The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence

by Laurence Ralph

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. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander John Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square "black site" show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds--perhaps thousands--of Chicago residents.

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.

• ISBN13: 9780226490533
• Publish Date: 23 September 2019
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 3 April 2024
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: University of Chicago Press
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 248
• Language: English
• URL: http://wiley.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=9780226490533

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

Before we have a conversation about the “justice system” in the United States: mandatory reading.

We’re just now beginning to reckon with the militarization of police, not to mention the racism or corruption, but let’s talk about how four decades in CPD gets you a job at Guantanamo. How public school kids had to travel to the UN in Geneva to get their case heard— only to be dismissed and insulted by the DOJ. How this was published in January 2020 but still doesn’t talk about Homan Square or police bonds or [insert endless names here] because the scope is just so big, in one city, that one book can’t cover it.