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The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence
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The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence Paperback - 2020

by Laurence Ralph

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Reader reviews for The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence

From the publisher

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 Jon 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 protesters, 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 protesters, 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.

Details

  • Title The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence
  • Author Laurence Ralph
  • Binding Paperback
  • Pages 248
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher University of Chicago Press
  • Publication date 2020-01-09
  • Features Bibliography, Index
  • ISBN 9780226650098 / 022665009X
  • Weight 0.9 lbs (0.41 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.9 x 6 x 0.7 in (22.61 x 15.24 x 1.78 cm)
  • Themes
    • Chronological Period: 21st Century
    • Chronological Period: 1950-1999
    • Demographic Orientation: Urban
    • Ethnic Orientation: African American
    • Geographic Orientation: Illinois
    • Locality: Chicago, Illinois
  • Category Politics / Current Events
  • Library of Congress subjects Torture - United States, Police brutality - Illinois - Chicago
  • Library of Congress Catalogue Number 2019005353
  • Dewey Decimal Code 363.254

Media reviews

Citations

  • Choice, 10/01/2020, Page 0
  • Kirkus Reviews, 01/01/0001, Page 0
  • Publishers Weekly, 07/01/2019, Page 0

About the author

Laurence Ralph is a professor of anthropology at Princeton University. He is the author of Renegade Dreams: Living with Injury in Gangland Chicago, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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