Numerous accounts have identified the racialized nature of mass incarceration and its impact on minority communities, poverty, crime, inequality and even, daily life. Yet, we know little about how mass imprisonment and its racially disproportionate features affect criminal justice apparatuses themselves. Through ethnography of the criminal courts in Chicago-Cook County, this research examines how the racial divides and segregation that define mass incarceration manifest within our criminal courts and transform them from central sites of “due process” to central sites of “racialized punishment.” In these sites, the mostly black and Latino defendants confront a workgroup of white professionals who are charged with classifying and deliberating on the criminality of a racialized offender pool. Despite a host of due process protections and professionals who espouse colorblind ideologies, the court process relies on a legal habitus entangled with racial ideologies and practices. Court professionals use racialized tropes and narratives regarding the immoral character of criminal defendants to efficiently sort and process the backlog of cases caused by mass incarceration. By mobilizing a moral rubric to encode racial difference, professionals maintain court processes as “race-neutral.” In their view, disdain for defendants is not based on the color of their skin but the moral violations they embody – allowing racist narratives to become integrated into one’s criminal defense with impunity. Ultimately, this account reveals the courts as “the cultural engine” and crucial gateway for the racialization of criminal justice - where racism and discretion collide with dire effects to both the experience and appearance of justice.

Bio:
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 received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University where she was a Legal Studies Fellow and received the Badesch Fellowship from Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice. She is the recipient of the 2014-2015 Ford Foundation Fellowship Postdoctoral Award and the 2015 New Scholar Award (co-winner) awarded by American Society of Criminology’s Division on People of Color and Crime. She is also an affiliated scholar with the American Bar Foundation. Her book, Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America's Largest Criminal Court was recently nominated for an NAACP Image Award and her legal commentary has been featured on NBC News, MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show and CNN. Her recent op-ed in the New York Times entitled, "Chicago’s Racist Cops and Racist Courts" shows the complicity of the criminal courts in the racist culture of policing and injustice in Chicago.