A short driveway leads from California Avenue to Division 5 of the Cook County Jail. It is the point of entry for hundreds who daily visit friends or family members confined behind the razor wire. It is a point of departure too. Each day dozens of men pass through the...

Chicago's political establishment must shudder each time Jon Burge garners another headline. This past week was a bad one for politicians who would like to forget that Burge ever commanded an elite unit of Chicago Police detectives; that beneath the cops' cop veneer, Burge was a sadistic racist who systematically...

Since 9/11, the United States government has flexed its security muscle at the gate concourse in every domestic airport, where passage through a security check point reminds everyone of the might of Homeland Security.

Tens of thousands of us bear this ritual in silence every day. We empty...

The United States has the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the world -- higher than Rwanda, more than three times the rate in Iran and nearly five times the rate in Great Britain. The Sentencing Project writes:

More than 60% of the people in prison...

Chicago's Emanuel Era was ushered in last week and among those in attendance on the Great Day was Chicago Police Superintendent-in-waiting Garry McCarthy.

For anyone interested in the reform of the police department, there was a glum feeling in the air. McCarthy's tenure as superintendent is likely...

Speaking last Friday to cheering soldiers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, President Obama declared that the past week "has been a reminder of what we're about as a people." It was a remark the president intended as homage to American grit, determination and persistence. Nearly ten years had passed,...

As the clock ticks down on Richard M. Daley's 22-year tenure as mayor of Chicago, the airwaves and print media have been full of retrospectives -- most of them positive, some highly laudatory. The story on the front page of last Sunday's Tribune was typical: "As other Rust...

Earlier this week, I wrote about Private Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of leaking State Department files to Wikileaks, and his ongoing mistreatment at the maximum security brig in Quantico, Virginia.

Just yesterday, Department of Defense Counsel Jeh Johnson announced that...

For a couple of news cycles last month, there was a public debate of sorts about the treatment of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of embarrassing the government by leaking State Department files to Wikileaks.

Manning, it will be remembered, is...

When he takes over as mayor next month, Rahm Emanuel is expected to appoint a new superintendent of police, and he will likely also install someone new as corporation counsel, the head of the city's law department. He would do well to insist that these two talk with each other.

John Thompson has lived through more ups and downs than most of us will. In April 1985, he was convicted of an armed robbery he did not commit and sentenced to 49 and one half years in prison. The next month, he was tried and convicted of a...

It has been a season of demonstrations. In the midst of economic upheaval, natural and human-engineered disasters, and war, we have been reminded again, with recent evidence from Egypt and Tunisia, of the awesome power of the people assembled in peaceable, public protest against tyranny and oppression. Only a cold...

In the tortured logic of Henry Skinner's 16-year battle to show he didn't commit the brutal triple murder that landed him on the Texas Death Row, Monday, March 7, 2011, was a good day--sort of.

Since his 1995 conviction and death sentence, Skinner has been asking for a...

The State of Illinois owes a debt to the innocent men and women who have been convicted in our justice system of crimes they didn't commit and then been forced to serve years -- sometimes decades -- of wrongful imprisonment.

It isn't easy to quantify this debt. Imprisonment, particularly in...

Poor Jody Weis. Rates of murder and violent crime have fallen like a stone in the three years since Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed him Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department. He's been innovative, unorthodox, and he seems to have gotten results as a crime fighter. Yet...

Last month Jon Burge, the disgraced former Chicago Police Commander whose men tortured scores of African American suspects into confessing during a reign of terror that spanned nearly two decades (from the 1970s through the early 1990s), was finally sentenced to four and a half years in prison...