Courtroom 302 (11 page)

The Chicago Bar Association
campaigned repeatedly to move the criminal court back downtown—always in vain. In 1960 a huge civic center was on the drawing board for the Loop, with plans for it to house the county’s civil courtrooms. Bar associations, civic groups, and the city’s newspapers agreed: the criminal court ought to be in the civic center, too. But an officer of the Chicago Real Estate Board warned that having the criminal court downtown, with its “
certain elements,” might create a “real hazard” for the Loop. The
Chicago Daily News
called the resistance to the criminal court in the Loop by the “
well-heeled tenants of the city’s skyscrapers” part of a “wider inclination to hide away somewhere as many unpleasant facts as possible” about crime and criminal justice in Chicago.
Mayor Richard J. Daley—for whom the new civic center would be named—was not about to have the unseemly criminal court in it. Like the realtors, he considered the remote site at 26th and California the ideal one—and his was the opinion that mattered.

Still today, citizens summoned to 26th Street for jury duty often beg to be assigned to another courthouse, saying the one on the southwest side is just too hard to reach. It’s a difficult trip by car for many county residents and not well served by public transportation.

AT THE CORNERSTONE
ceremony for the new courthouse, in September 1927, the dignitaries who spoke “expressed the hope that crime in Chicago would soon be under such control that the [new] jail would never be overcrowded or even uncomfortably filled,” the journal of the Chicago Crime Commission reported that year. When the courthouse opened a year and a half later, it had five more trial courtrooms than its predecessor, and the new jail behind the courthouse could hold four times as many inmates as the previous jail. But with crime escalating during Prohibition, the new jail was
overbooked on opening day, with a capacity of 1,302, and 1,341 prisoners. The jail and the courthouse became even more glutted when the stock market crashed later that year. Prohibition’s repeal in 1933, however, along with the waning of the Depression in the late 1930s, led to a quarter century of relative calm at 26th Street.

That calm ended in the 1960s. Blacks escaping southern racism had been streaming into northern cities, where they were confined to dilapidated ghettoes and limited to the lowest-paying jobs. The deepening poverty in these areas, combined with the large proportion of inhabitants in their teens and twenties, resulted in a vast escalation in street crime.

“
Crime flourishes where the conditions of life are the worst,” President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice observed in 1967. The criminal justice system could deal with
“individual instances of crime,” but it was “not designed to eliminate the conditions in which most crime breeds”—namely poverty and racism. The best way to attack crime was “
to eliminate slums and ghettoes, to improve education, to provide jobs, to make sure that every American is given the opportunities and the freedoms that will enable him to assume his responsibilities.” The following year the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders said that urban slums were making their youthful residents “
better candidates for crime and civil disorder than for jobs,” and it called for sustained attempts to end segregation and “
unprecedented levels of funding” to eradicate slums.

In 1973 the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals—the commission that called for an end to plea bargaining—asserted that the nation had come to lean mindlessly on prison to reduce crime, and that the failure of this approach was “
incontestable.” The time had come to question this strategy, the commission said:
“If New York has 31 times as many armed robberies as London, if Philadelphia has 44 times as many criminal homicides as Vienna, if Chicago has more burglaries than all of Japan, if Los Angeles has more drug addiction than all of Western Europe, than we must concentrate on the social and economic ills of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and America.” These social and economic ills “form the freshets that make the streams that form the rivers that flood our criminal justice system and ultimately its correctional institutions.” A more just society would protect the public more than prison ever would, the commission said. The prison was “obsolete, cannot be reformed … and should be repudiated as useless for any purpose other than locking away persons who are too dangerous to be allowed at large in free society. For the latter purpose we already have more prison space than we need.” The commission urged that no new prisons be built in the foreseeable future.

But an all-out attack on the nation’s social ills never happened—not with the Vietnam War distracting the nation and draining its budget. The closing of factories in central cities throughout the 1960s and 1970s only worsened things. Street crime kept climbing, and the public wearied of the idea of addressing root causes, yearning for a quick fix instead.

