Crook County, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve
Crook County, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve
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Crook County
Racism and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court

Author: Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve

Narrator: Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve

Unabridged: 10 hr 11 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/23/2023


Synopsis

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. Crook County bursts open the courthouse doors 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 she takes listeners 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. 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 "save" and which they will sacrifice.

Crook County's powerful and at times devastating narratives reveal startling truths about a legal culture steeped in racial abuse. 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.

About Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Nichole on June 07, 2017

This book is extremely misleading and also dated even though recently published. Having personal knowledge of the system and knowing there are issues in Cook County and changes that need to be made, I can tell you that this author had lost all credibility with me. The assumptions made and the broad......more

Goodreads review by Celeste on May 06, 2016

Fascinating. I work in this system as a public defender, and overall I think the author's criticisms are well taken. I have some nits to pick with some of her characterizations, particularly with characterizing certain actions of defense attorneys, and in fairness to defense attorneys I think that c......more

Goodreads review by Ren on May 20, 2017

I really wanted to like this book. I was completely ready to be on board with her assessment of the Cook County judicial system as corrupt, racist, violent, etc. but I found myself so incredibly let down by several aspects of this book. First, the writing itself is off-puttingly redundant, self-right......more

Goodreads review by Carrie on June 09, 2016

This book really makes you think twice about all of the procedures and interactions in criminal courts that become everyday -- things people stop noticing, practices we stop second-guessing, comments that stop seeming wrong.......more

Goodreads review by Stephen on December 17, 2019

As a lawyer, Nicole Gonzalez Van-Cleve's "Crook County" was eye opening in an awful sense: how the criminal courts of Cook County (Chicago) were (and likely still are) perverting justice and creating a system that promotes efficiency over true due process, and racialized concepts over anything even......more