Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve's Crook County - Example of ethnography

From the ASA an explanation about her ethnography on Youtube:

From Stanford University Press, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve published a scathing account of Racism in Chicago's Cook County Courthouse.  Van Cleve, who is from Chicagoland originally,  spent ten years while at tending Northwestern U.  researching the Cook County Courthouse, the largest courthouse in the United States.  She is currently a sociology professor at Brown University.

Embedded below is an interview with Dr. Van Cleve on PBS:

Here is a bookreview from the ASA:  

There are three central aspects to Gonzalez Van Cleve’s argument in Crook County: her focus on professionals, her detailing of racial abuses, and her critical analysis of racism and racial injustice as embedded within court culture. Perhaps the most essential is her inverted lens on the court professionals. Rather than focusing on the impacts of an unjust criminal system on the Black and Brown individuals who pass through it, Gonzalez Van Cleve instead highlights the ways these injustices are carried out by the very professionals tasked with upholding and administering fair and just due process. In turning the lens on criminal justice professionals, Gonzalez Van Cleve articulates how systemic racism is managed, perpetuated, practiced, and understood by those “doing” colorblind racism, particularly in how they carry out unchecked racialized court abuses.

From Amazon,

Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve spent ten years working in and investigating the largest criminal courthouse in the country, Chicago–Cook County, and based on over 1,000 hours of observation, she takes readers inside our so-called halls of justice to witness the types of everyday racial abuses that fester within the courts, often in plain sight. We watch white courtroom professionals classify and deliberate on the fates of mostly black and Latino defendants while racial abuse and due process violations are encouraged and even seen as justified. Judges fall asleep on the bench. Prosecutors hang out like frat boys in the judges' chambers while the fates of defendants hang in the balance. Public defenders make choices about which defendants they will try to ""save"" and which they will sacrifice. Sheriff's officers cruelly mock and abuse defendants' family members. Crook County's powerful and at times devastating narratives reveal startling truths about a legal culture steeped in racial abuse. Defendants find themselves thrust into a pernicious legal world where courtroom actors live and breathe racism while simultaneously committing themselves to a colorblind ideal. Gonzalez Van Cleve urges all citizens to take a closer look at the way we do justice in America and to hold our arbiters of justice accountable to the highest standards of equality.

And here is an essay that Dr. VanCleve tweeted during the unprecedented pandemic of 2020-21:

https://contexts.org/blog/education-under-covid-19/