n March, the Cook County Board unanimously voted to confirm Sharone Mitchell Jr. as the county’s new public defender. Mitchell, the former director of the Illinois Justice Project, had previously worked for the public defender’s office for six years as a trial attorney handling misdemeanor, felony, and civil cases. A Chicago native, Mitchell attended Morgan […]
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The Reinvestment Movement After Redlining
nly a writer with great confidence in her scholarly and narrative abilities would reserve a book’s most dramatic line for the acknowledgments. On the 237th page of After Redlining: The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Deregulation (University of Chicago Press), author and historian Rebecca K. Marchiel writes, “This book began when I heard […]
Posted inHealth
What Went Wrong at Cook County Jail
few days before Easter, Karl Battiste called his daughter Karla with a headache. He wasn’t feeling well and was worried about the spread of COVID-19 in Chicago’s Cook County Jail, where he was incarcerated at the time. Battiste told his daughter that he was being held right across from two people who had tested positive […]
Posted inViolence
An End to Cash Bond in Illinois is Only the Beginning of Restorative Justice
ast month, state Senator Robert Peters and Representative Justin Slaughter announced a bill known as the Pretrial Fairness Act that, if passed, would make Illinois the second state to end the use of money bonds after New Jersey. In Cook County, where about a quarter of the county’s detainees are kept incarcerated because they cannot […]
Posted inUncategorized
Report: Cook County Jail Is Filling Up Again
he Cook County Criminal Courts system drastically failed to contain the spread of coronavirus or prevent the deaths of people in custody, according to a report released on September 16 by the Coalition to End Money Bond (CEMB)—and now the number of detainees is increasing. Hundreds of detainees and several guards have been infected with […]
Posted inActivism
The Student Fight to Get Cops Out of CPS
“n this neighborhood, there are gangs, there are kids who don’t get attention who can get to the point of bringing drugs to sell inside school, or bully,” Esmeralda Gutierrez, a parent representative on the Local School Council (LSC) of George Washington High School, said in Spanish. “Now that there’s no officials taking care [of […]
Posted inJustice
Absence of Proof
n 2016 then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced that by 2017 all Chicago police officers would be equipped with body cameras. Body cameras have become the number-one tool for police departments across the nation to remain accountable. By providing video footage of encounters with the public, they are intended to keep both citizens and officers safe from […]
Posted incoronavirus/COVID-19
Prison Speaks: Torture survivor Mark Clements on the coronavirus, decarceration, and more
ark Clements spent April 7 the way he spends many days: protesting outside the Cook County Jail. That day, the police torture survivor and activist was denouncing Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart and Governor J.B. Pritzker, for the state of things inside the jail—the site of one of the largest single-site outbreaks of COVID-19 in […]
Posted incoronavirus/COVID-19
Risk Is in the Air
Léalo en español nce immortalized in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle, the meatpacking factories that made Chicago “hog butcher for the world” and gave Back of the Yards its name left the city nearly fifty years ago. But the scent of industry still lingers. “There’s a saying in Back of the Yards,” says Billy […]
Posted inJustice
Uprooting Chicago’s Torture Tree
arcus Wiggins is the youngest known survivor of hundreds of mostly Black Chicagoans tortured by police: he was just thirteen years old when he was tortured with electric shocks by several white officers under the direction of then-Lieutenant Jon Burge. At the conclusion of Wiggins’s 1997 civil rights lawsuit brought against the police and the […]