up. Powerful, disturbing and paradigm shifting, Crook County is
ethnography at its best."—Paul Butler, Georgetown Law, author of
The Chokehold: Policing Black Men
"Crook County is a searing account of how criminal courts serve as
the gateway to racialized punishment. Turning a spotlight on the
everyday actions of prosecutors, judges, and defense attorneys,
Gonzalez Van Cleve reveals a court culture that dehumanizes and
discriminates against defendants, victims, and family members. Her
eye-opening analysis forces us to confront the possibility [or
reality] that mass incarceration results from mass wrongful
convictions of black and brown people forced into a devastating
charade."— Dorothy Roberts, University of Pennsylvania, author of
Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of
Liberty
Urgent and important, Crook County is a powerful, eye-opening
account of the code of the big-city court system. Carefully
dissecting this crucial step of the 'school to prison pipeline,'
Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve illustrates just how the scales of
justice are cynically stacked against black and brown inner city
young people, undermining their faith in our criminal justice
system. Crook County is a must-read."—Elijah Anderson, Yale
University, author of Code of the Street and The Cosmopolitan
Canopy
"This book is public sociology at its best. It is theoretically
grounded, methodologically rigorous and innovativeIn sharp detail,
the book shows how the crisis of racism is routinized in the daily
functions of formal institutions of justice. There are lessons in
this book, then, for any criminologist or sociologist of crime, law
or deviance. It transcends geographic boundaries and at once
provides seminal insights into future ethnographic research
Gonzalez Van Cleve demonstrates the power of ethnography in the
best possible sense."—Benjamin Fleury-Steiner, British Journal of
Criminology
"Van Cleve's book is nothing less than a tour de force, and a
clarion call for bringing egalitarian principles of racial and
social justice to our most overlooked of criminal justice
institutions, the courts. It forces us to confront 'the everyday
miscarriages of justice' that pervade today's courts, asking us
what has become of Gideon's trumpet in the age of spatially and
racially concentrated 'mass incarceration.' The book is destined to
become a classic, and ought to be on the mandatory reading list for
citizens, law and society scholars and all sentient social
scientists."—Thomas E. Reifer, Law and Society Review
"In a groundbreaking new book, Crook County: Racism and Injustice
in America's Largest Criminal Court, Professor Nicole Gonzalez Van
Cleve adds an important, novel dimension to this problem. She
exposes the deeply flawed operation of the criminal justice system
by focusing on how felonies are processed in Cook County,
Illinois...Van Cleve's important ethnography brings to light the
hidden and pernicious workings of the criminal justice system that
often operates in the shadows."—L. Song Richardson, Yale Law
Journal
"Through her meticulous methodological approach that draws on field
notes, over one thousand hours of court observations by court
watchers, and interviews with judges, private attorneys, public
defenders, and prosecutors, Van Cleve outlines a legal habitus
allowing individual actors to appear blameless in the practice of
racialized justice....Reading Crook County, it becomes clear that
the court system is a mere charade of what it is meant to be."––Amy
Baumann Grau, Contexts
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