Due Process & the Theater of Racial Degradation: The Evolving Notion of Pretrial Punishment in the Criminal Courts

Most theorists assume that the criminal courts are neutral arbiters of justice, protected by the Constitution, the rule of law, and court records. This essay challenges those assumptions and examines the courts as a place of punitive excess and the normalization of racial abuse and punishment. The essay explains the historic origins of these trends and examines how the categories of “hardened” and “marginal” defendants began to assume racialized meanings with the emergence of mass incarceration. This transformed the criminal courts into a type of public theater for racial degradation. These public performances or “racial degradation ceremonies” occur within the discretionary practices and cultural norms of mostly White courtroom professionals as they efficiently manage the disposition of cases in the everyday practice of law. I link these historical findings to a recent study of the largest unified criminal court system in the United States–Cook County, Chicago–and discuss court watching programs as an intervention for accountability and oversight of our courts and its legal professionals.

Cleaning Streams in Cook County, IL: Forest Preserves, Water Pollution, and Interwar Environmentalism in the Chicago Region

In 1916, the Forest Preserve District of Cook County began acquiring land to create a natural retreat for Chicagoans in that booming metropolitan region. Since district officials acquired many properties along county streams, water pollution soon interfered with their mission of creating an urban wilderness for recreational pleasure. To address the problem, in 1931, county leaders appointed the Clean Streams Advisory Committee that collaborated with forest preserve staff members to pressure polluters to clean-up their operations and to persuade enforcement agencies to prosecute ongoing offenders. They also lobbied the Public Works Administration to earmark New Deal funding for sewage treatment in Cook County. Their efforts suggest that early activism against water pollution in American cities emerged not only from efforts to ensure clean drinking water, but also struggles to protect nature. The interwar campaign to clean forest preserve streams anticipated the goals of the federal Clean Water Act (1972) to make all American waterways fishable and swimmable. The movement also preceded the burst of anti-pollution activism that historians have documented in U.S. suburbs after WWII and laid the groundwork for postwar efforts to mitigate water pollution in Cook County.

Punishment by Association: The Burden of Attending Court for Legal Bystanders

Scholars have shown how legal bystanders experience punishment at the hands of the state in their homes and neighborhoods, as well as jails and prisons. Other scholars have shown how bureaucratic processes, such as attending court, are punitive toward people charged with crimes. There is less information about how legal bystanders also experience punishment in courtrooms. In this article, we bridge the literatures between secondary prisonization and procedural punishment to illustrate how legal bystanders, such as family and friends of bond court defendants, experience punishment when attending bond court. We utilize courtroom ethnography of Central Bond Court in Chicago’s Cook County and interviews with family and friends of people charged with a crime to illustrate this form of punishment in three themes: extraction, destabilization, and degradation. With these findings, we argue that secondary prisonization begins not at the point of incarceration, but at the moment a loved one’s contact with the criminal legal system begins.

The Use of Concept-Mapping to Structure the Cultural Adaptation of Educational Curricula for Latino Older Adults

Culture, embedded in language and reflected in colloquial expressions, influences behaviors and cognitive constructs that affect health. To reach Latino older adults, health promotion efforts should include congruent cultural aspects—such as relevant metaphors, values, and proverbs—that will resonate with their cognitive constructs. However, this content should also be situated within a broader social context. For community-dwelling Latino older adults, this means considering their care systems and the multiple stakeholders within. In this paper presentation, we describe an innovative, interdisciplinary collaboration to culturally and linguistically adapt existing Illinois Extension curricula to meet the needs of Latino older adults and their families living in Cook County, which includes Chicago and its neighboring suburbs. We will demonstrate how concept-mapping (CM) studies can be used to structure the cultural adaptation of educational curriculum to a Latino audience. Specifically, we describe these CM studies, which asked how multiple stakeholders and Latino older adults living in the Chicagoland area defined positive aging provided empirically-grounded direction for our 11-member steering committee, composed of investigators, service leaders, and Latino older adults. We also will describe how the current project deepens relationships in the community that facilitate dissemination efforts to Latino older adults.

COVID-19 Nursing Home Deaths in Cook County: Predictors and Modifiable Risks

Investigators at the University of Illinois Chicago, the Illinois Department on Aging (IDOA), the Illinois Department of Public Health, and the Health and Medicine Policy Research Group are collaborating to examine comparative rates of Covid-19-related deaths among older adults who reside in nursing homes vs. the community in Illinois. As a first step, we have examined data from the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office to compare nursing home resident fatalities to those who died in the community. Deaths with Covid-19 listed as primary or secondary cause of death that occurred between January 1, 2020 to September 30, 2020 among older adults ages 60 and over were identified from the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office case archive file. Location at death and race/ethnicity were obtained from the same source. Location at death was matched with data in the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Covid-19 Nursing Home Data to identify persons who died in skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) as well as facility and staff characteristics. We found that the 3,937 deaths among persons over the age of 60 comprised 75% of total deaths in Cook County. Of the total older adult deaths, 2,090 (53%) died in the community and 1,837 (47%) died in SNFs. Regression analyses that controlled for CMS quality ratings found that larger, for-profit nursing homes, with high levels of staff infected with Covid-19 were associated with higher mortality. The policy implications of these findings will be discussed.

