Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse » (Reprint)

Steve Bogira graduated from Northwestern University and has been a prizewinning writer for the Chicago Reader since 1981. He is a former Alicia Patterson Fellow. He lives with his wife in Evanston, Illinois.

Courtroom 302 is the fascinating story of one year in Chicago's Cook County Criminal Courthouse, the busiest felony courthouse in the country. Here we see the system through the eyes of the men and women who experience it, not only in the courtroom but in the lockup, the jury room, the judge's chambers, the spectators' gallery. From the daily grind of the court to the highest-profile case of the year, Steve Bogira’s masterful investigation raises fundamental issues of race, civil rights, and justice in America.

The New York Times - Ted Conover

Steve Bogira, for years a reporter for The Chicago Reader, burrows into the machine that processes thousands of citizens a year, most of them poor, African-American and involved with drugs. His intuition was that the goings-on in the old limestone courthouse on 26th Street, however banal-seeming, might hide sprawling human dramas. And by focusing on something small -- the cases coming before one judge, in a single courtroom -- he gets a handle on something large and hard to make sense of: the American way of criminal justice.