Fictional tales about crime and punishment need specific locales, but so do the non-fiction kind, says Kevin Davis. In his new book, “Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago’s Cook County Public Defender’s Office” (Atria, 2007), the Chicago-based author taps the story’s geography for color and resonance. “Outside the massive, gray stone Cook County courthouse at Twenty-sixth Street and California Avenue,” Davis writes, “a stream of government employees, cops, corrections officers, lawyers, social workers investigators, jurors, witnesses, felons … all converged for another day in the administration of justice. Buses disgorged clusters of people out front, and at the corner near the Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits. Waves of others marched across California Avenue from the five-story parking garage … “
Popeyes. Parking garages. Street names. The details anchor his book, Davis believes. “Chicago is a very urban city. A gritty city,” he said in a phone interview. “A city with a long history of crime stories. And 26th and California is definitely a world unto its own.”
It’s a place that came to restless life with the 2005 publication of Steve Bogira’s unforgettable “Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse” (Knopf). Davis focused on a smaller slice of the facility on Chicago’s West Side: public defenders, the last hope of the poor and dispossessed when they find themselves in trouble with the law. His book presents a fascinating portrait of Marijane Placek, a flamboyant public defender who seems to relish the long odds facing her and her mostly unappetizing clients.
Davis, who was born and raised in the Chicago area and graduated from Highland Park High School and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says he likes to write about the criminal justice system because “you find the essence of human drama there … All these grand conflicts on a larger scale.”
Yet there’s also a smaller scale, a sense of Chicago’s vividly specific neighborhoods. Places you know. That skyline. That gritty grid. The Cook County courthouse may be a “dark place,” as Davis notes, but it’s a real place too. And it’s right around the corner.
