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The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago
A lawyer for the people, Flint Taylor has spent nearly fifty years fighting for justice, from the courtrooms of Cook County to the US Supreme Court.
With his colleagues at the People’s Law Office (PLO), Taylor has argued landmark civil rights cases that have exposed corruption and cover-ups within the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and throughout the city’s corrupt political machine.
The Torture Machine takes the reader from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark—and the historic, thirteen-years of litigation that followed—through the dogged pursuit of commander Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects.
Joining forces with community activists, torture survivors and their families, other lawyers, and local reporters, Taylor and the PLO gathered evidence from multiple cases to bring suit against the CPD officers and the City of Chicago. As the struggle expanded beyond the torture scandal to the ultimately successful campaign to end the death penalty in Illinois, and obtained reparations for many of the torture survivors, it set human rights precedents that have since been adopted across the United States.
With his colleagues at the People’s Law Office (PLO), Taylor has argued landmark civil rights cases that have exposed corruption and cover-ups within the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and throughout the city’s corrupt political machine.
The Torture Machine takes the reader from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark—and the historic, thirteen-years of litigation that followed—through the dogged pursuit of commander Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects.
Joining forces with community activists, torture survivors and their families, other lawyers, and local reporters, Taylor and the PLO gathered evidence from multiple cases to bring suit against the CPD officers and the City of Chicago. As the struggle expanded beyond the torture scandal to the ultimately successful campaign to end the death penalty in Illinois, and obtained reparations for many of the torture survivors, it set human rights precedents that have since been adopted across the United States.
556 pages, Hardcover
Published March 19, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
May 13, 2019
This book is a tough read because even if you aren’t someone naive to police corruption in Chicago (it’s been reported on for decades) the extent of corruption may still surprise you. Though the book touches on different cases, the story of corrupt cop Jon Burge is a common theme and was hard for me to wrap my mind around. Burge was known to use torture devices, his experience with torture coming from his days seeing combat in Vietnam. But the exploitation of power doesn’t start and stop with him. It runs square into politics, with Richard M Daley prominently featured. Author Flint Taylor knows a thing or two since he was the lawyer fighting this cess pool of injustice. At one point in the book investigative journalist John Conroy poses a question of why the US attorney wasn’t getting involved in the case of accused cop killer Andrew Wilson’s alleged torture by police. His answer was “perhaps because no one believes it can happen here. Perhaps there is no investigation simply because, as other nations have found, torture is an intimate affair, something that happens among a few adults behind a closed door, something that is hard to prove afterward because the accused—often decorated soldiers who have served their country in a time of crisis—deny the allegations, and the victims are terrorists or alleged terrorists, associates of terrorists...dissidents, criminals, rioters, stone throwers, sympathizers, or relatives of the above”.
May 26, 2019
If the author can spend his entire working life litigating the same set of police torture cases to expose the truth and get partial justice , you can slog through this tome and learn about the cover-up and how hard it was to expose it. An important chapter in recent American history, showing the power of the police over black lives, the difficulty of teaching interrogation tactics to citizen soldiers and then bringing them back home, and how the bias and personal beliefs of some judges affects the supposed impartiality of our justice system. Among other things.
October 1, 2019
Flint Taylor is not a prose stylist. This book is light on narrative and heavy on names and small details, making the reading slowgoing. But it's a comprehensive historical account of the activism and legal fight against the Chicago Police Department's systemic torture of Black men, when such accounts are rare. An invaluable resource for anyone studying or writing about Chicago police torture.
June 21, 2019
Flint Taylor has lived in the trenches of civil rights cases for years. In this book, Taylor sets out the pursuit by him and his colleagues at the People’s Law Offices of police brutality and especially the Burge torture.
March 24, 2020
In 2018 reading Just Mercy cemented my admiration of Bryan Stevenson. In 2019 it was Ronan Farrow for his Catch and Kill. Now in 2020 I’ve just added Flint Taylor to my list of men who are making the world better. Like Just Mercy, Flint Taylor’s The Torture Machine documents injustices inflicted on black and Latinx men by the justice system, and he is also an attorney. The Torture Machine, however, was much, much more difficult to read, and I think that was intentional.
I’ll back up a little and say why it was so difficult to read. Taylor speaks of his decades fighting in the courts on behalf of men who had been tortured by police officers in Chicago. In terms of a timeline, it spans one year short of fifty years, starting with the murder of Fred Hampton in 1969 and going all the way to 2018. Taylor is extremely detailed. Thus the reader is taken through one night of torture to the next, page after page, chapter after chapter. This makes for a very long and dense and draining book with detailed accounts of torture mixed in with many names to keep track of and trials and hearings and appeals.
