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Reporting on Americas Most Unwanted (cont’d)

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“The system is a landfill,” says Bogira, 51, the author of Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse (Random House, Paperback 2006). Based in Chicago, Bogira centered his work on the busiest and largest felony courthouse in the U.S.: Roughly 9,000 inmates are held at any given time, many of them indigent and unable to post bail as they await hearings.

In Courtroom 302, Judge Dan Locallo presides over dozens of cases per day, and it is here that the keenly perceptive Bogira sets up a ground-level observation post, monitoring the people who make the court system tick: attorneys, guards, deputies, juries, and other court personnel. Bogira soon found that most employees were more than willing to share their experiences, taking their cue from Judge Locallo’s own willingness to open his courtroom to the intrepid reporter.

“It’s amazing what you can accomplish as a reporter when you just listen to someone,” says Bogira. “There are two, related things about our job that I love most: being a busybody because you have an excuse to ask people questions; and the feeling that you’re honoring the other person, and that’s a good feeling. Take the court clerks and jail guards, for instance. Usually nobody ever comes and talks to them. It’s clear we’re not really interested. When they see that someone is really interested, they feel like they’re being recognized, even honored, for the work they do.”

Down in the dungeons of the facility, Bogira witnesses and relates the book’s rawest, most gut-wrenching experiences, where guards wage a daily low-level war against detainees, many of whom are suffering from HIV, chronic drug addiction, and/or serious mental illnesses. Bogira recounts many of those experiences in chilling detail, including the sights and sounds of detainees withdrawing from crack or heroin; the barked commands, derogatory and racist comments, and even the violent tempers of guards who quickly lose patience with their charges.

“It’s where people who have become the refuse of our society are processed, buried,” he says frankly.

Bogira’s approach toward the courthouse and the jail system differ from that of many other criminal justice-focused journalists in that he does not focus on the miscarriages of justice so much as the “predictable outcomes of urban poverty.”

“We journalists tend to focus too much on aberrations,” Bogira explains. “We love the story of innocent people who are convicted and we love it if we can help free them. But to me as a journalist, it’s a dead end, in a way. You can’t get at what’s causing crime by writing about the truly innocent.”

Different trenches, similar goals

There are other notable similarities between Abramsky’s and Bogira’s projects. In tackling book-length immersion journalism, both writers go to great lengths to learn what it takes to gain the trust of their subjects. Both are willing to admit to failures in the process of their reporting: the days where leads go nowhere, the moments where long waits or drives yield nothing. Some days, neither could hold the interest of a subject or realized that their subjects were more interested in personal gain–the (misperception) that they might get paid for their story, for instance–than in contributing to a deeper understanding of the issues at hand.

The biggest difference between these works of non-fiction lies in the physical environments the writers encounter. Bogira’s Courtroom 302, by intent and necessity, keeps him largely confined within walls, long underground corridors, jail cells, and stiff courtroom benches. For his part, Abramsky plumbs the physical context of the American landscape that continues to both capture and churn the literary imagination.

Whether driving down the wide expanse of American highways, or sorting through hundreds of courtroom case files, both Abramsky and Bogira are infinitely more comfortable seeing themselves as “immersion” and “muckraking” journalists than being labelled “advocacy” journalists. This term, Abramsky cautions, generates the “risk that you’ll be seen as a propagandist.”

“I make it very clear in [Conned] that these disenfranchisement laws have no place in modern day society,” he explains, “but my prime goal is to tell the [stories of these ex-offenders] as compellingly as possible … and bringing [voice] to people whose very lives have been defined by other people telling them they’re not important.”

Instead of lecturing to readers, or trying to impress them with shocking stories of travesty or triumph, Bogira encourages journalists who write about criminal justice to invest more day-to-day time in the lives of the people who really have committed the crimes of which they’ve been accused. To do so, he says, reporters should try immersing themselves to the degree that they begin to understand why people “do what they do.”

“This justice system is not at all interested in what the causes of crime are,” adds Bogira. “But we should be.”

Silja J.A. Talvi, a senior editor at In These Times, is an investigative journalist and essayist with credits in many dozens of newspapers and magazines nationwide, including The Nation, Salon, Santa Fe Reporter, Utne, and the Christian Science Monitor.

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