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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.



About the Author

Laurence Ralph

Laurence Ralph is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. Before that, he was a Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at Harvard University, where he taught for nearly a decade. He earned his Ph.D. (2010) and Masters of Arts degrees (2006) in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and a Bachelor of Science degree (2004) from Georgia Institute of Technology, where he majored in History, Technology and Society. His research and writing explores how police abuse, mass incarceration, and crime make disease, disability, and premature death seem like natural outcomes for people of color, who are often seen as expendable by "polite" society. Ralph is known for using careful and deliberate description rather than esoteric theory to ensure that his research findings are comprehensible to a broader range of intellectuals, experts, college students, and curious readers. In each of his research projects, he discusses experiences of violence, debilitating injury, and/or death to examine the stereotypes and prejudices associated with America's inner-cities. Ralph has been awarded a number of honors and prestigious fellowships for his research, some of which include: Cultural Anthropology grants from the National Science Foundation as well as the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a visiting fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, membership at the Institute for Advanced Study, a Ford Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Research Council of the National Academies, and the Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Post-Doctoral fellowship from the University of Michigan. Ralph currently lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife, Aisha, and their daughter, Amina.



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