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Four out of every five vehicles towed in Chicago for snow-related parking violations were seized on days without accumulation of snow. Either unwilling or unable to satisfy the debts required to recover their cars, hundreds were never recovered. Synthesising multiple sources of public data over a five-year span (2013–2017), the authors show how these towing practices disparately devastate segregated communities of colour through impositions of debt and dispossession. Who profits from these impositions? The same politically connected company that represents one of Chicago’s first attempts at privatisation. United Road Towing landed the exclusive city contract in 1989, only nine days after the company’s creation, and its ascendance to Chicago’s political scene stood upon a white racial imaginary that linked parking violations to threats of urban decay. Through a euphemistically named public–private partnership, United Road Towing has since become one of the largest towing companies in the world. This article is an inquiry that parses out a concept the authors label as ‘public–private predation’ by historicising Chicago’s commodification of the streetscape, theorising how racialised hardship results from the draining of neighbourhood resources and quantifying which segregated communities are subject to these new sites of extraction – all within a world of winter parking regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few studies that disentangle the relationship between race, crime, and punishment have turned to administrative documents as a central site of power. Speaking to this omission, I use a case study of mandatory financial sanctions in the Criminal Division of the Cook County Circuit Court in the State of Illinois. The analysis draws upon a sample of 89 sanctions imposed upon conviction, at the state and county levels, to identify three bureaucratic aspects that sustain racial inequality. One, these sanctions are represented in ways that abstract the conviction process from its highly racialized context. Two, these sanctions enable legal actors to enact a multilevel mode of decision making, combining compulsory and discretionary judgment, that entrenches racial bias within the broader legal organization of punishment. And three, these sanctions redistribute the operational costs of justice through earmarks onto those who are processed through the system (i.e., disproportionately people of color). Altogether, these bureaucratic aspects paradoxically intensify racial stratification in ways that are seemingly nonracial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The peaks and valleys written into Chicago's 42nd Ward outline themselves against what space is legible to ticketers in the city's hungriest vehicle ticketing district. It is a space that defies the racial geography of ticketing in Chicago, where predatory practices prey on communities of color as though they are the city's slush fund. In the 42nd Ward, ticketing is like a language that is spoken in a specific geometric dialect. Those who issue them speak with a street-level fluency that omits a vocabulary of verticality, where space is readable only through narrow focus that sees what is at ground-level but not below or above it. In a district that features high volumes of automobility but little street parking, the ward's ticketing hotspots are territorial soft targets that stand out like italicized font to flag the ticketer's attention. Camouflaged in the unarticulated White space that separates one word from another are vertical sanctuaries from surveillance and sanction. The district is a White space in both a figurative and literal sense, given the racial position of who wrote these words, which vested interests they advance, and to what ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]