Guardian Lawsuit Shines a Light on Homan Square Detention Facility in Chicago
The Good Wife is my favorite legal TV show ever. I’ve written about it before at least a few times (see, e.g., here and here). I feel like one of the most important posts I’ve written on this blog was prompted by the show: The Good Wife, The Alford Plea, The Jewish Ban On Confessions, & The Times Of Emergency Necessity Exception. Part of what makes The Good Wife great is its focus on the current legal milieu. A big chunk of last season’s finale, Wanna Partner?, was based upon something that is very much part of the Chicago legal milieu: Homan Sqaure.
In Wanna Partner?, Homan Square is presented as a Kafkaeque environment filled with Schrödinger’s suspects who somehow both are and aren’t arrested. They are, however, very much interrogated.
The Guardian has been spearheading the investigation into this brick in the wall of the prison-industrial complex, and it reported the following back in August:
At least 3,500 Americans have been detained inside a Chicago police warehouse described by some of its arrestees as a secretive interrogation facility, newly uncovered records reveal.
Of the thousands held in the facility known as Homan Square over a decade, 82% were black. Only three received documented visits from an attorney, according to a cache of documents obtained when the Guardian sued the police.
Despite repeated denials from the Chicago police department that the warehouse is a secretive, off-the-books anomaly, the Homan Square files begin to show how the city’s most vulnerable people get lost in its criminal justice system.
People held at Homan Square have been subsequently charged with everything from “drinking alcohol on the public way” to murder. But the scale of the detentions – and the racial disparity therein – raises the prospect of major civil-rights violations.
Documents indicate the detainees are a group of disproportionately minority citizens, many accused of low-level drug crimes, faced with incriminating themselves before their arrests appeared in a booking system by which their families and attorneys might find them.
It turns out that, however, that the crisis at “Little Guantanamo” is much worse than previously reported. According to an article published by The Guardian today,
Police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people at an off-the-books interrogation warehouse in Chicago, nearly twice as many detentions as previously disclosed, the Guardian can now reveal.
From August 2004 to June 2015, nearly 6,000 of those held at the facility were black, which represents more than twice the proportion of the city’s population. But only 68 of those held were allowed access to attorneys or a public notice of their whereabouts, internal police records show.
The new disclosures, the result of an ongoing Guardian transparency lawsuit and investigation, provide the most detailed, full-scale portrait yet of the truth about Homan Square, a secretive facility that Chicago police have described as little more than a low-level narcotics crime outpost where the mayor has said police “follow all the rules”.
The police portrayals contrast sharply with those of Homan Square detainees and their lawyers, who insist that “if this could happen to someone, it could happen to anyone”. A 30-year-old man named Jose, for example, was one of the few detainees with an attorney present when he surrendered to police. He said officers at the warehouse questioned him even after his lawyer specifically told them he would not speak.
It is simply unfathomable that a place like this exists in the United States, in a city that I was proud to call my home on two separate occasions. I hope that The Guardian‘s lawsuit is the death knell for Homan Square, and I hope that The Good Wife continues shining a light on legal injustice.
-CM