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Courtroom 302
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Prologue-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary: “Welcome to County”
Content Warning: The source material and this guide contain extensive discussion of mass incarceration, systemic racism, and substance use disorders. They also touch on topics of sexual assault, domestic and child abuse, and hate crimes. This guide obscures the n-word when reproduced in quotes.
On January 20, 1998, deputies unload incarcerated individuals from police wagons and take them into the Cook County Criminal Courthouse, "the biggest and busiest felony courthouse in the nation” (3). It is a federal holiday—the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday—but this hasn’t quelled the steady stream of detainees. On average 1,500 people enter the courthouse each week for a bond hearing; that amounts to around 78,000 men and women each year.
The courthouse is located “in a Mexican neighborhood on Chicago’s southwest side” (3). Its “cinder-block walls and metal benches” are decorated with graffiti (3). 15 men exit the wagons: 12 of the men are Black and three are white. The prisoners have been arrested for “the usual reasons”—selling crack, attempting to buy heroin from an undercover cop, and shoplifting liquor (3). When they enter the district station, they are ordered to remove their belts and shoelaces and to empty their pockets. They are then told to place their hands behind their backs and to keep them there—a rule branded “the First Commandment” (10). When they hear their surnames, they are to respond with their given names. Not following directions results in harsh and profane reprimands. For sustenance, they are handed coffee in Styrofoam cups and baloney sandwiches on white bread. After they leave bond court, they will either go home or to jail. If they fail to follow instructions, they might end up in the jail hospital, where they will not receive any more food. They are also banned from smoking and making phone calls.
A deputy officer nicknamed “Bullneck,” “announce[s] ‘freebie time’” (6), which is when incarcerated individuals can give up any drugs they’ve managed to smuggle in without getting charged for possession. Typically, no one speaks up, so Bullneck searches their shoes. He commands them to take them off, pull out any shoe liners, and to hold the shoes upside down with their arms outstretched. Bullneck next goes for the socks. He tells the men to remove them, shake them around, and to “[wiggle] their toes” (6). The deputies are malicious toward the incarcerated population to establish who is boss. Some of the former, if provoked, will beat up an ornery incarcerated man. The deputies insist that those in prison are dangerous and must be treated harshly.
Those who complain of illness are typically met with skepticism, like Walter Williams, who is addicted to heroin, has asthma, and lost his leg when he was nine but still learned “to swim, play basketball, and ice skate” (11). He was so impressive that he landed a guest spot on the television show That’s Incredible! in the early 1980s. The deputies figure that he is “just another scumbag” looking for drugs (11). Similarly, when Cecelia Diaz tells a paramedic that her chest hurts, they figure that she, too, is just experiencing withdrawal symptoms.
Chester, an “olive-skinned and broad-shouldered” young man who was “charged with aggravated battery against police officers” for walking into a police station and punching cops, gets more sympathetic treatment (10). The officers suspected Chester had a mental illness; they were right. Chester complains of hearing voices. Rather than connecting him with appropriate treatment, the officers advise him to alert them if he hears any voices during his lock-up.
When all of the incarcerated individuals are culled and “the bars at the entryway […] slid[e] shut for the evening” (10), there are 77—65 men and 12 women—in lockup in the basement chambers. Of those, 50 are African American, 14 are Latinx, and 13 are white. Most of the detainees are teenagers or 20-somethings. Some are there for misdemeanors: shoplifting fabric softener and alcohol, selling watches on a train, and selling drugs with a street value of only $18.75. One of the clerks wonders how much it costs the taxpayer to process someone for possession of less than $20 worth of drugs.
The Honorable Lambros Kutrubis deals with pretrial matters—that is, he sets jail bonds, which determine who gets to go home and who goes back into lock-up. Judges in these cases must weigh the nature of the charges, the evidence against the defendant, how likely the defendant is to be convicted, if there is a flight risk, any criminal history, the defendant’s reputation in the community, and how cooperative the defendant has been.
The defendants get bonds with a letter and an amount. A D-bond means that to remain free, the defendant has to post 10% of the amount due, while an I-bond means that a defendant does not owe any money and can leave as soon as the paperwork is done, as long as they show up for court. If they don’t appear, the amount identified with the “I” initial will be the amount due. Suspects with no prior convictions or arrested for possession of tiny quantities of drugs get an I-bond. Chester, for example, gets an I-bond. Judge Kutrubis’s priority is to get people in and out as quickly as possible.
Walter Williams gets a $7,500 D-bond. He doesn’t have the $750 required to go home. He knows he’ll be beset with withdrawal symptoms and asthmatic attacks for the rest of the evening. One week after his 34th birthday, Williams dies of “massive gastric dilation,” exacerbated by his withdrawal from heroin (18). On the day he dies, Williams has been vomiting all day and complaining of stomach pains. His requests for medical attention are ignored due to the presumption that he is merely in withdrawal.
