Thanks to “Law & Order” and its countless brethren in the courtroom drama genre, there’s sort of an aura around courts, judges, lawyers and criminals. Trials are supposed to dramatically address pressing legal and moral issues, with judges, juries and lawyers all greasing the wheels of justice with the collective sweat generated from a hard day’s work.

But the American justice system is really more like the absurdist 1980s sitcom “Night Court,” in which a harried judge and quirky attorneys would race through as many cases as possible so they could get back to hanging out with Mel Torme or canoodling in the bathroom.

There’s no Mel Torme cameo and precious little canoodling in “Courtroom 302,” but journalist Steve Bogira’s book, recently released in paperback, does amply demonstrate that kind of absurd, bizarro-world justice in which lawyers, judges and defendants all keep reciting the same lines, just to keep the process moving along.

Bogira spent a year following the lawyers, lawbreakers and legal proceedings in one courtroom in Chicago’s Cook County Criminal Courthouse. Bogira describes it as a place where “justice miscarries every day, by doing precisely what we ask it to do.” He’s not far off. The line between guilt and innocence is almost indistinguishable—a fact that’s mostly ignored in favor of speedily getting through the day’s docket.

Bogira begins the exhaustively researched book with a portrait of Larry Bates, a 42-year-old man on probation for a minor drug offense. He’s struggling to get clean and finish up his community service requirements, but he can’t quite kick his coke addiction and find a steady job. Bates reappears throughout the book, coming back before Judge Dan Locallo a number of times for minor possession offenses. Through Bogira’s lens, Bates and other defendants like him are a choice illustration of what’s wrong with the system. Politicians’ desires to be “tough on crime” result in harsh penalties for the most minor of drug offenses, which floods the court with scores of poor minorities, who make up about 80 percent of the criminal cases heard in Cook County. Because there are so many defendants, cases are whisked through court.

As Bogira describes it, plea deals are encouraged and jury trials are discouraged; any defendants who attempt to slow the process are usually given harsher sentences. And because there’s so little attention paid to the underlying circumstances in each case (for instance, Bates spiraled into drug addiction after his wife killed their children), defendants are given few opportunities for treatment and rehabilitation and so appear back in court over and over. Simply put, justice sucks.

But what’s even more depressing is the suggestion that nothing can be done about it. Bogira remains a dispassionate, neutral observer throughout the book, and unless the reader whips himself or herself into a frenzy, there’s no real anger. While there’s a lot to be said for objective reporting, a little anger is surely understandable, especially concerning cases in which the stakes are so high.

Bogira does, however, let the various players damn themselves. Locallo and the rest of the legal crew working on the side of law and order think the system, as clogged and imperfect as it is, generally works fine. When asked why drug offenders keep using, and therefore keep appearing in court, Locallo dismisses them as people who “can’t get a high out of life itself.” After one case concludes with a not guilty verdict for a defendant, the prosecutors complain that the defendant was surely guilty of something.

The defendants who march through Courtroom 302 are the usual lot of drug dealers, murderers and car thieves, hardly a batch of sympathetic characters. But Bogira goes the extra mile, maybe even an extra 10 miles, and interviews not only the defendants before, during and after their cases move through the system, but also speaks with their family members and friends. It’s these individual stories that give “Courtroom 302” its narrative power and poignancy. Like the defendants, “Courtroom 302” carries with it a sense of disappointment and hopelessness. The system is, and has been, broken for a long time, and it’ll be even longer before it’s fixed. Between now and then, we’ve got plenty of “Law & Order” reruns to watch.