40 pages • 1 hour read
Nicole Gonzalez Van CleveCrook County
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Monsters and Mopes: Racial and Criminal ‘Immorality’”
Chapter 2 focuses on the connection between immorality and criminality. It begins with the story of an elderly Black woman being sentenced for killing her husband. The sobbing woman explains that she was abused and that she hadn’t meant to kill her husband. The judge not only berates her for wasting the court’s time, but also degrades her character. This anecdote exemplifies the racial degradation ceremony, a term sociologists use to describe the “ritual destruction of a person being denounced” (52). Gonzalez Van Cleve explains that the racial degradation ceremony transforms social actors by diminishing their social status until they are separated from their social group. These marginalized actors are then publicly denounced, as the elderly woman in Gonzalez Van Cleve’s opening anecdote. The judge’s focus on the woman’s immorality, central to the operation of colorblind racism, justified her denigration by presenting her as deserving of punishment.
Gonzalez Van Cleve then explains that professionals at the Cook County courthouse classify defendants as mopes or monsters. Mopes are lazy, incompetent, and unmotivated people who deserve punishment and humiliation. Mopes make up most of the system and take time and resources away from prosecuting monsters. Prosecutors cast themselves as moral warriors who do “God’s work on earth” but who are pressed for time because of the mopes (72). As Gonzalez Van Cleve observes, the dehumanization of defendants allows court professionals to rationalize breaking the rules of due process to keep the system moving. She describes due process for mopes as a “ceremonial charade,” whereby court officials do not fully explain to defendants their rights while denying them public defenders and indigency hearings (hearings to determine if a defendant has the resources to pay for a lawyer or to post bond) (73). The concept of the mope casts divisions in the court in moral rather than racial terms. According to this colorblind logic, the unequal treatment of defendants is based not on their race, but on their immorality.
Gonzalez Van Cleve argues that the belief in defendants’ inherent immorality fuels paternalism. Judges regularly lecture people of color on how to dress and behave, in addition to encouraging them to be obedient, submit to authority, and remain invisible and silent. Breaking these rules results in punishment. Court professionals deny mopes due process rights and punish them when they seek to participate in court proceedings, ask questions, or otherwise render themselves visible in court. The most consequential punishment is sending defendants back to jail, forcing them to await another hearing, in order to coerce them into accepting plea deals. Other punishments include yelling, mocking, and tasteless jokes. Black non-defendants are not immune to abuse, nor are poor white defendants, Gonzalez Van Cleve observes. By contrast, upper-class white defendants are often seen as ill rather than criminal and are thus sentenced to rehabilitation instead of jail. Gonzalez Van Cleve describes the unequal cultural practices of the court as “persistent and entrenched” (79). Defense attorneys participate in this culture by ignoring their clients, silencing them, and seeking plea deals above all else. Those who fail to control their clients or who fight too hard by filing too many motions and pursuing trials instead of plea deals are called difficult, incompetent, or mopes. The marginalization of these defense attorneys through abuse, eyerolls, and jokes, none of which are recorded in the official record, encourages compliance to court culture.
Chapter 2 Analysis
Chapter 2 centers on two interrelated themes: Colorblindness in the Courts and The Role of Court Professionals in Racialized Justice. The construct of mopes and monsters exemplifies how racial colorblindness operated at the Cook County Courthouse. Court professionals view mopes (the bulk of the predominantly Black and Latinx defendants who pass through the system) as lazy, incompetent, and unmotivated. These traits, considered immoral, not only make mopes undeserving of equal justice, but also justify their abuse. Court professionals also blame mopes for their own poverty, which they see as a natural consequence of their laziness and incompetence. As Gonzalez Van Cleve argues, the mope construct veils racism in the language of immorality. Rather than being treated unequally because of their race, people of color are treated unequally because they are immoral. The fact that only Black and Latinx defendants are automatically labeled mopes points to the inherent racism of the construct. As Gonzalez Van Cleve aptly puts it: White defendants are “innocent until proven guilty of being a mope” (65).
Gonzalez Van Cleve argues that prosecutors, defense attorneys, and even judges, whose jobs demand impartiality, employ the mope construct and thus reinforce racialized justice. Prosecutors pressure mopes to accept plea deals to free up time for monsters, as did the defense attorneys charged with protecting mopes. Defense attorneys also ignore their clients and fail to explain their rights, turning due process into a ceremonial charade. As Gonzalez Van Cleve’s opening anecdote reveals, judges also engage in colorblind racism. After calling an elderly defendant “a bad, bad woman” for killing her abusive husband (53), the presiding judge yelled, degraded the woman’s character, denied her identity as a victim, and stressed her complicity in her own abuse. In other words, the judge’s comments focused on the defendant’s immoral character, not on her criminal actions. This racial degradation ceremony was so harsh that Gonzalez Van Cleve describes it as a reenactment of the domestic abuse she read about in the woman’s case file: “This time the judge was the public abuser and, incidentally, the judicial arbiter” (52). This anecdote exemplifies The Role of Court Professionals in Racialized Justice and further illustrates how colorblind racism operates by repackaging racial bias into seemingly neutral categories like the condemnation of immorality.
Gonzalez Van Cleve provides detailed descriptions of her research methods to lend weight to her arguments. In Chapter 2, she specifies that she and the court watchers under her supervision conducted 104 interviews with public defenders, private defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges. To promote candor in this colorblind setting, the interviewers asked court professionals if they believed that defendants were treated fairly, regardless of their race or class (54-55). Despite these efforts, interviewers were often met with awkward silence or hostility. Many court professionals insisted they were colorblind, despite the disproportionate number of Black and Latinx defendants in the courthouse. As one prosecutor put it, “I don’t even notice if a defendant is white or black” (55).
In addition to interviews, examples and statistics are among the most robust aspects of Gonzalez Van Cleve research. Toward the end of Chapter 2, for instance, she reveals that the average prosecutor in Cook County has approximately 300 active cases at any given time, that nearly 95% of these cases are resolved through plea bargains, and that most defendants are charged with victimless crimes (72). These statistics not only convey the immense pressure on the system, but also reveal that attorneys on both sides of the bench prefer plea bargains to time-consuming trials. According to Gonzalez Van Cleve, defendants are often coerced into accepting deals with menacing looks from judges and other visual cues. In some cases, defendants who insist on a trial are sent back to jail to await another hearing to make them more compliant. None of these practices appear in the court record, prompting Gonzalez Van Cleve to write the following in her field notes: “I am the court record” (92). By outlining both what gets recorded and what does not get recorded, Gonzalez Van Cleve underscores the text’s claim about the misleading nature of seemingly standardized and objective proceedings. Just as the veneer of immorality is a veil for racial bias, masking the racial inequalities of the court system, allows the court record to maintain a veneer of objectivity. Gonzalez Van Cleve argues that what the court record does not say is just as important as what it does say, thus casting doubt of the court record’s supposed objectivity.