Chapter 1 Summary: “White Sales”
Larry Bates lives in an apartment on the Westside of Chicago. He hasn’t been steadily working, but all morning he has been thinking of not going to court. The only thing that convinced him to go was the prospect of arrest. He makes it to Cook County Courthouse to answer to Judge Daniel Locallo for not meeting the terms of his probation. Bates was sentenced to probation and community service for selling a small quantity of heroin. He has completed only 16 of his required 20 days of community service.
Bates is addicted to alcohol and cocaine. He was first convicted on a drug charge in 1996, when the police picked him up for buying a $5 rock of crack cocaine. Bates got probation, stayed clean for a short while, and then became lured by the calls of “rocks and blows” from the corners in his neighborhood (24). Soon thereafter, he fell back into his old ways and was again arrested.
Back at the courthouse, Bates does his best to avoid running into anyone he might know. He feels embarrassed to be there and imagines the disapproving eyes of other Black people working at the courthouse.
Meanwhile, on this same morning, 34-year-old Tony Cameron is wondering if he should have pled guilty. He’s been sharing a dorm in Division Two with 50 other men. They sleep “on metal cots topped with flimsy foam mattresses” (26). Cameron has been jailed for five months for armed robbery. He feels that his public defender and the state’s attorney are trying to get a guilty plea out of him. At 4:45 am, he and 36 other incarcerated men line up to be taken to the courthouse, where they arrive at 6:00 am. Court, however, doesn’t begin until 9:30 am. Cameron does his best to keep to himself until a nurse gives him the psychotropic medication he’s been taking since he was 16. Cameron is worried. He knows that if he doesn’t win this trial, the judge will sentence him. He finds his public defender nice enough but doesn’t believe she cares about his case, given how many others she has on her roster. Though he wishes for better representation, Cameron confesses to the author that he did indeed commit the robbery.
Judge Dan Locallo is late for court. Larry Bates is annoyed but knows that the judge can be as late as he wants while the defendants risk a warrant if they don’t show up on time. When Judge Locallo arrives, one of the first cases he hears is of two young men robbing two others of their Air Jordan basketball shoes. Locallo decides to continue the case to February. 17-year-old Leslie McGee, who shot a cab driver to death, is to be tried the following month.
When Judge Locallo gets to Bates’s case, he assigns him a new court date—March 25—and warns him to complete the last four days of community service by then. Bates promises himself that he’ll fulfill his community service obligation.
The jail behind the Cook County Courthouse is the most populous in the country; in 1998, there are 9,000 individuals held there—almost more than the jail can hold. To mitigate this overcrowding, the court relies on plea bargains—offering defendants a reduced sentence if they agree to plead guilty and waive their right to a jury trial. Prosecutors intimidate defendants by threatening them with harsher sentences if they choose to go to trial.
Tony Cameron requests a conference to discuss his case. Cameron lives with his mother, has learning disabilities, and left school after the eighth grade. He has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Judge Locallo carefully explains that a guilty plea to armed robbery will result in a minimum of six years in prison. However, Cameron has already spent five months in prison and, with “day-for-day credit and other credits,” he will serve only another two years (42). When Cameron pleads guilty, Judge Locallo gives him the opportunity to speak on his own behalf. Cameron sees no point since it won’t make any difference in his sentencing. Starting at home, Cameron has known hardship and violence all his life. His brothers, too, have prior arrests “for battery and assault” (45).
Judge Locallo ensures that Cameron understands that, by pleading guilty, he will forfeit his “right to see, to confront, and question any of the witnesses who’d [testified] against [him]” (46). Cameron shrugs this off, too. Cameron signs a waiver to confirm his understanding; his sentence has been decreed. Contrary to the recommendation of Cameron’s lawyer, Judge Locallo sentences Cameron to the Illinois River Correctional Center instead of the Graham Correctional Center where he can receive treatment for his crack addiction. Judge Locallo “quickly [assented]” to the request when it was mentioned, but reneged on his promise. Cameron was not surprised.
Chapter 2 Summary: “A Growth Industry”
The 26th Street Courthouse has existed for seven decades. The building is in rather good shape—except for its restrooms, which are poorly maintained and barely functioning. The courthouse, designed in the Classical style, remains an elegant building. There are “eight allegorical figures in tunics and togas” above each of the “eight columns that stretch from floors three through six” (49). The figures were carved by Peter Toneman—a “German-born sculptor” whose great-granddaughter Lynn Toneman saw the sculptures “for the first time” when she had jury duty in December 1997 (49).
When Cook County was founded in 1831, its first trials were held “in taverns, stores, and churches” (50). The rapid growth of Chicago—the county seat—required the construction of the first courthouse in 1835. This first edifice was torn down to make room for a larger one in 1853. The second courthouse burned down in the Chicago Fire in 1873, which was the same year the county “opened a courthouse exclusively for criminal cases” (50). Twenty years later, the county built a larger criminal courthouse to make room for the growing number of cases. Taxpayers, however, balked at the request for a third courthouse and jail. In response to public objections, Cook County sought the expertise of the criminologist George Kirchwey to study its crime problem. Kirchwey emphasized understanding the factors that led people to commit crimes, though the county largely ignored Kirchwey’s advice.
