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About the book: Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protestors, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protestors, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.
About the author: Laurence Ralph is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and the Director of Center on Transnational Policing. He is the author of Renegade Dreams: Living with Injury in Gangland Chicago (2014), which received the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 2015. The animated short film The Torture Letters (2020), which he produced based on his book The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence (2020), has been official selections for numerous film festivals. It received the Best In Show award at the Spark Animation Festival and contended for an Academy Award in the animated film category for the 2021 Oscars season.
About the interlocutor: Reuben Jonathan Miller is an Associate Professor in the University of Chicago Crown Family School and a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. His book, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration (2021), is based on 15 years of research and practice with currently and formerly incarcerated men, women, their families, partners, and friends in Chicago, Detroit, and a number of cities across the United States. He was named a 2022 MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
From the Guardian via Gawker:
In February, the Guardian published a deep investigation into Homan Square, a shadowy facility where the Chicago Police Department takes suspects without booking them, entering them into any official database, or giving them access to a telephone or their lawyer. A new Guardian report claims that more than twice as many people have been “disappeared” into Homan as officials initially disclosed...The paper obtained documents showing that more than 7,000 people were detained at Homan between 2004 and 2015—about 6,000 of whom were black. Less than one percent of those detainees were allowed to see their lawyers during interrogations. Attorneys described a system that seems deliberately engineered to make it difficult to find their clients; others said that they were turned around at the door. “Try finding a phone number for Homan to see if anyone’s there. You can’t, ever,” an attorney named David Gaeger told the Guardian. “If you’re laboring under the assumption that your client’s at Homan, there really isn’t much you can do as a lawyer. You’re shut out. It’s guarded like a military installation.”And from an August 2015 Guardian report:
Of the thousands held in the facility known as Homan Square over a decade, 82% were black. Only three received documented visits from an attorney, according to a cache of documents obtained when the Guardian sued the police. Documents indicate the detainees are a group of disproportionately minority citizens, many accused of low-level drug crimes, faced with incriminating themselves before their arrests appeared in a booking system by which their families and attorneys might find them.One of my former students was detained there:
From the Guardian,
Marc Freeman is the 11th person to come forward to the Guardian detailing detention inside Homan Square – and the first whose police record details how long he was stuck inside. ‘At no point was I ever processed, I was never asked for my information, they did not take any fingerprints,’ he said.
Here is the John Oliver bit on Civil Forfeiture that Mr. Freeman mentioned:
Another more disturbing example is former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge who tortured suspects for decades to get them to confess.
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