288. Clinical Variables Associated with COVID-19 Mortality and ICU Admission in a Public Safety-net Hospital in Chicago

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted minorities in the United States. John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital (JSH) is a tertiary care hospital within the safety-net system for Cook County in Chicago, Illinois. In this study we report demographics, clinical characteristics and outcomes of patients admitted with COVID-19 in our hospital during the spring surge of 2020. Methods A retrospective study was done including patients > 18 years of age admitted to JSH with positive PCR for SARS-CoV2 from March 18 to May 30th, 2020. Outcomes, clinical and demographic characteristics were extracted from the electronic medical record. Moderate and severe disease were defined as radiographic evidence of pulmonary infiltrates and SpO2 > 94% on room air or SpO2< 94% on room air, respectively. Bivariate analysis and logistic regression were performed to assess for risk factors for admission to the intensive care unit and mortality. Results 625 patients were included, 424 (68%) were male. Median age was 44 years (44,63). 364 (58%) were Hispanic and 222 (36%) non-Hispanic Blacks. 113 (18%) of patients presented with mild disease, 204 (33%) with moderate disease, 298 (48%) with severe disease. 73 patients (12%) died. 153 (24%) required ICU admission, 84 (13%) required intubation [Table 1]. In bivariate analysis, increasing age and diabetes (DM) were associated with increased mortality and ICU admission (p=0.001, Tables 2 and 3). Race/ethnicity was not associated with increased mortality or ICU admission. In the multivariate analysis, elevated glucose on admission regardless of DM and CKD were associated with mortality (p < 0.001). Conclusion JSH is a safety net hospital that provides care for the most vulnerable population of Chicago. The proportion of Hispanic patients increased in the later weeks of the pandemic until they represented most of the inpatient population and presented with more severe disease (Figure 1). Although race was not associated with mortality or ICU admission, the high prevalence of chronic diseases such as hypertension and DM in our population may explain the higher rate of admissions. Strengthening of preventive medicine and social engagement with minorities must be a crucial effort to decrease the burden of COVID-19 in this population. Graph showing disease severity on admission by Race/Ethnicity (upper). Notice the predominance of severe disease (orange) in Hispanic patients. Graph showing Race/Ethnicity Distribution by Week (lower). Notice the gradual increase and predominance of Hispanic patients (orange) in the later weeks of the study period compared to Black (blue) and White (green) patients. Disclosures All Authors: No reported disclosures

Long-time series of racial maps with a time-invariant legend

Although there is significant literature on quantifying racial segregation in the US cities using numerical metrics, there is a lack of comprehensive studies that chronicle, over a long time, the evolution of the spatial distribution of racial groups from which segregation had arisen. Mapping multi-decades changes in racial geography of major US cities provide information on the evolution of spatial configuration of racial divides and, ultimately, provides insight into social processes that led to presently observed segregation. To fill this gap, we have developed and made freely available a set of GIS-compatible time series of racial maps featuring a time-invariant categorization of racial groups. These GIS-based maps cover 63 major cities in the US at the resolution of the census tract. Maps go back as far as the availability of the census allows, in some cases as far back as 1910. To make such map series possible, we needed to overcome changing categorizations of racial groups in past censuses and changes in the census tracts' boundaries. The paper explains our methodology and presents, as an example of temporal mapping, the case study for Cook County, IL (which contains the core of the present-day Chicago

Cabbage and Sauerkraut Consumption in Adolescence and Adulthood and Breast Cancer Risk among US-Resident Polish Migrant Women

Background: Breast cancer (BC) incidence and mortality are lower in Poland than in the United States (US). However, Polish-born migrant women to US approach the higher BC mortality rates of US women. We evaluated the association between consumption of cabbage/sauerkraut foods and BC risk in Polish-born migrants to US. Methods: We conducted a case–control study of BC among Polish-born migrants in Cook County and the Detroit Metropolitan Area. Cases (n = 131) were 20–79 years old with histological/cytological confirmation of invasive BC. Population-based controls (n = 284) were frequency matched to cases on age and residence. Food frequency questionnaires assessed diet during adulthood and age 12–13 years. Odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) were estimated with conditional logistic regression. Consumption of total, raw/short-cooked, and long-cooked cabbage/sauerkraut foods was categorized as low, medium, or high (frequency of servings/week). Results: Higher consumption of total and raw/short-cooked cabbage/sauerkraut foods, during both adolescence and adulthood, was associated with a significantly lower BC risk. Consumption of long-cooked cabbage/sauerkraut foods was low and not significantly associated with risk. The multivariate OR for total cabbage/sauerkraut consumption, high vs. low (> 4 vs. ≤ 2 servings/week) during adolescence was 0.36 (95% CI = 0.18–0.71, ptrend < 0.01) and 0.50 (95% CI = 0.23–1.06, ptrend = 0.08) during adulthood. For raw/short-cooked cabbage/sauerkraut (>3 vs. ≤1.5 servings/week), the ORs were 0.35 (95% CI = 0.16–0.72, ptrend < 0.01) during adolescence and 0.37 (95% CI = 0.17–0.78, ptrend < 0.01) during adulthood. For joint adolescent/adult consumption of raw/short-cooked cabbage/sauerkraut foods, (high, high) vs. (low, low), the OR was 0.23 (95% CI = 0.07–0.65). The significant association for high adolescent consumption of raw/short-cooked cabbage/sauerkraut foods and reduced BC risk was consistent across all levels of consumption in adulthood. Conclusion: Greater consumption of total and raw/short-cooked cabbage/sauerkraut foods either during adolescence or adulthood was associated with significantly reduced BC risk among Polish migrant women. These findings contribute to the growing literature suggesting a protective effect of a potentially modifiable factor, cruciferous vegetable intake, on breast cancer risk.