Crime Fictions: How Racist Lies Built a System of Mass Wrongful Conviction

From award-winning sociologist Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve comes the first account of mass wrongful conviction in America, indicting a system purposefully designed to ensnare Black youth in order to close cases “A must-read reckoning with past and present alike.”—Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Fear and Fury and Blood in the Water Wrongful convictions have long been dismissed as rare exceptions to an otherwise well-oiled criminal justice machine. But, after years spent investigating the largest criminal courthouse in the nation, Chicago’s Cook County, Dr. Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve began to uncover a far more chilling truth. Wrongful convictions are not accidental, nor anomalous: There are at least hundreds of cases indicting innocent Black youth of crimes they didn’t commit.