But, as I said before, I think that the fact that it’s a difficult read is intentional. It should not be an easy read. In choosing to release this book with its detail and density, Taylor finally made me come closer to realizing the horror of systematic racism in the American judicial system. It is not just about the policeman who tortured men; everyone from prosecutors to judges to politicians covered for them and even benefitted from their acts. I’ve read many books that cover this subject, but none have forced me to look at it like The Torture Machine did.
The cover of the book is a picture of the box rigged up to electrocute various body parts in acts of torture, and the title of the book at first seems to refer to that piece of equipment. As you read, however, you realize the real torture machine is the system that allows the torture to happen and even encourages it.
I don’t think a lot of people have read this book, and I have a feeling that in this time of pandemic, fewer emotionally draining books will be read. I hope I’m wrong. I hope people continue to bear witness as much as they can. This story needs to be common knowledge.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in furthering their knowledge on the subject but with a trigger warning. I recommend it to anyone whose interest was sparked by episode 134 of the Criminal podcast “Call Russ Ewing.” I think the biggest recommendation, though, would come from someone like Netflix. I was very glad when Just Mercy was made into a movie because it meant that more people would know Bryan Stevenson’s work. I hope a limited series gets made about Flint Taylor’s work.
I’ll back up a little and say why it was so difficult to read. Taylor speaks of his decades fighting in the courts on behalf of men who had been tortured by police officers in Chicago. In terms of a timeline, it spans one year short of fifty years, starting with the murder of Fred Hampton in 1969 and going all the way to 2018. Taylor is extremely detailed. Thus the reader is taken through one night of torture to the next, page after page, chapter after chapter. This makes for a very long and dense and draining book with detailed accounts of torture mixed in with many names to keep track of and trials and hearings and appeals.
But, as I said before, I think that the fact that it’s a difficult read is intentional. It should not be an easy read. In choosing to release this book with its detail and density, Taylor finally made me come closer to realizing the horror of systematic racism in the American judicial system. It is not just about the policeman who tortured men; everyone from prosecutors to judges to politicians covered for them and even benefitted from their acts. I’ve read many books that cover this subject, but none have forced me to look at it like The Torture Machine did.
The cover of the book is a picture of the box rigged up to electrocute various body parts in acts of torture, and the title of the book at first seems to refer to that piece of equipment. As you read, however, you realize the real torture machine is the system that allows the torture to happen and even encourages it.
I don’t think a lot of people have read this book, and I have a feeling that in this time of pandemic, fewer emotionally draining books will be read. I hope I’m wrong. I hope people continue to bear witness as much as they can. This story needs to be common knowledge.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in furthering their knowledge on the subject but with a trigger warning. I recommend it to anyone whose interest was sparked by episode 134 of the Criminal podcast “Call Russ Ewing.” I think the biggest recommendation, though, would come from someone like Netflix. I was very glad when Just Mercy was made into a movie because it meant that more people would know Bryan Stevenson’s work. I hope a limited series gets made about Flint Taylor’s work.
January 8, 2026
This book is emotionally devastating to read - but it's also an incredibly valuable piece of history that must never be forgotten.
Chicago Police officer Jon Burge and his "Midnight Crew" terrorized the streets of Chicago for years throughout the 70s and 80s, detaining and torturing over a hundred plus innocent Black men into confessing for crimes so that CPD and the State's Attorney's Office could seem like they were "effective" at "solving crimes". They beat men to a pulp, waterboarded them, played Russian roulette with them, and most infamously (as memorialized on the cover of this book) used an electric shock box to electrocute people until they confessed. These confessions were then used by then-State's Attorney Richard M. Daley to build up his reputation as a "law and order"/ "tough on crime" prosecutor, before he became Mayor in 1989.
All the while, Flint Taylor and the lawyers of the People's Law Office, who started out defending Black Panthers from Ed Hanrahan after the assassination of Chairman Fred Hampton, set out defending and clearing the names of the victims of Burge's torture regime - and then finally, after decades getting reparations for the harm done. But it was an unbelievable lift, one that saw literally every piece of the system fight back tooth and nail to prevent true justice from being served. Cops refused to testify against Burge and made death threats to the lawyers challenging the official narrative. The media refused to cover the issue or attacked the lawyers and their clients as criminals and degenerates. The State's Attorney Office and the Cook County Criminal Court Judges stonewalled the lawyers at every stage, tying them up in legal battles that would take decades to resolve. Mayor Daley and his allies were able to spend years in power without ever truly having to be held accountable for the coverup they directly aided and abetted. But ultimately, after decades, the victims of Burge's torture received a historic settlement in 2015 that included a series of reparative components - mandated teaching of this in CPS curricula, and a planned memorial honoring all those who were tortured and wrongfully convicted by Burge (said memorial will finally be built later this year).
