Books discussed in this essay:

Blue Blood
By Edward Conlon
Riverhead Books, 576 pp., $16.00 paper

No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
By Edward Humes
Simon & Schuster, 400 pp., $15.00 paper

Coutroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse
By Steve Bogira
Vintage Books, 416 pp., $14.95 paper

The Executioner’s Song
By Norman Mailer
Little, Brown and Company, 1072 pp., $18.00 paper

Fiction is crowded with cop and courtroom dramas — one could watch a different Law & Order spin-off for each hour of the day, and John Grisham novels sell like the Bible. There is a lot for storytellers to love in the subject of criminal justice: Good and evil battle it out in public, and heroes and villains can be distinguished by whether they wear an orange jumpsuit or a pinstripe suit. In real life, it is not so clearly defined. Nonfiction writers who choose to write about criminal justice face barriers to access, as well as a commercial hunger for the sensational cases that make up only a tiny portion of what goes on in the police precincts, courtrooms and prisons of America.

As a nonfiction writer, I knew that great journalism could illuminate the problems of justice in America. But as a reader, I wanted to know if it could be done in a powerful narrative way that wouldn’t make me wish for a CSI: Las Vegas rerun. I chose four nonfiction books dealing with different aspects of the criminal justice system: Edward Conlon’s Blue Blood is a memoir of the author’s life as an NYPD officer on one of the toughest beats in the Bronx. Edward Humes’ No Matter How Loud I Shout is a chronicle of his year inside the Los Angeles juvenile court system. Steve Bogira’s Courtroom 302, a required text for some first-year law students, takes the same ‘year inside’ approach, but focuses on the busiest criminal courtroom in America. Finally, Norman Mailer’s seminal The Executioner’s Song chronicles the life and death of Gary Gilmore, the first man to be executed after the United States re-instituted capital punishment in the 1970s.  Considering that each book uses a disparate lens — the cop, the judge, the murderer, the juvenile delinquent — to look at the system, it is telling (and distressing) that all the books ultimately reveal the frailty and absurdity of the pursuit of justice in America.

None of these books, save The Executioner’s Song, the outlier of the group, could be considered a traditional narrative. Herein lies the difficulty of writing about “the system.” It is too wide-ranging, too crowded with characters and court dates to give both a broad overview and a satisfying character-driven story. Edward Conlon’s police officer memoir Blue Blood comes the closest. Conlon, whose Irish family served the NYPD for generations before him, has a keen eye for the odd poetry of crime in the South Bronx housing projects where he works. He writes about arresting some perps and letting others get away for reasons more mundane and self-centered than the unrelenting pursuit of justice: The paperwork might take too much time, or the perp is homeless and drunk and filthy and might throw up on him.

Conlon is a deeply invested participant observer, and he is writing about more than his job, it is “the Job” — with a capital J. His sense of fairness often frays on patrol, when he’s wrestling with an angry crack dealer or trying to make sense of a mother who killed her child. But his constant internal negotiations with “the Job” give the book insight. He is also a graceful writer and notices the perfect, absurd moments of street theatre in his line of work.  In one scene Conlon talks to a woman whose no-good ex-boyfriend has been stealing hospital stationary and writing not entirely convincing doctor’s opinions to slide under her door: “You got the Clapp, Bitch! You got the AIDS!”

Because Conlon’s encounters with most of the people he arrests are fleeting the book is really about him and is, therefore, limited in its scope of illumination. You just end up hoping all NYPD cops are as reflective as he is: “I found myself entwined in lives I could barely imagine, and I wondered if theirs were the better for it, or how mine, in time, would be worse.”

Unlike Conlon, Bogira and Humes are not participants. They are pure observers. And they have both chosen sprawling, dysfunctional legal systems to profile. Bogira, a veteran Chicago Reader reporter, got access to the busiest felony court in the nation with a favor from judge Daniel Locallo, who let him spend a year encamped in his busy courtroom at Chicago’s Cook County Courthouse — the Courtroom 302 of the book’s title. Locallo is a media-loving judge (always a fresh haircut on the day of a high profile case) skilled at avoiding trials for the thousands of drug-related cases that clog the system. This poses an interesting access question. Because it is a judge that gives access, is the story necessarily slanted in his favor? It doesn’t seem so, but the judge is at the center of the story.

Bogira follows the daily crush of harried public defense lawyers and downtrodden defendants through the court, and most disappear without a trial or a trace in the reader’s memory. By watching the daily churn of defendants, Bogira is able to chronicle a well-hidden truth of the criminal justice system: Speed takes precedence over justice much of the time. But for the reader, it’s unsatisfying: The courthouse is so busy that it is hard to grasp onto any narrative threads here — suspects all walk out the door on a suspended sentence in exchange for a guilty plea and parole. By honestly chronicling the life of the courthouse, Bogira trades the narrative grace of a single story. Maybe this is the conundrum of writing about an institution as frantic and dysfunctional as the felony courtroom.

Edward Humes is more successful than Bogira with No Matter How Loud I Shout, his chronicle of a year inside the Los Angeles juvenile court system. The reason is simple: Humes chooses the cases of seven children and follows them through, so the reader can watch as the court saves three, fails to punish the remorseless killer among them, and abandons the rest to adult prisons. Humes also chooses a smart way to enter the lives of his subjects: In the course of researching the book, he worked as a volunteer teacher for incarcerated boys, whose essays are included, unadorned, in some sections of the book. Their own words are more powerful than the author’s could ever be. By including his students’ writing, Humes circumvents another hallmark of books about the criminal justice system: The people whose stories and time are most readily available are the lawyers and judges – the people who may least need their stories told.

Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song is an altogether different beast.  Instead of a vast institution, Mailer looks at justice in America through the story of one man, Gary Gilmore. Because it is Norman Mailer doing the writing, the book’s scope is much wider than the story of Gilmore. It is a meditation on the conditions that create criminals — the loneliness and drift of Gilmore’s life, and the subsequent purpose and fame that murdering two men gave him. Ironically, all Gilmore has to do is say that he wants to die and the justice system starts to fight to keep him alive.  The second section of the book is about Gary Gilmore as celebrity and commodity: Everyone wants a piece of him. He even gets fan mail. Mailer’s book endures because it vividly captures the queasy delight of the American public’s interest in criminality and punishment.

In real life, criminal justice rarely conforms to the storylines we expect. Instead, it is often muddled, and our system fails as often as it works. Writers approaching the topic face a conundrum: Try to profile the entire system and the participants remain silhouettes, but tell a single story representative of the actual system and it is so depressingly ordinary that you’re unlikely to get a book contract. There is a lesson about the limits of our own curiosity here.  We seem to prefer queasy delight of sensational crime to reading about everyday miscarriages of justice, which may be why we prefer our criminal justice stories to be fictional. 

MICHELLE THERIAULT is a graduate student in the literary nonfiction program at the University of Oregon.