For her undergraduate thesis in criminal justice, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve organized court watchers in Chicago’s Cook County courthouse. She hoped to create an ethnography of America’s largest courthouse across thousands of hours of interviews and first-person observations. More than a decade later – and now as Professor Gonzalez Van Cleve – she published these observations as Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court. Professor Gonzalez Van Cleve spoke about her recent publication on November 9th here at the Beasley School of Law, alongside Professor Hosea Harvey of Temple University.
Employing an interrogative style, Professor Gonzalez Van Cleve began by presenting some of the results of her research. As an ethnographer, Gonzalez Van Cleve pointed out that language in her field functions both as indicator and as an active, purposive agent. She was particularly interested in the way that language – specifically racially coded language – worked in court communities and the justice system itself. In this way Professor Gonzalez Van Cleve’s Crook County expands on the work of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Paul Butler’s Let’s Get Free by looking at the effects of racially disproportionate incarceration on the courthouses and jails themselves.
As a student hoping to work in a courtroom for a federal prosecutor or district attorney, Gonzalez Van Cleve’s research raises critical questions about my own prospects within the justice system. How is the pursuit of justice centered within these courthouses? How can I center justice within my own professional aspirations? What obstacles do my whiteness and my own identity present to the pursuit of justice? Is there justice-oriented work to be done within a racialized system of incarceration?
Feeling overwhelmed by the scale of these questions, I wrote a poem – a villanelle – to help myself process some of Professor Gonzalez Van Cleve’s work. These nineteen-line poems had been assigned in first-year Contracts to emphasize significant themes in the course and to give us practice working with arbitrary directives about language, formatting and syntax. Wikipedia suggests that the villanelle lends itself to irony or fatalism, and that it appropriately appeals to the outsider. In the poem, I image Cook County Jail from the perspective of Professor Gonzalez Van Cleve beginning her ethnographic study. In keeping with the tutorial nature of her talk, this appropriation of Gonzalez Van Cleve’s voice began as an empathetic exercise, and is shared here in the same spirit.
1-A bulletin board of black and brown faces with no hope.
2-Welcome to Cook County, the largest jail in these United States!
3-Ten thousand prisoners awaiting their trial – all these so-called mopes.
4-The court watchers were here to record, but the deputy said nope.
5-Back in the office I am startled to see, my mouth agape,
6-a bulletin board of black and brown faces with no hope.
7-“The cop says it’s clear that he sold the dope.
8-Should I believe him or some damn animals and degenerates?
9-You know we’ve got ten thousand prisoners lady – all of ‘em mopes.”
10-I’ve come to investigate this system that sorts people like some racist horoscope!
11-I’ll create an ethnography of prejudice because justice won’t wait!
12-I saw a bulletin board of black and brown faces with no hope.
13-“It’s not about race,” “I’m doing my job,” “We all have to cope.”
14-“These are killers, trash, offenders of rape!”
15-Ten thousand prisoners awaiting their trial – all these so-called mopes.
16-What’s in a word? Why use that trope?
17-Why call it Crook County? And what is the fate
18-of the bulletin board of black and brown faces with no hope?
19-Of the ten thousand prisoners awaiting their trial – all these so-called mopes?
In her talk, Professor Gonzalez Van Cleve focused on the use of the term “mope” by court personnel. The word served as a racial code for identifying those defendants, prisoners, and witnesses unworthy of procedural or legal protections under the law. It became both a shorthand and a justification for a lack of due process. The “mope,” – almost always, though not exclusively, a person of color – was ignorant, a burden on society, a loser, and therefore likely to be guilty of whatever crime they had been accused.
In the poem, the prisoners are presumed guilty, culpable by virtue of their essential mope-ness. Their racial identification thus enables and encourages court personnel to bypass time-consuming procedural responsibilities. According to Gonzalez Van Cleve’s analysis, this presumption of guilt would result in a reluctance amongst defense attorneys to fight for their clients, racialized rhetoric in plea bargaining, and the transformation of due process into a ceremonial charade. This language thus became a de facto racial sorting mechanism to help the courts process defendants and prisoners.
Professor Gonzalez Van Cleve’s work, and the new Crook County, raises sober and uncomfortable questions about the state of our courthouses and prisons. For students like me who hope to work inside of these institutions, the ways in which we answer these questions become important highway markers. And for all lawyers, for those of us whose business it is to take language seriously, these questions serve as timely opportunities for reflecting on the justice system in which we work.
