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
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.