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.

• Date: 01 March 2017
• Published date: 01 March 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12255

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.

Reviewed by Thomas E. Reifer, University of San Diego

Crook County is a powerful sociological exploration of the largest uni-

fied criminal courthouse in the United States—Cook County, Chica-

go—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. Por-

trayed here is a Goffmanesque world in which justice is absent,

racial animus ever present, and bureaucratic rules of efficiency pri-

oritize 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 habi-

tus behind Durkheimian rituals of ceremonial racialized degrada-

tion 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 prov-

en innocent. Van Cleve uses her ethnographic gifts to underscore

the culture and code of the courts, where a largely White profes-

sional 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 Cali-

fornia 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 mir-

rored 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

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