The public ultimately gave in on a new courthouse with a jail, but it was agreed that a downtown location would be detrimental to the city and could negatively impact local businesses. Anton Cermak, the county board president, offered “a large parcel of land at 26th and California” (52). Conveniently, Cermak owned property in the same ward; members of his ward organization would have been among the first selected for jobs at the courthouse and the jail.
The courthouse on 26th Street opened on April 1, 1929. In its initial days, there were challenges. Judges sat too high and could barely hear proceedings below the stand. Freight trains regularly passed on the 26th Street tracks. The tunnel through which deputies ferried incarcerated individuals to the courthouse and from jail had “icy rain dripping from [its] ceiling” (53). Later, elevators got stuck, and the rooms were scorching in the summer until the county board provided funding for air-conditioning in 1973. Worse, the courthouse failed to attract local businesses and didn’t encourage lawyers to open practices nearby. Some advocated for the courthouse to move downtown, but Mayor Richard J. Daley insisted it remain remote. This way, wealthier downtown residents could avoid the city’s “criminal” element.
The jail behind the 26th Street Courthouse once held “four times as many inmates as the previous jail” (53). The jail quickly became overrun, however, during Prohibition. After the repeal of Prohibition and then the end of the Great Depression, the jail saw a decline in population; this lull ended in the 1960s. Many poor, Black Chicagoans—confined to project housing and denied good work opportunities—took to street crime. The nation coped by funneling people who broke laws to prison instead of understanding the root causes of crime and how it could be prevented.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the prison system expanded, with “more than six hundred state and federal prisons” constructed and with the number of people incarcerated increasing from 500,000 in 1980 to nearly 2.1 million in 2003 (55). In 1978, the county built “the fifteen-story administration building” connected “to the courthouse by the first-floor lobby” (55). Around this time, the courthouse’s caseload “more than doubled, from 6,900 cases” each year between 1977 and 1985 “to 15,000” (55). The National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals advised judges to be as thoughtful as possible when deliberating, but judges chose expediency over introspection.
The most expensive inclusion to the 26th Street Courthouse was “the $97 million maximum-security Division 11” (56). In 1978, the state spent a meager $100 million on maintaining its prisons. Around the date of the book’s publication, the state of Illinois spent more than $1 billion on prisons. Two-thirds of all of Illinois’s prison population is produced and processed in Cook County. Of those individuals, 80% are Black, though the population of Cook County is only 26% Black.
Prologue-Chapter 2 Analysis
In the first chapters, Bogira establishes the statistical factors that determine the likelihood of someone ending up in prison: race, class, and even mental health play a role. Most of those who are in holding have been arrested for petty offenses—usually those involving substance use. All of those incarcerated are vilified by the officers charged with looking after them. The deputies’ attitudes result from a desire for self-preservation—it’s easier to be on guard when one assumes every “criminal” is dangerous—as well as the belief, prevalent among law enforcement, that people who have broken a law are bad and thereby unworthy of respect. The officers’ attitudes also illuminate the contempt the penal system has for people who use drugs. Bogira later illustrates The Injustices of the US Justice System by contrasting the harsh treatment of people who commit minor drug offenses with the court system’s lenient treatment of major dealers, who are often white and have significant financial resources and political connections.
Bogira presents the story of Walter Williams as a counternarrative to that of the deputies. Williams briefly enjoys a moment of fame as someone elevated for his extraordinary abilities. Later in life, due to his addiction, he becomes someone society is eager to discard in an effort to declare moral distance and superiority. Bogira draws on techniques of characterization common to narrative nonfiction to give context to each “character” in the novel that predates their arrests. Larry Bates, for example, is trapped in a cycle of addiction, partly due to inescapable economic circumstances—a recurring theme in the book. He, like the others who are incarcerated, is regarded as an object of contempt. This general attitude, compounded by the poor care that defendants sometimes receive from overwhelmed public defenders and the barely livable conditions of prisons, makes it difficult to argue that correctional facilities truly exist to rehabilitate people with convictions and to prevent future crime. Instead, Bogira argues that The Prison-Industrial Complex dehumanizes incarcerated people in order to exploit them as a source of revenue.
To explain the function of this prison-industrial complex, Bogira gives an overview of the history of criminal law in Chicago. He explains which social factors—particularly poverty and urban blight—contributed to the expansion of the prison system. As more and more people found themselves incarcerated, a vast prison economy arose, creating jobs in construction, maintenance, security, and provisions but depending on being steadily fed bodies to incarcerate. Those bodies are usually those of Black men from the Chicago area—poor, desperate, and already viewed as dangerous due to racist stereotypes.
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