The new prevailing sentiment was expressed in 1981 by Illinois governor James Thompson, chair of the Attorney General’s Task Force on Violent Crime. “We have to
lock up more violent offenders and we have to keep them locked up,” Thompson declared. While “unfortunate social conditions, unemployment, and inadequate education undoubtedly contribute to crime,” he conceded, the task force wanted to bring about “an immediate impact” on the crime problem. Its main recommendation: two billion federal dollars for the construction of state prisons.

“Unprecedented levels of funding” were indeed dispensed—but not to fight poverty. The 1980s and 1990s saw the opening of more than
six hundred state and fifty federal prisons in the United States, with
huge expenditures for building and running them. The total number of inmates in the nation’s prisons and jails
has quadrupled, from half a million in 1980 to almost 2.1 million in 2003.

It’s not clear that this imprisonment binge has had the intended effect. Since 1980, the violent crime rate has
waxed and waned, while the
incarceration
rate has risen every year. Criminologists have linked the rises and falls in violent crime to such factors as the
persistence of poverty,
the proportion of young males in the population,
the prevalence of guns, and
the emergence of certain drugs in society—notably crack cocaine in the 1980s. But no consensus has emerged.

There’s no question, though, about what the get-tough approach has meant for felony courts. Since the late 1970s the pace at 26th Street has been more frenzied than ever.

In 1978, Cook County erected the fifteen-story administration building that’s joined to the courthouse by the first-floor lobby. The transfer of offices out of the courthouse opened space for sixteen new courtrooms on the second and third floors of the old building. County board secretary Michael Igoe called the administration building a worthy investment of $32 million, observing that “
the biggest growth industry we’ve got going right now is crime.”

And the sunniest days for the industry lay ahead. From 1977 to 1985 the caseload in the courthouse more
than doubled, from 6,900 cases annually to 15,000. From 1985 to 1990 it doubled again, thanks mainly to the horde of drug addicts and small-time dealers being dropped off at the courthouse basement. The caseload has since leveled off at about thirty thousand a year.

The principal job in the courthouse still is sorting; the sorting is just done even faster now. The 1973 National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals urged judges and lawyers to put more thought into their actions, but there’s no chance of that today. “There is not sufficient time to be introspective,” says Thomas Fitzgerald, the presiding judge at 26th Street in 1998. “Thinking time doesn’t show up on a cost-benefit analysis.”

For decades the jail consisted of a single division directly behind the courthouse, with a population around two thousand. Starting in the 1970s building after building went up on the jail grounds adjoining the courthouse. By the early 1990s the inmate population had surpassed seven thousand, and the jail “campus,” as jail officials now call it, was five blocks long and two blocks wide. The more than nine thousand inmates in the jail as 1998 dawned were costing taxpayers a half-million dollars a day in room and board. (The jail population has since surpassed eleven thousand.)

The jail’s most expensive addition—the $97 million maximum-security Division 11—opened for business in 1995 at 31st and California, on the former site of International Harvester’s
Tractor Works plant. For decades Tractor Works had thrived down the street from the courthouse, its workers building crawler tractors, bulldozers, and graders, equipment that was
shipped nationwide and around the world. In 1960 Tractor Works employed five thousand.
But in 1969 International Harvester closed the plant and fled for the suburbs. At 31st and California, where laborers once forged steel on presses, machined parts, welded, assembled, and painted, today men and women in navy uniforms watch men in tan uniforms watch TV.

In 1978
Illinois spent $100 million on its prison system; now it spends more than a billion. Most of that goes for warehousing the commodities rolling out of 26th Street; Cook County furnishes two-thirds of the state’s prison inmates, sixteen thousand new ones a year. Eighty percent of those inmates are black, though only
26 percent of Cook County’s population is. The exportables are loaded before dawn onto the sheriff’s buses. Most of them couldn’t support families at home, but they put food on the table for the families of prison workers in Danville and Dixon, Vandalia and Vienna, Jacksonville and Taylorville, and the Land of Lincoln’s eighteen other prison-dependent towns.

