The Chicago police department has promised for more than a century to eliminate torture from its interrogation rooms. For more than a century, the Chicago police department has failed to deliver on that promise.

The latest shameful episode is the tale of Richard Zuley, a police officer who brought the tactics he learned in Chicago to Guantánamo Bay and back again, as reported by The Guardian.

Sadly, there is a precedent for Zuley.

For example, in a 2000 case that resulted in a successful federal civil rights lawsuit, a Latino teenager was held for four days chained to a wall in an interrogation room, where he was not only questioned repeatedly, but denied bathroom access and left to soil himself. During the boy’s civil rights trial, officers could only prove that they fed him once during the four days. The teen eventually confessed to a murder he did not commit. After he spent just a few weeks in jail, another suspect was arrested with the murder weapon and confessed shortly after his arrest. How many others locked up have not been so fortunate?

Most infamously, there is highly decorated Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge who, during his 23-year tenure on the force from 1970 to 1993, used the techniques he learned from interrogating the Vietcong as a military policeman in Vietnam on black suspects in Chicago. These techniques included Russian roulette with pistols and shotguns, burning suspects on radiators, suffocation with typewriter covers, beatings with phone books and electric shocks to the ears, nose, fingers, and testicles.

Burge was a fast-rising and well-respected officer who operated with impunity; neither his colleagues nor his supervisors blew the whistle. Neither did prosecutors or officials in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office. Instead, Burge was accorded hero status – until community activists, public interest lawyers and one lonely journalist at the city’s weekly exposed his horrid behavior what it really was: unacceptable.

Once public pressure mounted – and only then – Burge was finally fired in 1993, accused of torturing confessions out of what is believed to be more than 100 African American men. He was not, however, without his defenders: at the time of his firing, the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, the largest union representing officers, attempted to run a float honoring Burge in the Chicago’s St Patrick’s Day parade. And it wasn’t until 2006 that a special prosecutor was appointed to examine Burge’s record and determine if a criminal case could be brought against him. (Only a perjury charge stuck.)

The relationship between communities of color in Chicago and the Chicago Police Department hasn’t recovered from Burge’s abuses. Residents remain wary, while the police remain largely unapologetic. Today, the Chicago Police Department’s tactics – known as “touchless torture” – are less horrific but still abusive.

These new methods focus more on sensory deprivation and isolation to wear down a suspect – sometimes with the same result: false confessions. Because these methods do not leave marks, it is much harder for judges and juries to understand just how coercive they are.

A series of US supreme court cases over the last century have codified the rights that are supposed to protect suspects under our system. Sadly, those rights still mean next to nothing in Chicago interrogation rooms, which still bear too much resemblance to those in Guantánamo – and those from the now-distant past of Vietnam.

The way forward requires reform on a system’s level – not at an individual case level. The use of these types of tactics is not a bad apple issue, but rather about a rotten-to-the-core system that turns a blind eye to massive civil rights violations because the system benefits from those civil rights violations. About 90% of all criminal cases in America result in a plea bargain, which makes any given confession so much more powerful than it would normally be and thus that more desirable to obtain. Sadly prosecutors who have a constitutional obligation to be a check on coercive police practices fail in their obligations in America because there is an institutional incentive for them to ignore civil rights violations and push for plea bargains using the coerced confessions.

Any meaningful reform starts with educating juries about the coerciveness of the interrogation room and the tactics used to extract confessions; after that, judges must live up to their responsibilities and deny plea bargains in case in which the only evidence is a confession. While hardly a cure-all, these two massive reforms of legal procedure could help remove the institutional incentives for those working for the system to obtain and use coerced confessions.