Thanks to their tireless effort, and that of many grassroots organizers, the story of Burge and his heinous crimes against humanity will never be forgotten. But the struggle against police violence continues, and while some things have changed, most things haven't, and we must continue to fight back against the brutality and viciousness of the criminal legal system, and all of its champions.
Chicago Police officer Jon Burge and his "Midnight Crew" terrorized the streets of Chicago for years throughout the 70s and 80s, detaining and torturing over a hundred plus innocent Black men into confessing for crimes so that CPD and the State's Attorney's Office could seem like they were "effective" at "solving crimes". They beat men to a pulp, waterboarded them, played Russian roulette with them, and most infamously (as memorialized on the cover of this book) used an electric shock box to electrocute people until they confessed. These confessions were then used by then-State's Attorney Richard M. Daley to build up his reputation as a "law and order"/ "tough on crime" prosecutor, before he became Mayor in 1989.
All the while, Flint Taylor and the lawyers of the People's Law Office, who started out defending Black Panthers from Ed Hanrahan after the assassination of Chairman Fred Hampton, set out defending and clearing the names of the victims of Burge's torture regime - and then finally, after decades getting reparations for the harm done. But it was an unbelievable lift, one that saw literally every piece of the system fight back tooth and nail to prevent true justice from being served. Cops refused to testify against Burge and made death threats to the lawyers challenging the official narrative. The media refused to cover the issue or attacked the lawyers and their clients as criminals and degenerates. The State's Attorney Office and the Cook County Criminal Court Judges stonewalled the lawyers at every stage, tying them up in legal battles that would take decades to resolve. Mayor Daley and his allies were able to spend years in power without ever truly having to be held accountable for the coverup they directly aided and abetted. But ultimately, after decades, the victims of Burge's torture received a historic settlement in 2015 that included a series of reparative components - mandated teaching of this in CPS curricula, and a planned memorial honoring all those who were tortured and wrongfully convicted by Burge (said memorial will finally be built later this year).
Thanks to their tireless effort, and that of many grassroots organizers, the story of Burge and his heinous crimes against humanity will never be forgotten. But the struggle against police violence continues, and while some things have changed, most things haven't, and we must continue to fight back against the brutality and viciousness of the criminal legal system, and all of its champions.
March 7, 2023
Flint Taylor's The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago is a historical chronicle of the decades it took to get any form of justice for torture survivors. For years, the Chicago Police Department used terror tactics and physical torture to get false confessions from men of color—I won't even call them suspects, since almost all of them were simply men of color profiled by the police—torturing more than 120 people. The worst of them was commander Jon Burge, but it was a culture and pervasive chain of violence, not to mention a cover-up, that involved people at every level of the police department and Chicago government, and is a shameful stain on Chicago history that needs to be well-known.
The book exposes the lengths to which people would rather be ignorant—the lengths they'll go to in order to preserve the system—to avoid confronting hard questions. How things suddenly become political and "editorial" the moment they implicate the system as a whole. How the judicial system tried to subvert and break down these trials at every turn, largely due to the ingrained biases of judges and to the concerted efforts of the government to cover-up as much as they could.
It is a thick, dense history of both the torture and primarily the legal process it took to expose it and break the police code of silence and government conspiracy of silence that dominated up to that point. Dense, but hard to put down. Horrific, and exposed me to a lot of history that I should know as a Chicagoan and progressive in Chicago.
My only complaint about the book is it dearly needs a timeline. I made one myself full of crucial names and dates, but it would have been a huge help. To organize his story, Taylor has to go back and forth in time sometimes—totally fine, but less confusing with a timeline present!
Content warnings for violence, torture, racism (systemic, language/slurs, violence), misogynoir, sexual assault.
The book exposes the lengths to which people would rather be ignorant—the lengths they'll go to in order to preserve the system—to avoid confronting hard questions. How things suddenly become political and "editorial" the moment they implicate the system as a whole. How the judicial system tried to subvert and break down these trials at every turn, largely due to the ingrained biases of judges and to the concerted efforts of the government to cover-up as much as they could.
It is a thick, dense history of both the torture and primarily the legal process it took to expose it and break the police code of silence and government conspiracy of silence that dominated up to that point. Dense, but hard to put down. Horrific, and exposed me to a lot of history that I should know as a Chicagoan and progressive in Chicago.
My only complaint about the book is it dearly needs a timeline. I made one myself full of crucial names and dates, but it would have been a huge help. To organize his story, Taylor has to go back and forth in time sometimes—totally fine, but less confusing with a timeline present!
Content warnings for violence, torture, racism (systemic, language/slurs, violence), misogynoir, sexual assault.
May 3, 2021
First off, because I don’t want to scare readers off too quickly, I want to say
thise who have little knowledge about the subject matter should read this or something else to see just what goes on with the police and the justice system. Also, if you are looking for a detailed, step by step, account, this is for you..