Not that crime doesn’t pay for Cook County as well. The multitudes brought to 26th Street in handcuffs, whether they’re eventually deemed exportable or not, help cover mortgages, car payments, and tuition bills for jail guards, prosecutors, public defenders, private lawyers, judges, clerks, court reporters, deputies, probation officers, police officers, psychiatrists, social workers, translaters, cooks, janitors. Jail guards here sometimes greet batches of new prisoners by saying, “We’d like to thank you for committing your crimes in Cook County.”

THREE

Baggage

AUGUST LOCALLO
was a frequent visitor to the witness stands at 26th Street in the 1950s and 1960s, most of those years as a robbery detective. He became a Chicago police officer in December 1952, two months after his son Daniel was born.

For many police officers, coming to the courthouse to testify is an aggravation barely offset by the time and a half. They wait in hallways or empty jury rooms, sometimes for hours, for the privilege of squaring off with a defense lawyer bent on demonstrating their carelessness or deceit. But Detective Locallo relished the challenge. While he waited, he thought about the traps the defense lawyer would likely set for him on cross, and how he could evade them. As a result, he usually was an effective witness for the state. But he wouldn’t stretch his testimony to help prosecutors win—unlike some officers, he says. “I used to take great pride in putting someone in the penitentiary,” he says. “But I think I took greater pride in keeping someone out who didn’t deserve to go.”

August Locallo regaled his wife and children at the dinner table with stories of his courtroom experiences. Dan Locallo listened with pride.

After the younger Locallo graduated from Chicago’s John Marshall Law School in 1977, he hoped for a job as a Cook County prosecutor. And he soon had one, thanks to his father’s police work.

For six months in 1977 state police were unable to solve the $120,000
robbery of a toll collection driver near O’Hare Airport. Late that year August Locallo, then a north-side commander of robbery detectives, pried a confession from a suspect, as well as information leading to the indictment of his coconspirators: two Chicago cops and two state transportation
department workers. At the press conference announcing the indictments, the elder Locallo sat next to Cook County state’s attorney Bernard Carey. “I mentioned the fact that my son was an attorney who would like to become an assistant state’s attorney,” August Locallo says. A month later his son was one.

DAN LOCALLO
says that when he started out as a prosecutor, he was “kind of an asshole” to defense lawyers. One day he had a heated exchange with a defense lawyer named Roosevelt Thomas. He doesn’t remember the substance of the dispute, but the episode troubled him. “Something just clicked. I realized that I have my job to do, and defense counsel has his job to do, and it’s nothing personal.”

He speaks highly of all the judges in whose courtrooms he served as an assistant state’s attorney. But it is Judge William Cousins whose photo now hangs in Locallo’s chambers.

Cousins later was elected to the appellate bench and is now retired. Locallo admired his independence. Before he became a judge, Cousins was an alderman—one of the few who dared oppose Mayor Richard J. Daley. He retained that independence while he was on the bench. In many courtrooms prosecutors would “back-door” the judge, Locallo says—they’d discuss upcoming cases with the judge in his chambers, hinting broadly at how the judge should rule on certain key issues. There was no back-dooring Cousins; he wouldn’t discuss a case off the bench with either side. Locallo respected this even though it made his job harder.

Locallo didn’t want to win by manipulating the judge, anyway—but he certainly wanted to win. He was “very intense and very competitive” as a prosecutor, says Richard Schwind, who was one of Locallo’s partners in Cousins’s courtroom. “He’d prepare and prepare and prepare, and cover every angle. And he’d get very upset when something happened that he didn’t anticipate. He was very focused, almost to the point of having tunnel vision.”

Locallo hadn’t been a prosecutor long before he decided he wanted to be a judge. “The power to influence was a great attraction,” he says. “But it was never a power-trip type thing, like being able to order people around. For me, what was attractive was the ability to make decisions, to do justice.”