A Recipe for Torture: How the Police Professionalization Model Encouraged Detectives to Break the Rules in 1970s Chicago

This paper looks at various reforms of the Chicago Police Department and the Cook County State's Attorneys Office from 1960 to 1972 in order to understand the sanctioning of police torture under Sergeant Jon Burge at the South Side's Area 2 headquarters throughout the 1970s. I argue that the department's obsession with the crime clearance rate, prosecutors' decision to prioritize convictions over arrests, and the rank-and-file's racist disregard for the rights of black criminal suspects led to the appearance of a serious human rights crisis by the start of the 1980s. This paper contributes to scholarship on the rise of the carceral state by looking at the criminal justice system from the bottom-up, exploring the role of rank-and-file detectives and assistant prosecutors as they grappled with rising street crime and overwhelming caseloads during the violent 1970s. While recent historical scholarship has taken a top-down approach to explaining the punitive turn in American criminal justice after 1970—by looking at federal and state legislation, the actions of the executive branch, and federal or state court decisions—this paper zooms in on the local level to uncover widespread misconduct among ground-level law enforcement operatives. Alongside a more familiar story demonstrating the unintended consequences of otherwise race-neutral crime legislation, this paper shows how the discretionary use of targeted misconduct—including police brutality, torture, and perjury—contributed to racial disparities in the criminal justice system as well.