I just hate not giving this book five stars, and I hate what my comment is mostly about to be, but...
However, I do have this knowledge already and the simple truth is that as much as I like and appreciate the author ( who I met decades ago while looking for a lawyer in my own political activism based conspiracy case), I have to say he needs to stick to his day job. This is one of the most dry and uninteresting account of something this important that I have ever run across. I did not finish the book, but I scanned ahead and it never changed, just dry, almost transcript like accounting with little commentary or analysis. Sorry, just dull. It certainly did not have to be. It’s too bad, for example, Angela Davis did not write this.
thise who have little knowledge about the subject matter should read this or something else to see just what goes on with the police and the justice system. Also, if you are looking for a detailed, step by step, account, this is for you..
I just hate not giving this book five stars, and I hate what my comment is mostly about to be, but...
However, I do have this knowledge already and the simple truth is that as much as I like and appreciate the author ( who I met decades ago while looking for a lawyer in my own political activism based conspiracy case), I have to say he needs to stick to his day job. This is one of the most dry and uninteresting account of something this important that I have ever run across. I did not finish the book, but I scanned ahead and it never changed, just dry, almost transcript like accounting with little commentary or analysis. Sorry, just dull. It certainly did not have to be. It’s too bad, for example, Angela Davis did not write this.
March 24, 2021
It's sad to think that while I was riding my bicycle, going on a first date, entering the workforce and buying a new car...that many poor souls were living an actual hell on Earth.
Between 1960 and the early 90's black men were being tortured into confessing to crimes they did not commit and then sentenced to life in jail.
Most of white America was unaware of this torture crew working for the Chicago Police Department.
This book describes the uncovering of the torture and the 35 years of cover-up perpetrated by the City of Chicago's mayor, States attorney and many others.
Flint Taylor is a lawyer and this book presses home proof after proof that the travesty of justice occurred.
I listened to the audiobook version over 3 weeks.
A disturbing look in to how power is abused and the lengths taken to keep the torturers reputations intact.
Between 1960 and the early 90's black men were being tortured into confessing to crimes they did not commit and then sentenced to life in jail.
Most of white America was unaware of this torture crew working for the Chicago Police Department.
This book describes the uncovering of the torture and the 35 years of cover-up perpetrated by the City of Chicago's mayor, States attorney and many others.
Flint Taylor is a lawyer and this book presses home proof after proof that the travesty of justice occurred.
I listened to the audiobook version over 3 weeks.
A disturbing look in to how power is abused and the lengths taken to keep the torturers reputations intact.
June 7, 2024
An in depth look into the prosecutor that represented several civil rights cases in Chicago revolving on police mistreatment of those in custody. This follows litigation of a police unit that was known for forcing confessions by the use of torture.
I wish I had learned more about this subject matter and other civil rights issues before now. I will think about this book. It raised several interesting questions as they worked to bring justice to those who were wronged by the actions of the police officers, judges, and politicians involved.
I wish I had learned more about this subject matter and other civil rights issues before now. I will think about this book. It raised several interesting questions as they worked to bring justice to those who were wronged by the actions of the police officers, judges, and politicians involved.
September 2, 2026
This book really intimidated me, but I'm so glad I picked it up anyway! I did have to keep a running list of people's names and what they did in order to keep track of everything; however, it was relatively easy to follow. The subject material was obviously very heavy and at times I wanted to scream BUT Flint Taylor is an absolute icon and I cannot wait to read his new book!!!!
March 7, 2021
really interesting read, learned a lot as well, read a different nonfiction of the same audio length and this book was so much better in so many ways, wouldn't mind buying this book for my dad.
April 13, 2021
If you want a thorough case study on systematic racism and the powers that be restrict holding people accountable and preventing abuse to BIPOC this is the book for you. My heart was heavy in how much the system made it hard to stop abuse that needed to stop.
November 19, 2024
definitely a long read, but a super important telling of the history of police torture in chicago.
may you never ever rest peacefully, jon burge <3
may you never ever rest peacefully, jon burge <3
January 6, 2020
Just finished reading
The Torture Machine
Is 542 pages of
healing medicine justice words.
Wishing everybody read this book.
Is so important in our struggles
to abolish policing
and Prison Imperialism.
The Torture Machine
Is 542 pages of
healing medicine justice words.
Wishing everybody read this book.
Is so important in our struggles
to abolish policing
and Prison Imperialism.
January 18, 2020
Just finished reading
The Torture Machine
Is 542 pages of
healing medicine justice words.
Wishing everybody read this book.
Is so important in our struggles
to abolish policing
and Prison Imperialism.
The Torture Machine
Is 542 pages of
healing medicine justice words.
Wishing everybody read this book.
Is so important in our struggles
to abolish policing
and Prison Imperialism.
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews