Contemporary Authors

• Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America Farrar, Straus and Giroux, (New York, NY), 2017

1. Locking up our own : crime and punishment in black America LCCN 2016041345 Type of material Book Personal name Forman, James, 1967- author. Main title Locking up our own : crime and punishment in black America / James Forman, Jr. Edition First Edition. Published/Produced New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. ©2017 Description 306 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm ISBN 9780374189976 (hardback) CALL NUMBER HV9950 .F655 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• NPR - http://www.npr.org/2017/04/18/524569143/locking-up-our-own-details-the-mass-incarceration-of-black-men

  AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
  'Locking Up Our Own' Details The Mass Incarceration Of Black Men

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  April 18, 20174:32 PM ET
  Heard on All Things Considered
  NPR's Robert Siegel talks with author James Forman, Jr., about his new book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. It tells the story of how African Americans in law enforcement made the war on drugs very much their war.

  ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

  James Forman Jr. may change the way you think about the mass incarceration of African-Americans on drug charges. Foreman is a law professor at Yale who used to be a public defender in Washington, D.C. He's also the son of a famous black civil rights leader. His father was head of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

  In his new book, "Locking Up Our Own," James Forman Jr. tells the story of how blacks in law enforcement, people who had battled for the right to serve as police and judges as well as politicians, made the war on drugs very much their own. Professor Foreman, thanks for joining us.

  JAMES FORMAN JR.: Thanks for having me.

  SIEGEL: You start your book with an observation at the trial of a young man who's charged with possessing a handgun and a very small quantity of marijuana. When he was sentenced, he was dispatched with a denunciation from the bench that he not only had violated the law; he had undermined the entire civil rights movement. How common was that?

  FORMAN JR.: It was more common than I certainly would have expected. I mean when I became a public defender in D.C. in the 1990s, I did it because I imagined myself doing the civil rights work of my generation, fighting - we didn't call it mass incarceration, but we knew by that point that 1 in 3 young black men was under criminal justice supervision.

  And so when I go to court in that case and I have a judge who tells my client, young man, Martin Luther King fought and died for your freedom, and he didn't fight and die for you to be out there running and thugging (ph) and carrying a gun, that for me was really kind of the wakeup moment that there was a story that needed to be told.

  SIEGEL: This is a black judge.

  FORMAN JR.: Black judge.

  SIEGEL: And it may very well have been a black police officer who had busted the young man. And by the time you were representing drug offenders, there were lots of black cops and soon black police chiefs around the country. As you describe it, those men had broken color lines. They'd fought to be treated equally, and they're a part of the story of black empowerment that we often forget about.

  FORMAN JR.: It's true that in the 1970s with the decline of formal Jim Crow, the work that my father and so many others contributed to, these new cast of black characters come into office. They're incredibly constrained, right? There's only so much they can do. They're facing rising crime, rising heroin addiction, rising violence. And so I try to tell the story of how this pressure cooker environment leads to a set of decisions that has been so damaging.

  SIEGEL: Yeah. One reading of this story is that black cops turn out to be not that different from white cops in their attitude towards crime, in their attitude towards whom they're protecting, the middle-class households that are victimized by crime, not young people who get involved with drugs and commit crimes.

  FORMAN JR.: Well, I think we have never had a good theory for what difference we expect black officers to make. I have people like - Martin Luther King Sr. in the book is arguing in 1940s in Atlanta, Ga., that we need one black officer in Atlanta for all of the 105,000 Negroes. And the theory is that black officers will be more aggressive in fighting crime that white officers have ignored.

  Other people say we need black officers because they're going to be less brutal. At the end of the day, I think my story is, we need black officers because African-Americans need a fair shot at good jobs in this country, but we cannot expect them and should not expect them to change the nature of policing.

  SIEGEL: As you describe it, the - a major motivation for becoming a police officer for an African-American man or woman today was not to advance the civil rights movement but to have a job and to have good benefits.

  FORMAN JR.: Yeah, and that's completely reasonable...

  SIEGEL: Yeah.

  FORMAN JR.: ...And appropriate.

  SIEGEL: That's why a lot of white people become police as well.

  FORMAN JR.: Yeah, and I - and you know, one of the things I say is that black people should be able to be firefighters. We don't think they're going to change how we fight fires in America. I feel the same way about policing.

  SIEGEL: I want you to tell the story about how in the District of Columbia a handful of police officers got together to see to it that they would pass the exams to get not only hired but promoted and what an important development that was for the city.

  FORMAN JR.: Yeah, well, you had Burtell Jefferson and Tilmon O'Bryant - were the leaders of this in the early 1960s. And at the time, they faced real discrimination because to get promoted, you needed to achieve a certain test on the written exam, and you needed a certain level of supervisor evaluation - you know, a qualitative assessment. And no matter how well the black officers did on the written exam, they would get dinged by their white superiors on the qualitative assessment, and they never would get the promotion.

  And the response of men like Burtell Jefferson and Tilmon O'Bryant was, we are going to study twice as hard, three times as hard. They set up special study sessions in Tilmon O'Bryant's basement. They would come together once a week. And over time, 14 out of 15 of them passed the exam with scores so high that even factoring in the discriminatory qualitative assessment, they had to be promoted.

  SIEGEL: It's not hard to imagine the police lieutenant that emerges from that experience.

  FORMAN JR.: Well, that's exactly right. And then one later in the decade when some civil rights advocates, including the editors of the Afro-American, D.C.'s largest black paper at the time - they call for affirmative action to hire more black officers in D.C. And Tilmon O'Bryant comes out and says he opposes that. And you know, that feeling that you're describing of somebody who comes up through the ranks, studies two times as hard, three times as hard - that does produce a kind of severity later when it seems as if people aren't behaving as you yourself would have behaved or at least as you imagine you would have behaved.

  SIEGEL: What do you say to those people who hear in that speech from the judge in the case with which you begin the book, you have betrayed Martin Luther King; you have betrayed the civil rights movement? What do you say to people who say, well, there was - there is some disconnect here? Things - legal barriers come down in the 1960s. Social change is underway. The catastrophe that drugs wrought in inner-city neighborhoods, in black neighborhoods was at least a terrible disappointment to, if not a betrayal of, what people - what their parents and their grandparents had been struggling for.

  FORMAN JR.: Well, I'm not sympathetic to that because I think that the nature of the problem changed. So yes, you didn't have Jim Crow. But we also had de-industrialization, right? We had jobs that were leaving. We had an education system that was failing. We had mental health programs that were not being adequately invested in.

  So - and we have segregation that's getting harder - the lines are getting harder and harder around a particular group, which is to say low-income, black Americans. Today, a black person without a high school degree - their likelihood of going to prison has gone up 10 times since the 1960s. Jim Crow is gone, but life is just as hard.

  SIEGEL: And those communities - you would say instead of economic development or social and economic justice, they get crackdown justice instead, is what happened.

  FORMAN JR.: I think that's right. And most of the black actors that I write about are asking for economic development. They are asking for root causes to be addressed. Many people follow John Conyers, the congressman, and say, we want a marshal plan for urban America. They want more police, more prisons, better jobs, better schools, better parks. They want the whole thing, all of the above. Instead, they get one of the above, which is law enforcement.

  SIEGEL: James Forman Jr. is the author of locking up our own, crime and punishment in black America. Thanks for talking with us.

  FORMAN JR.: Thank you.

  (SOUNDBITE OF PERPETUAL GROOVE SONG, "TEAKWOOD BETZ")

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• James Forman Jr. - https://www.jamesformanjr.com/about/

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  James Forman, Jr. is a professor of law at Yale Law School. He has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, numerous law reviews, and other publications. A former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, he spent six years as a public defender in Washington, D.C., where he cofounded the Maya Angelou Public Charter School.

• Yale Law School - https://law.yale.edu/james-forman-jr

  James Forman Jr.
  Professor of Law
  James Forman Jr. is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He is a graduate of Atlanta’s Roosevelt High School, Brown University, and Yale Law School, and was a law clerk for Judge William Norris of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the United States Supreme Court.

  James Forman Jr. is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He is a graduate of Atlanta’s Roosevelt High School, Brown University, and Yale Law School, and was a law clerk for Judge William Norris of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the United States Supreme Court.

  After clerking, he joined the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., where for six years he represented both juveniles and adults charged with crimes.

  During his time as a public defender, Professor Forman became frustrated with the lack of education and job training opportunities for his clients. So in 1997, along with David Domenici, he started the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, an alternative school for school dropouts and youth who had previously been arrested. A decade later, in 2007, Maya Angelou School expanded and agreed to run the school inside D.C.’s juvenile prison. That school, which had long been an abysmal failure, has been transformed under the leadership of the Maya Angelou staff; the court monitor overseeing D.C.’s juvenile system called the turnaround “extraordinary.”

  Forman taught at Georgetown Law from 2003 to 2011, when he joined the Yale faculty. At Yale, he teaches Constitutional Law, a seminar called Race, Class and Punishment, and a seminar called Inside Out: Issues in Criminal Justice, in which Yale law students study alongside men incarcerated in a Connecticut prison.

  Professor Forman teaches and writes in the areas of criminal procedure and criminal law policy, constitutional law, juvenile justice, and education law and policy. His particular interests are schools, prisons, and police, and those institutions’ race and class dimensions. Professor Forman’s first book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, was published in 2017.

• Yale Law School - https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/professor-forman-publishes-new-book-locking-our-own

  Tuesday, April 18, 2017
  Professor Forman Publishes New Book, Locking Up Our Own

  In his new book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, Professor James Forman Jr. ’92 explores the complex relationship between race, class, and the American criminal justice system in a new and original light.

  The ongoing debates surrounding the American criminal justice system – particularly in regard to issues of race – are numerous, inspired, and often impassioned. In a world where the United States has a higher prison population than any other nation, and when communities of color are disproportionately affected by this rate of incarceration and its associated police violence, the question often emerges — what can be done?

  In Locking Up Our Own, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Forman brings to the forefront a new, far-less-discussed perspective. Forman wonders — how is it that the number of black elected officials has increased dramatically since the Civil Rights Era, alongside an almost equal increase in black incarceration? By exploring the decisions that many black mayors, judges, and police chiefs made – ostensibly in the hopes of stabilizing what they saw as struggling African American communities – Forman shows that these leaders had a significant, albeit unintended, role to play in the creation of the current state of the criminal justice system.

  Interweaving issues of socio-economics and class into his discussion of race, Forman argues that members of the African American political elite, as well as many black police officers and administrators, were decidedly in favor of the policing tactics that contributed to the imposition of mass incarceration upon communities of color. With a particular focus on Washington D.C., Forman empathetically describes the quagmire in which African Americans found, and continue to find themselves, when dealing with an imposing criminal justice system. Whether in regards to the impossible choices once made by African American political elites, or in reference to the very victims of mass incarceration themselves, Forman employs his experience both as a public defender and a legal scholar in order to present a new portrait of the law, race, and crime in the contemporary United States.

  Locking Up Our Own enriches our understanding of why our society became so punitive and offers important lessons to anyone concerned about the future of race and the criminal justice system in this country.

  James Forman Jr. is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School who teaches and writes in the areas of criminal procedure and criminal law policy, constitutional law, juvenile justice, and education law and policy. His particular interests are schools, prisons, and police, and those institutions’ race and class dimensions.

  He is a graduate of Atlanta’s Roosevelt High School, Brown University, and Yale Law School, and was a law clerk for Judge William Norris of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the United States Supreme Court. After clerking, he joined the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., where for six years he represented both juveniles and adults charged with crimes.

  During his time as a public defender, Professor Forman became frustrated with the lack of education and job training opportunities for his clients. So in 1997, along with David Domenici, he started the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, an alternative school for school dropouts and youth who had previously been arrested. A decade later, in 2007, Maya Angelou School expanded and agreed to run the school inside D.C.’s juvenile prison.

  At Yale, Forman teaches Constitutional Law, a seminar on Race and the Criminal Justice System, and a clinic called the Educational Opportunity and Juvenile Justice Clinic. In the clinic, Professor Forman and his students represent young people facing expulsion from school for discipline violations, and they work to keep their clients in school and on track towards graduation. Last year he took his teaching behind prison walls, offering a seminar on criminal justice which brought together, in the same classroom, 10 Yale Law students and 10 men incarcerated in a Connecticut prison.

• The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/29/james-forman-jr-locking-up-our-own-black-on-black-crime

  'Demolish that lie': James Forman Jr takes on Black Lives Matter backlash
  The son of a prominent civil rights leader argues in a new book, Locking Up Our Own, that the ‘black on black crime’ trope is based on a false premise – and lays much of the blame for America’s carceral crisis at the feet of the political class
  hands on prison bars
  ‘In terms of addressing crime issues in the black community, the dominant political class has historically refused to endorse the full slate of reforms along lines of education, economic security, housing, etc, necessary to address the root causes.’ Photograph: Alamy
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  Saturday 29 April 2017 07.00 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 12.07 EDT
  In the conservative backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement, deflection to “black on black” crime has become a meme. Why, op-eds and pundits sputter, does the black community get so riled about police violence and yet remain silent about the gun and drug crime that savages so many of its own?

  James Forman Jr, son of civil rights leader James Forman Sr, knew from his time as a public defender in Washington DC that such broadsides are patently wrong. In his new book, Locking Up Our Own, he goes beyond the broader argument – that it’s reasonable to expect more from sworn law enforcement than from street criminals – to make clear that the charge is simply wrong on face value too.

  “I think of it as a 239-page rebuttal to the claim that black people and their elected leaders only care about crime when it’s [committed by] the police,” Forman told the Guardian. “If there’s one thing that I hope the book does, it’s demolish that lie.”

  Behind bars, beyond means: the crushing expense of loving someone in prison
  Read more
  His book sets up camp, however, on a deeply uncomfortable truth. Over the past half-century, in moments when black leadership has had the power to direct policy, such leaders have reliably chosen to embrace the types of “tough on crime” tactics that have led the US to becoming the most carceral nation in the world. For the most part, such leaders did so with the broad support of constituents seeking safety from the urban crises that colored the second half of the 20th century.

  “The words and deeds of … black law enforcement officials and politicians,” Forman writes, “so often overlooked in the histories of the war on drugs, are crucial to explaining why and how the war developed as it did in American cities.”

  Now a professor at Yale Law School, Forman has Washington in his sights. The city was known, at various point through the century, as both “Chocolate City” and “America’s murder capital”. Forman worked there as a public defender for six years in the 1990s, at the tail end of its most violent years.

  What was going on? How did a majority-black jurisdiction end up incarcerating so many of its own?
  James Forman Jr
  He opens with a question that gnawed at him as he argued in front of black judges and juries, against black prosecutors and for black clients who were, in many cases, arrested by black officers in a city that was about 70% black:

  “What was going on? How did a majority-black jurisdiction end up incarcerating so many of its own?”

  In many cases, what was being handed down was the type of hardline answer to crime usually placed solely at the feet of conservatives like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But in Washington, for example, it was a black electorate and leadership that killed a 1975 bill to decriminalize marijuana.

  “This was not a story in which a white majority, acting out of indifference or hostility to black lives, imposed tough criminal penalties that disproportionately burdened a black minority,” Forman writes.

  “Quite the opposite: the leaders of the decriminalization effort were white and … it was blacks who killed marijuana decriminalization in DC.”

  In the 1980s, this trend toward punitive justice continued. A 1982 ballot initiative to enact harsh mandatory minimum sentences for violent criminals passed in a landslide, with more support in black and poor districts than in their whiter and more affluent equivalents.

  There was broad support, in Washington and elsewhere, for tough penalties for gun crime and the distribution of hard drugs.

  For PCP dealers, said the Los Angeles Sentinel, a prominent black newspaper, in 1980, “no punishment was too harsh”. Such dealers deserved to be “tarred and feathered, burned at the stake, castrated, and any other horrendous thing which can be imagined”, editors opined. The column was signed: “The Los Angeles Sentinel and the rest of the Black Community”.

  Gift of freedom: how Obama's clemency drive tackled aftermath of 'war on drugs'
  Read more
  The reasons for such attitudes are many, but Forman finds explanations more interesting than simple moral panic. To some extent, such draconian policy could be traced to the chaste sobriety that nationalism – such as the pro-black nationalism that was ascending at the time – tends to bring in tow.

  Forman quotes from a speech by Kwame Ture, formerly known as Stokely Carmichael, in 1970: “Fighting against drugs is revolutionary because drugs are a trick of the oppressor.”

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  Forman also suggests such hardline policies were in part a reaction to historic underpolicing of black communities. “For 400 years black lives are never protected,” he said, adding that black leadership, when finally achieved, was then “bound and determined to do something different which produced this kind of extra vigilance”.

  In his book, Forman writes: “To many African American observers, the revolving door” by which criminals would be punished lightly and let go “was discriminatory”.

  “It spun fastest for the criminals who victimized blacks.”

  ‘To say it’s a fraught topic is correct’
  The book is long on disclaimers, seeking to avoid claims of victim blaming or anything similar. Forman is clear: everything he outlines happened or is happening under the macrocosm of white supremacy, which imposes the reality that fosters crime and the constraints that winnow down possible responses.

  He acknowledges that his unique pedigree, via his father and his career as a public defender, may have offered him some degree of cover.

  “To say it’s a fraught topic is correct and I was very conscious the entire time of potential missteps,” he said.

  In his text, Forman seeks to ensure that readers understand his perspective. He relays one story, from his time as a public defender, in which a prosecutor refused to offer one of his clients drug treatment in lieu of a jail sentence because she had been admitted to such a program before, on a prior charge.

  “And yet,” he writes, “our system never treated the failure of prison as a reason not to try more prison.”

  It’s bona fides like that which give Forman license to complicate our memory of the “war on drugs”, and to issue the following warning: “In terms of addressing crime issues in the black community, the dominant political class has historically refused to endorse the full slate of reforms along lines of education, economic security, housing, etc, necessary to address the root causes.

  “But if the ‘quarter loaf’ is going to be law enforcement, it’s better to have no loaf. For black people in America, we can’t make this mistake again.”

  Since you’re here …
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  Topics
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Print Marked Items
Forman Jr., James: LOCKING UP OUR OWN
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Forman Jr., James LOCKING UP OUR OWN Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 4, 18 ISBN: 978-0-
374-18997-6
A sharp analysis of how African-Americans, due to "profound levels of pain, fear, and anger" over crime and violence
in their neighborhoods, have helped shape U.S. policies leading to mass incarceration. In this candid, readable account,
Forman, a former Washington, D.C., public defender and current professor at Yale Law School, shows how our nation
has gotten to the point where so many citizens--primarily blacks--are imprisoned. Surveying the recent history of race,
crime, and punishment, the author, son of civil rights pioneer James Forman, argues that mass incarceration has
developed incrementally as a result of national campaigns and federal actions as well as of "mundane" local decisions
made around the nation. With a focus on majority-black D.C., where he represented criminal defendants and cofounded
a charter school for school dropouts, Forman traces the rise of drug addiction and criminality, the resulting
widespread fear in black neighborhoods, and the demands in the 1980s for "tougher criminal penalties" that set "a
national precedent for punitive sentencing." Most people punished under policies to combat drugs and guns, he writes,
have been "low-income, poorly educated black men." Especially insightful are Forman's discussions of the rise of black
policing in the 1960s ("a surprising number of black officers simply didn't like other black people--at least not the poor
blacks they tended to police"), the "hostile, unforgiving mindset" that prompted "warrior policing" during the 1980s
crack epidemic, and the practice of "pretext policing," in which routine traffic stops are used to seek evidence of
criminal activity, especially in ghetto areas. Writing with authority and compassion, the author tells many vivid stories
of the human toll taken by harsh criminal justice policies. He also asks provocative questions--e.g., what if the D.C.
drug epidemic had been treated as a public health issue rather than a law enforcement problem? Certain to stir debate,
this book offers an important new perspective on the ongoing proliferation of America's "punishment binge."
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Forman Jr., James: LOCKING UP OUR OWN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile,
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p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482911533&it=r&asid=57767f0d7accc696a8a2e50c4f52813d.
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Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in
Black America
Publishers Weekly.
264.2 (Jan. 9, 2017): p54.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
James Forman Jr. Farrar, Straus and Giroux,$27 (336p) ISBN 978-0-374-18997-6
Drawing on a varied CV (public defender, Supreme Court clerk, charter school cofounder, Yale law professor), Forman
addresses a tangled and thorny issue--the part played by African-Americans in shaping criminal justice policy. A
complex picture emerges, focused on Washington, D.C., as black inner-city residents are hurt both by "over--and underpolicing"
and as effective enforcement and fairer treatment of minorities come to seem incompatible to policymakers.
Forman delineates the ravaging effects of cures with boomerang consequences--from vigorous prosecutions of
relatively minor offenses that cut offenders off from public benefits, to black anti-drug activism that enables more
punitive policing, to mandatory sentencing policies that prove unequally implemented. With regard to public policy,
Forman's attentiveness to class divisions in the black community (for example, the middle-class desire for increased
numbers of black policemen, as opposed to the working-class goal of simply accessing new avenues of employment)
offers an exemplary perspective. The book achieves genuine immediacy, due not only to the topical subject, but also to
Forman's personal experiences within the legal system. Possibly controversial, undoubtedly argumentative, Forman's
survey offers a refreshing breath of fresh air on the crisis in American policing. Agent: David McCormick, McCormick
Literary. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America." Publishers Weekly, 9 Jan. 2017, p. 54. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477339325&it=r&asid=b4c77a72ed1ab80c8974cef13ad5b609.
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Forman, James. Locking up Our Own: Crime and
Punishment in Black America
Thomas J. Davis
Library Journal.
142.3 (Feb. 15, 2017): p103.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Forman, James. Locking up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. Farrar. Apr. 2017.320p. illus. notes,
index. ISBN 9780374189976. $27; ebk. ISBN 9780374712907. SOC SCI
Washington, DC, public defender-turned-Yale University clinical law professor Forman traces the growth of the
carceral state that now holds behind bars about one in every four adult black males. Taking a different turn from much
of the literature on the topic, the author focuses on black-on-black attitudes and actions as he recollects his Washington
experience. He argues that beginning in the 1970s, with a rising generation of unprecedented black political power,
elected black leaders and their constituents significantly shaped U.S. criminal justice policy, invariably supporting
tough on crime measures as fearful black communities sought self-protection. The result in Washington was that a
majority black jurisdiction ended up incarcerating many of its own, Forman concludes. VERDICT Forman's series of
brief essays deserve reading by policy-makers and practitioners in the criminal justice system, as well as by general
readers. His attention to the range of black responses to crime and punishment adds to our understanding of the prison
system, while not discounting the enduring role of discrimination. [See Prepub Alert, 10/10/16.]--Thomas J. Davis,
Arizona State Univ., Tempe
Davis, Thomas J.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Davis, Thomas J. "Forman, James. Locking up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America." Library Journal,
15 Feb. 2017, p. 103. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481649167&it=r&asid=8b76c6a64a2d49fb1d8c632cdc801e9a.
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Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in
Black America
Mark Levine
Booklist.
113.11 (Feb. 1, 2017): p15.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.
By James Forman.
Apr. 2017. 336p. Farrar, $27 (9780374716844). 365.
Forman is a former Washington, D.C., public defender, the cofounder of a charter school there, and the son of one of
the founders of SNCC, James Forman. He writes about the interrelated topics of the senseless killing of African
American men by police; the shocking fact that one-third of young black men (one-half in Washington) are under
criminal-justice supervision of some sort; and the larger but equally shocking reality that the U.S. is the world's biggest
jailer. Before profiling individuals involved with the criminal-justice system in Washington, from politicians and police
to accused criminals and crime victims, he traces the history leading up to the present crisis, noting that in the 1970s
many African American leaders favored a tougher criminal-justice system, including strict sentencing laws, but
showing how these policies have backfired. His case-study approach, looking closely at these sweeping problems
through the lens of one metropolitan area, offers a powerful, gut-wrenching slant on the subject, much like that in
Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy (2014). For a broader perspective, readers should also consult Michelle Alexander's The
New Jim Crow (2010).--Mark Levine
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Levine, Mark. "Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 15+.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481244734&it=r&asid=2d9305444e703b1cfc0c19737314661d.
Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.
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The problem of mass incarceration is more
complicated than we thought
Alex Mikulich
America.
216.4 (Feb. 20, 2017): p44.
COPYRIGHT 2017 America Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.
http://americamagazine.org/
Full Text:
We live in a so-called post-fact, post-truth era when politicians and media attempt to manipulate public opinion to their
narrow interests. Yet, as President Obama warned in his farewell address, "reality has a way of catching up with you."
Two new books help readers catch up with the reality of how the United States became the world's incarceration leader.
The authors, John Pfaff of Fordham University Law School and James Forman of Yale University Law School,
unflinchingly cast their eyes on the hard reality of mass incarceration. They demonstrate the enduring--and crying--
need for objective scholarship.
John Pfaff's Locked-In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform dismantles the
argument made by Michelle Alexander in her award-winning book, The New Jim Crow. The first part of Locked In
challenges the reigning consensus--the "standard story"--buttressed by Alexander's work.
Pfaff begins by explaining how the standard story is wrong about the origins of mass incarceration. Pundits and
academics often indict the failed drug wars of Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. While Nixon employed
tough rhetoric against crime, his policy actually favored public health responses over punitive enforcement.
Furthermore, prison populations did not budge much during his presidency.
An opposite problem arises in Reagan's case. By the time Reagan gave his "war on drugs" speech, the U.S.
incarceration rate had risen nearly 80 percent over the past decade. The "slow, steady climb" of incarceration, Pfaff
writes, was already well underway More important, however, a narrow focus on the president is misplaced. In reality,
there are over 3,000 wars on drugs and crime waged by district attorneys and local law enforcement.
Pfaff trains our attention on localities. The federal government does play a role in mass incarceration and offers some
policy direction. However, Pfaff shows that states and municipalities often ignore federal prescriptions, including
monetary incentives to adopt different approaches.
A second weakness Pfaff exposes in the standard account is that although nonviolent offenders get the most attention
from reformers, they account for less than 20 percent of all prisoners. Another complicating factor is that many drug
offenders can in fact be violent. Policy makers and reformers alike need to attend to violent crime, not because it is on
the rise--it is not--but because we need more nuanced responses to diverse individuals and forms of violence.
James Forman's Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America is no less erudite. Forman's style is
less pedantic and more engaging as he tells his personal story of serving as a public defender for six years in
Washington, D.C.
When Forman clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra O'Connor, she asked him why he wanted to be a public
defender. His clear response was that he believed that "today's civil rights struggle will be fought in the criminal justice
system."
As a public defender, Forman found himself on the other side of judges, prosecutors, police and victims who also
believed they were carrying the civil rights mantle of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His book tells the living passion play
of how all these actors contribute to a system that devastates African-American communities.
Just after the success of civil rights legislation in the 1960s, the first substantial cohort of African-American mayors,
judges and police chiefs gained office just when there was a major surge in crime. Documenting a full range of
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responses by African-American leaders and citizens over the past 40 years, Forman repudiates claims by defenders of
the criminal justice system that African-Americans protest police violence while ignoring violence by black criminals.
African-Americans have always viewed the protection of black lives as a civil rights issue, whether the threat comes
from the police or street criminals. Far from ignoring black-on-black crime, Forman implores, African-American
officials and citizens alike have been "consumed by it."
Both Forman and Michelle Alexander demonstrate how African-American distrust of the police runs as deep as the
nation's long history of police brutality and racism. After all, U.S. policing traces its roots to the control of slaves.
Forman and Alexander illuminate how shame operates in communities devastated by overlapping ills of poverty and
the racial bias of the dominant culture that associates blacks with criminality.
Forman's compassionate narrative interweaves the complexities of racial and class dynamics, especially in how
African-American political officials, police chiefs, judges and prosecutors came to support the punitive policies that
now ravage poor communities of color more than anyone else.
Neither Pfaff nor Forman softens the role of racism throughout the criminal justice system. Both unpack how the
system is fraught with racial disparities.
If we hope to regulate increased prosecutorial aggressiveness, Pfaff contends, we need to understand how prosecutors
operate. Sadly, unlike other dimensions of the criminal justice system, we know little to nothing of how they operate
because of a paucity of informative tracking data. Thus Pfaff calls prosecutors "the man behind the curtain," and their
offices "black boxes."
Pfaff urges thorough scrutiny of prosecutors and their offices. He exhaustively considers the role of tougher sentencing
laws; the role of "tough on crime" political rhetoric; the weakening of public defense; the fact that prosecutors rarely
face competitive elections; the ways prosecutors reap the political benefits of sending someone to prison while costs are
borne by the poor and the states; and the enduring role of implicit racial bias.
Until citizens and policy makers create ways to garner meaningful data in all of these areas, and develop more robust
means of prosecutorial accountability, as Pfaff puts it, we are "flying blind" with no real understanding of how
prosecution contributes to mass incarceration.
Pfaff and Forman lament how the public defender system is so woefully underfunded that in 43 states, indigent
defendants are required to pay some or all of their lawyer's costs. Pfaff is rightly enraged that making the poor pay for
their own constitutionally required lawyer is a mockery of everything for which the constitutional right to counsel
stands. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that many localities are running modern debtor's prisons, where the
failure to pay a fine results in the defendant getting locked up.
Turning his attention to the "broken politics of punishment," Pfaff detects multiple problems in punitive responses. One
of these is the "safety first" approach adopted by liberals and conservatives alike. The problem is that punishment
imposes heavy costs on offenders and their communities. Research and advocacy centers like the Pew Research Center
and the Brennan Center for Justice need to pay more attention to funding de-carceration policies that lead to better
employment opportunities for those released from prison.
Both texts should become required reading for students, citizens, activists and policy reformers interested in excavating
how our system of hyper-incarceration was constructed incrementally over decades. Their analyses of root causes and
extensive public policy prescriptions ought to instruct every reform debate. Otherwise, the reality of mass incarceration
is not only catching up with us; it is choking life and justice to death.
By Alex Mikulich
Alex Mikulich is the co-author of The Scandal of White Complicity in U.S. Hyper-incarceration: A Nonviolent
Spirituality of White Resistance (Palgrave MacMillan).
Caption: Locked In The True Causes of Mass Incarceration--and How to Achieve Real Reform By John F. Pfaff Basic
Books. 272p $27.99
Caption: Locking Up Our Own Crime and Punishment in Black America By James Forman Jr. Farrar, Straus and
Giroux. 320p $27
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Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Mikulich, Alex. "The problem of mass incarceration is more complicated than we thought." America, 20 Feb. 2017, p.
44+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA484157394&it=r&asid=8a2a9bc7aaf848ef72e05e81df61302e.
Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.
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When Black America was pro-police: as crime
rose from the late '60s to the '90s, so did innercity
support for law-and-order policies
Paul Butler
The Atlantic.
319.5 (June 2017): p37.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Atlantic Media, Ltd.
http://www.theatlantic.com
Full Text:
African Americans lament that the cops are never there when you need them--that "911 is a joke," as the Public Enemy
song goes--and then they complain that their communities are "overpoliced." These gripes aren't so much inconsistent
as they are underdeveloped, or they have been until now. James Forman Jr.'s revelatory new book, Locking Up Our
Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, sets out to describe how, and explain why, both complaints are valid
and what that means for criminal-justice reform.
If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, you might expect black folks, who are disproportionately victims of
crime, to support the politics of law and order. And they frequently have done just that, according to Forman, a former
public defender in Washington, D.C.; a co-founder of a D.C. charter school for at-risk youth; and now a professor at
Yale Law School. Using the District of Columbia (aka "Chocolate City") as his laboratory, Forman documents how, as
crime rose from the late 1960s to the '90s, the city's African American residents responded by supporting an array of
tough-on-crime measures. A 1975 measure decriminalizing marijuana died in the majority-black city council, which
went on to implement one of the nation's most stringent gun-control laws. Black residents endorsed a ballot initiative
that called for imposing harsh sentences on drug dealers and violent offenders. Replicated on a national level over the
same period, these policies led to mass incarceration and aggressive policing strategies like stop-and-frisk,
developments that are now looked upon as affronts to racial justice.
Much of what Forman reports would not surprise anyone who has spent time at a black church or a black barbershop--
or in the company of my mother. In the '60s, she marched with Malcolm X, and during the '80s, after the public school
where she taught was vandalized, she said, "Those niggers should be put under the jail." My mom's ideas about
criminal-justice policy are informed by getting held up at gunpoint in front of our house on Chicago's South Side,
seeing family members suffer from addiction, and watching the cops treat my stepfather like a criminal after he got into
a fender bender with a white man.
Needing the criminal-justice system to help keep you safe, to be fair in its investigations, and to be merciful with
people who've run afoul of the law--this urgent, unwieldy agenda explains much of African American politics, from the
anti-lynching campaigns of the early 20th century to the Black Lives Matter movement today. As Forman reminds his
readers, black people have long been vigilant, often to no avail, about two kinds of equality enshrined in our nation's
ideals: equal protection of the law, and equal justice under the law.
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The absence of equal protection has been, historically, the most vexing problem in the lives of African Americans. The
NAACP was founded in 1909 partly in response to the federal and state governments' turning a blind eye to white
violence against blacks. More than half a century later, as open-air drug markets flourished in inner-city neighborhoods,
black activists perceived a related form of racist neglect by the state. The police, they believed, would have shut down
those markets had they existed in white communities. In fact, as Forman notes, many activists thought that those in
power actually condoned the availability of drugs in the hood, as a means to keep the black man down. (In those days,
it was black men--rather than all black people--who were seen as principally injured by racism, a fallacy that made its
way into government policy under the guise of the controversial Moynihan Report in 1965.) The black radical Stokely
Carmichael, speaking at a historically black college in 1970, said, "Fighting against drugs is revolutionary because
drugs are a trick of the oppressor."
Back then, many white progressives were pro-pot, and disinclined to see drug prohibition as part of a revolutionary
utopia. African American suspicion of white liberals is a theme throughout Locking Up Our Own. One reason the 1975
effort to decriminalize marijuana in Washington, D.C., failed is that the bill's two primary supporters were white men.
Forman quotes the spoken-word artist Gil Scott-Heron's portrayal of a typical white member of Students for a
Democratic Society: "He is fighting for legalized smoke ... / All I want is a good home and a wife and children / And
some food to feed them every night."
Scott-Heron's very traditional wish list reveals another important explanation for black support of law and order. Not
for the first time, many middleclass African Americans subscribed to the "politics of respectability": The race
advances, the view goes, when black people demonstrate that they are capable of living up to white standards of
morality and conduct. Among the black elite, advocacy for lenient criminal-justice policies was deemed an admission
that black interests were allied with the interests of criminals. That sort of solidarity would hardly help the cause. For
many bougie African Americans--certainly those in cities like Washington and Atlanta, where light-skinned blacks
dominated the middle class--colorism was also at work: The fact that their dark-skinned hoodlum cousins were getting
locked up was not a problem. Indeed, one of the primary arguments for allowing African Americans to join Atlanta's
police department in the 1930s and '40s was that they would be better able than white officers to distinguish between
elite blacks and the riffraff.
As Forman tells the story, the politics of respectability converged with other cultural and social influences to shape
tough-on-crime attitudes in the black community. He builds on, among other things, two conclusions associated with
the work of the Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy. In Race, Crime, and the Law, Kennedy argues that
African Americans suffer more harm from underenforcement of the law than from overenforcement. He also notes that
"racist" can be, from the perspective of African Americans, an inaccurate way to describe criminal-justice policies that
burden primarily black criminals. Forman doesn't endorse these views. Rather, he demonstrates how influential they
were in the black body politic during an era of high crime.
At the same time, he avoids any hint of the "gotcha" spirit that some commentators found in Michael Javen Fortner's
Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, which mines similar territory.
Whereas Fortner's analysis could be read as a rejoinder to the Black Lives Matter movement--implying that early
support for harsh sentencing in drug cases undercut later critiques of the policy--Forman's experience as a D.C. public
defender gives him more street cred. His stories about clients make it clear that, however well-intentioned black
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middle-class power brokers were in fashioning conservative approaches to criminal justice, the policies that resulted
were devastating to the larger community.
Some of those stories will stay with me a long time. One woman lost her hard-won job at FedEx because she got
arrested for possessing a little bit of weed, and then couldn't get the job back even after the prosecutors dropped the
case. Her arrest record will follow her like a curse for the rest of her life, all because cops pulled her over, supposedly
for the infraction of driving a car with dark tinted windows. Though Brandon, a scared 15-year-old kid, had a gun, he
never used it. He was sent to jail for six months anyway when a cop found him carrying it (along with a small amount
of pot). Forman doe sn't tell us how things turned out for Brandon, but few boys sentenced to D.C.'s notorious Oak Hill
juvenile-detention facility left better off than they came in. Sending a nonviolent kid there was like sending him to a
finishing school for criminals.
I was a prosecutor in D.C. during part of the time that Forman writes about, and I have some stories too. I loved
standing in front of juries in my best suit, announcing my name and declaring that I represented the United States. (The
federal government is the primary local prosecutor in the capital, because of the city's status as a district and not a
state.) The jurors--often elderly black people--would beam at me, and I imagined them thinking, You go, boy, you
represent the United States! I didn't know the term politics of respectability at the time, but I did know how to crossexamine
a defendant (virtually every single one was black) and mock his diction and references to his "baby mama,"
and then button up my jacket and give the jury a look indicating that they and I were middleclass Negroes and the
defendant was a thug who needed to be locked up. I won most of my cases, and Forman's book helps me understand
that my trial-advocacy skills weren't the only reason.
But I didn't win all my cases, and that helps me understand that not all the black people in D.C. were as complicit as
Forman implies. When I was in training, various experienced prosecutors told us rookies that in some cases we would
convince the jury that the defendant was guilty. But if it was a drug case, jurors might find him not guilty because they
didn't want to send another young black man to jail. That did indeed happen, and when I left the prosecutor's office and
became a law professor, I learned that this practice of jury nullification is not simply legal. It is a check built into the
Constitution, through the double-jeopardy clause, which has been interpreted to mean that not-guilty verdicts cannot be
reversed for any reason. The purpose is to let the people, rather than a power-mad prosecutor of the kind I used to be,
have the final say in the fate of the accused.
I am not sure what Forman would make of the fact that in the nation's capital, widespread jury nullification in drug
cases coincided with the city council's passage of a law in 1994 that took away the right to a jury trial in many
misdemeanor cases. As a result, D.C. residents have fewer rights to a jury trial than do the residents of most states.
More-vivid evidence of deeply mixed impulses with perverse consequences would be hard to find: A law passed by a
majority-black city council protected prosecutors (who, though you won't learn this from Forman, remain majoritywhite)
from the judgment of majority-black juries.
Locking Up Our Own is a well-timed, nuanced examination of the past, but I am glad that the story it tells is over.
Beginning in the early '90s, crime went down dramatically across the country. It has continued, by and large, to decline.
Activists have turned their attention to mass incarceration and police violence. Even mainstream civil-rights
organizations now focus on reducing sentences and making the police more accountable and transparent. Gone are the
days when some black activists and politicians aimed to equip cops with more-powerful guns, as then-D.C. Mayor
Marion Barry wanted to do during the crack wave that began in the late '80s.
As everyone knows, Barry himself got caught up in that epidemic and eventually, like a lot of the African American
politicians who figure in Forman's account, changed his mind about what was in the best interests of the community. If
lawand-order policies had actually worked to make neighborhoods safer, maybe people would have been willing to
tolerate them, despite the racial disparities and erosions of civil liberties they entailed. But they did not work. Most
criminologists don't credit aggressive policing and harsh sentencing with substantially reducing crime, in part because
crime went down in jurisdictions that weren't relying on those policies.
At its best, democracy is about being creative and experimental, learning from mistakes and trying a different approach.
Locking Up Our Own makes a powerful case that the African American community was instrumental in creating a
monster. We should be grateful that the same community--from nullifying D.C. jurors and Black Lives Matter activists
to writers like Michelle Alexander and artists like Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar--is leading the fight to take the
monster down.
The Culture File
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LOOKING UP OUR OWN: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN BLACK AMERICA
JAMES FORMAN JR. FSG
Paul Butler is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. His new book, Chokehold: Policing Black Men, will
be published in July.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Butler, Paul. "When Black America was pro-police: as crime rose from the late '60s to the '90s, so did inner-city
support for law-and-order policies." The Atlantic, June 2017, p. 37+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA496344360&it=r&asid=9efade91dc9768db0811edc5d92a5e8c.
Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A496344360

"Forman Jr., James: LOCKING UP OUR OWN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482911533&it=r. Accessed 27 Sept. 2017. "Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America." Publishers Weekly, 9 Jan. 2017, p. 54. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477339325&it=r. Accessed 27 Sept. 2017. Davis, Thomas J. "Forman, James. Locking up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America." Library Journal, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 103. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481649167&it=r. Accessed 27 Sept. 2017. Levine, Mark. "Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 15+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481244734&it=r. Accessed 27 Sept. 2017. Mikulich, Alex. "The problem of mass incarceration is more complicated than we thought." America, 20 Feb. 2017, p. 44+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA484157394&it=r. Accessed 27 Sept. 2017. Butler, Paul. "When Black America was pro-police: as crime rose from the late '60s to the '90s, so did innercity support for law-and-order policies." The Atlantic, June 2017, p. 37+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA496344360&it=r. Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/books/review-locking-up-our-own-james-forman-jr.html?mcubz=0
  Word count: 1488

  ‘Locking Up Our Own,’ What Led to Mass Incarceration of Black Men
  Books of The Times
  By JENNIFER SENIOR APRIL 11, 2017
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  A police captain in Washington hangs a recruiting poster announcing police examinations to be given in predominantly black neighborhoods in 1968. Credit D.C. Public Library
  LOCKING UP OUR OWN
  Crime and Punishment in Black America
  By James Forman Jr.
  Illustrated. 306 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $27.

  James Forman Jr. divides his superb and shattering first book, “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America,” into two parts: “Origins” and “Consequences.” But the temptation is to scribble in, before “Consequences,” a modifier: “Unforeseen.” That is truly what this book is about, and what makes it tragic to the bone: How people, acting with the finest of intentions and the largest of hearts, could create a problem even more grievous than the one they were trying to solve.

  Photo

  Credit Patricia Wall/The New York Times
  Forman opens with a story from 1995, when, as a public defender in Washington, he unsuccessfully tried to keep a 15-year-old out of a juvenile detention center with a grim reputation. Looking around the courtroom, he realized that everyone associated with the case was African-American: the judge, the prosecutor, the bailiff. The arresting officer was black, as was the city’s police chief, its mayor and the majority of the city council that had written the stringent gun and drug laws his client had violated.

  “What was going on?” Forman asks. “How did a majority-black jurisdiction end up incarcerating so many of its own?”

  This is the exceptionally delicate question that he tries to answer, with exemplary nuance, over the course of his book. His approach is compassionate. Seldom does he reprimand the actors in this story for the choices they made.

  Photo

  A special 1979 issue of Ebony magazine addressing a crisis. Credit Ebony Magazine
  Instead, he opts for dramatic irony. When he discusses policy decisions first made in the 1970s, the audience knows what’s eventually coming — that a grossly disproportionate number of African-American men will become ensnared in the criminal justice system — but none of the players do. Not the clergy or the activists; not the police chiefs or the elected officials; not the newspaper columnists or the grieving parents. The legions of African-Americans who lobbied for more punitive measures to fight gun violence and drug dealing in their own neighborhoods didn’t know that their real-time responses to crises would result in the inhuman outcome of mass incarceration.

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  The effect, for the reader, is devastating. It is also politically consequential. Conservatives could look at this book and complain, for example, that Michelle Alexander underemphasized black enthusiasm for stricter law enforcement in her influential best seller, “The New Jim Crow.” But it’s also possible, reading Forman’s work, to stand that argument on its head. One of the most cherished shibboleths of the right is that African-Americans complain about police brutality while conveniently overlooking the violence in their own neighborhoods.

  “Far from ignoring the issue of crime by blacks against other blacks,” Forman writes, “African-American officials and their constituents have been consumed by it.”

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  Forman does not minimize the influence of racism on mass incarceration. And he takes great pains to emphasize that African-Americans almost inevitably agitated for more than just law-enforcement solutions to the problems facing their neighborhoods — they argued for job and housing programs, improvements in education. But their timing in stumping for social programs was terrible. “Such efforts had become an object of ridicule by 1975, a symbol of the hopeless naïveté of 1960s liberalism,” Forman writes.

  One result: A wide range of African-American leaders championed tougher penalties for drug crimes and gun possession in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. It was the one option they consistently had, and it seemed a perfectly responsible, moral position. Wasn’t the safety of black law-abiding citizens a basic civil right?

  The list of those who voiced support for such measures may today seem surprising. It includes Maxine Waters, the current California congresswoman, back when she was a state assemblywoman, and Johnnie Cochran, when he was an assistant district attorney in Los Angeles. In 1988, when running for president, Jesse Jackson told The Chicago Tribune: “No one has the right to kill our children. I won’t take it from the Klan with a rope; I won’t take it from a neighbor with dope.”

  Photo

  The author James Forman Jr. Credit Harold Shapiro
  Eric Holder, who would become Barack Obama’s attorney general, may have played the most astonishing role in escalating the war on crime. During the mid-90s, when he was the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, he started Operation Ceasefire, an initiative that gave Washington police wide latitude to stop cars and search them for guns. “I’m not going to be naïve about it,” Holder said at a community meeting in 1995. “The people who will be stopped will be young black males, overwhelmingly.”

  He knew the roots of crime were complex. He said so in interviews. But his immediate concern was reducing harm in the present.

  That Forman alights on Holder is not an accident. Part of the power of “Locking Up Our Own” is that it’s about Washington — not the swamp of deceit merchants and influence-peddlers that Donald J. Trump promised to drain, but a majority-black city that hundreds of thousands call home, regardless of whose bum is in the Oval Office. Washington only first got the chance to elect its own mayor and city council in 1975, and the city’s coming-of-age story — and the challenges it faced — in some ways mirrored that of other cities with large African-American populations, like Atlanta and Detroit.

  Photo

  A mobile recruiting station in Oakland, Calif., in 1967. Credit Oakland Police Department
  “Locking Up Our Own” is also very poignantly a book of the Obama era, when black authors like Alexander and Bryan Stevenson and Ta-Nehisi Coates initiated difficult conversations about racial justice and inequality, believing that their arguments might, for once, gain more meaningful traction. (Often, in fact, they said things the president, burdened with the duty to represent everyone, might not have felt free to say himself.)

  Forman is a professor at Yale Law School and a co-founder of an alternative charter school for dropouts in Washington. (He’s also the son of the Civil Rights leader of the same name.) But it’s his six years as a public defender that seem most relevant to the sensibility of this book — and that give it a special halo, setting it apart. The stories he shares are not just carefully curated to make us think differently about criminal justice (though they will, particularly about that hallowed distinction between nonviolent drug offenders and everyone else); they are stories that made Forman himself think differently, and it’s in telling them that he sheds his cautious, measured self and becomes a brokenhearted, frustrated civil servant.

  “So what?” he crankily replies, when a judge tells him his client is ineligible for a drug program because her attempts at rehab have failed in the past. “Our system,” he later writes, “never treated the failure of prison as a reason not to try more prison.”

  Follow Jennifer Senior on Twitter: @jenseniorny

  A version of this review appears in print on April 12, 2017, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A War With Unintended Consequences. Today's Paper|Subscribe

• San Francisco Chronicle
  http://www.sfchronicle.com/books/article/Locking-Up-Our-Own-and-When-Police-11101511.php
  Word count: 1034

  Books

  ‘Locking Up Our Own’ and ‘When Police Kill’
  By Richard Thompson FordApril 26, 2017

  0

  "Locking Up Our Own"
  IMAGE 1 OF 4 "Locking Up Our Own"
  Black lives matter. Today, this stands for opposition to aggressive policing and punitive criminal sentencing. But in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, as a violent drug trade snuffed out or ruined countless black lives, more assertive policing in black communities was considered a civil rights imperative. Does racial justice require sympathy for criminal suspects who are disproportionately people of color or a crackdown on the criminals who victimize the residents of poor neighborhoods? Yale Law School professor and former public defender James Forman Jr. addresses this question in his poignant and insightful new book, “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.”

  Were tough-on-crime policies foisted on black communities by racist white politicians and police? “Locking Up Our Own” tells a more complicated story. Black communities desperate for relief from a plague of drugs and drug-related crime did not foresee the downsides of aggressive law enforcement and demanded law and order: “Mass incarceration,” Forman writes, “is the result of small, distinct steps, each of whose significance becomes more apparent over time, and only when considered in light of later events.”

  At first, the so-called War on Drugs had the support of civil rights leaders and black politicians desperate to stop the flow of drugs — first heroin, later PCP and finally crack cocaine — into minority communities. During the drug crises of the 1970s and 1980s, the inner-city drug dealer was considered not only a dangerous criminal but also a traitor to his race. In the early 1980s, black newspapers such as the Los Angeles Sentinel called for drug dealers to be “tarred and feathered, burned at the stake, castrated.”

  Forman’s book includes the story of Washington, D.C., vigilante librarian Tony Hillary, pictured with a determined scowl and a pistol in each hand, reminding the reader that African Americans living in crime-ridden neighborhoods were as likely to condone Dirty Harry-style justice as suburban whites. Indeed, under zero-tolerance policies embraced by many black political leaders, casual drug users were condemned along with drug kingpins: For instance, in the 1980s, Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry threatened the confiscation of assets and long prison terms for anyone “caught with half a gram of cocaine [or] one marijuana joint.”

  Forman deftly moves between such examples of black community support for a law-and-order crackdown and the dire present-day consequences of our increasingly punitive and aggressive war on crime. He reminds us that the United States is home to 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prisoners. He shows the human costs of mandatory minimum criminal sentences and zero-tolerance law enforcement through the stories of his clients in Washington, D.C., such as a sensitive young man who joined a gang for protection; a diligent working woman who lost her job after being caught with a small amount of marijuana; a talented but delinquent high school student raised by a drug-addicted single mother. Caught up in a merciless criminal justice system that refuses to distinguish between hardened criminals and recreational drug users or between youthful indiscretions and remorseless predation, these men and women suffered life-altering punishments for offenses that are often overlooked or forgiven in wealthier communities.

  Aggressive law enforcement tactics were a predictable reaction to heavily armed criminals who routinely outgunned police. Indeed, even as support for the War on Drugs waned in the black community, zero tolerance for gun-related crimes remained popular. Forman notes that in the early 1990s, Eric Holder, then U.S attorney for the District of Columbia, advocated the use of pretextual traffic stops and searches to uncover concealed weapons — a version of the now-infamous “driving while black” policing. Holder acknowledged that black drivers would be stopped disproportionately, but noted that “94% of black homicide victims were slain by black assailants.” African American politicians and their constituents accepted increasingly punitive and indiscriminate law enforcement as the only available response to pervasive violent crime.

  As UC Berkeley Law Professor Franklin E. Zimring writes in his meticulously researched book, “When Police Kill,” African Americans today are 2.3 times more likely to be killed by police than are whites. What’s worse, American police officers kill far more often than do police in other countries because of the risks of American policing: “[T]he threat of lethal attack is a palpable part of being a police officer in the United States,” Zimring writes.

  American police are 25 times more likely to be killed in the line of duty than police in the United Kingdom and 40 times more likely than police in Germany — a difference explained almost entirely by the availability of firearms. Guns are used in between 90 and 97 percent of all fatal attacks on police, and police respond to this risk with preemptive lethal force: Almost 60 percent of the roughly 1,000 civilians killed by American police every year were armed with a gun or something that looked like a gun. The easy availability of guns is a crisis for both police and the communities they patrol most assertively.

  Discriminatory policing is an ongoing scandal that deserves forceful condemnation, but, as these timely and important books suggest, prejudice alone does not account for the manifest injustices in contemporary law enforcement and criminal justice. Although racism undoubtedly plays a role in support for mass incarceration, zero-tolerance criminal sentencing and aggressive policing, tragically these deeply flawed practices are understandable overreactions — by both police and citizens of all races — to reasonable fears.

  Richard Thompson Ford teaches at Stanford Law School and is the author of several books, including “The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse” and “Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality.” Email: books@sfchronicle.com

  Locking Up Our Own

  Crime and Punishment in Black America

  By James Forman Jr.

  (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 306 pages; $27)

  When Police Kill

  By Franklin E. Zimring

  (Harvard University Press; 305 pages; $35)

• London Review of Books
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  Vol. 39 No. 9 · 4 May 2017
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  Out of Sight, Out of Mind
  Adam Shatz
  Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman
  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 306 pp, £21.98, April, ISBN 978 0 374 18997 6
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  One of the great paradoxes of the Obama era is that it encouraged so many liberals, both black and white, to see the black experience in America not as a slow, arduous struggle for freedom culminating in the election of a black president – Obama’s version, not surprisingly – but as an unending nightmare. Not least among the reasons was that a black man of unerring self-discipline and caution, bipartisan to a fault, should have provoked such ferocious white resistance – fanned by the man who questioned the validity of his birth certificate and then succeeded him as president. This most eloquent champion of ‘post-racialism’ may have been the most powerful man in the world, yet he remained a prisoner of his race, of his ‘black body,’ as Ta-Nehisi Coates put it in Between the World and Me.​1 In the face of repeated police shootings of young black men or atrocities such as the church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, Obama did little more than deliver one of his formidable speeches. And – as he did in Charleston – sing ‘Amazing Grace’, as if only a higher power could cure America of its original sin, and end the nightmare.

  That nightmare began in the early 17th century, when Africans were packed into slave ships and transported to the American colonies, where they – or those who survived the Middle Passage – were sold at auction, stripped naked for the perusal of prospective buyers. With the defeat of the South in the Civil War – by 1804, all the northern states had abolished slavery – four million slaves won their freedom. Under the protection of federal troops, they gained the right to vote, and to elect representatives to state legislatures and the US Congress, in the unfinished revolution known as Reconstruction. But the forces of white supremacy in the former Confederacy proved resilient and inventive, and succeeded in overturning the gains of Reconstruction: black captivity wasn’t liquidated so much as reconfigured. When the last federal soldiers left the South in 1877, Southern legislatures passed a series of laws that mandated segregation in public facilities (housing, schools, restaurants, drinking fountains and bathrooms), and banned interracial marriage. White tyranny was also enforced by a sharecropping system that kept black farmers tied to the land; a ‘poll tax’ and literacy tests that prevented blacks from voting; elaborate codes of deference to white authority that black men defied at risk to their lives; and lynchings, which many whites attended with their families for pleasure. (Between 1877 and 1950, nearly four thousand black men were lynched.) This brutal racial caste system, which lasted from the late 19th century until the mid-1960s, when the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were signed into law, was known as ‘Jim Crow’ (the origins of the term remain mysterious). Perhaps the greatest lie of Jim Crow was that segregation meant ‘separate but equal’. During and after the First World War, many of the South’s black captives voted with their feet in the ‘Great Migration’ to the North. They settled in the slums of Chicago, New York and Los Angeles under a form of residential segregation they would discover to be no less thorough, and sometimes no less ruthless, for being ‘de facto’ rather than ‘de jure’. As Malcolm X remarked, ‘the Mason-Dixon line begins at the Canadian border.’

  In 1964 even Nina Simone, no racial optimist, could sing ‘Old Jim Crow, don’t you know, it’s all over now!’ But in the early 1990s, many blacks started to wonder if they were becoming victims of a new Jim Crow. Its targets appeared at first glance to be more limited – young black people who committed drug-related crimes, rather than blacks as a caste – but its reach was national, and the lure of the drug economy would prove hard for poor blacks to resist.

  By the early 2000s, the number of Americans behind bars had grown from 350,000 in 1972 to more than two million, and an increasing proportion were black: a larger percentage, in fact, than in apartheid South Africa. The risk that an African American would be incarcerated at some point in their lifetime had doubled since Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation; and more black adults were under the control of the criminal justice system – whether in prison, on probation or on parole – than were enslaved in 1850. Once again, it seemed, the defeat of one system of racial oppression had given birth to another, only this one was concealed by the ennobling rhetoric of ‘colour-blindness’, as well as the fact that it appeared to be protecting Americans from crime. As the contours of this system of mass incarceration became visible – inspiring television shows like The Wire and Orange Is the New Black – the New Jim Crow thesis travelled from black radio and the church to academic journals. Its most articulate exponent was Michelle Alexander, a professor of law and civil rights attorney who had at one time considered the comparison between Jim Crow and mass incarceration ‘absurd’. In her study The New Jim Crow (2010), she argued that the new version differed from the old only in ‘the language we use to justify it’:

  Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of colour ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind … Once you’re labelled a felon, the old forms of discrimination – employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service – are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

  Alexander’s argument was a fairly straightforward backlash thesis. Just as Jim Crow was an attempt by Southern whites to roll back the gains former slaves had won during Reconstruction, so the New Jim Crow was designed to reverse the progress black people had been making since the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. Now that brazen appeals to racism had fallen out of fashion, they had to be replaced by the more insidious rhetoric of ‘cracking down on crime’. When Nixon devised his ‘Southern strategy’ to win over the white ‘silent majority’ in the 1968 presidential elections, his slogan was ‘law and order’. The blurring of the distinction between criminality and protest appealed to whites who were as frightened by the uprisings in Harlem, Watts, Newark and other places as they were by the rise of urban crime and heroin use. As Nixon’s advisor H.R. Haldeman recalled, Nixon ‘emphasised that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognises this while not appearing to.’ The result, Alexander argued, was a system far less vulnerable to civil rights protest than the old Jim Crow, because it was insulated from charges of bias by ‘colour-blind’ language, and also because it no longer required ‘racial hostility or overt bigotry to thrive’, only ‘racial indifference’, which was plentiful among whites who felt that blacks no longer had cause for complaint. The system was further strengthened by its spatial isolation: prisoners were out of sight and out of mind.

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  Nixon, who declared the first War on Drugs in 1971, presided over the birth of mass incarceration, but there was a dramatic escalation under Reagan, who launched his own War on Drugs in 1982, at a time when less than 2 per cent of Americans considered drugs to be the most important issue facing the country. This was also the year crack arrived, devastating poor black neighbourhoods already shaken by the loss of industrial jobs. In 1970, about 70 per cent of black employees in urban centres had blue-collar jobs; by 1987, the figure was 28 per cent. As poor black neighbourhoods fell prey to crack, even ostensibly liberal magazines such as the New Republic were full of lurid stories about ‘crack whores’, ‘crack mothers’ and their ‘crack babies’. Rather than expand rehabilitation and treatment programmes for addicts, the federal government, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, responded with increasingly punitive measures, in particular mandatory minimum sentences; police procedures that seemed to ignore the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures; and the use of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams, paramilitary units often advised by soldiers who served in America’s overseas wars and military occupations.​2 Like any war, the War on Drugs led to profiteering: police officers made drug busts with an eye to seizing assets (cash, homes, cars), which, through revenue-sharing agreements with the federal government, the police were allowed to keep for their own use. Police departments, prison administrators and towns where prisons were located all had considerable investments in the war economy.

  Although a similar proportion of black people and white people use drugs, blacks have always been disproportionately affected by the War on Drugs. SWAT teams seldom sweep through the suburbs in search of white cocaine users. Under the ‘100-1 rule’, anyone caught with fifty grams of crack was sentenced to ten years in prison, while dealers of powder cocaine had to be caught with five kilos – a suitcase full – to receive a comparable sentence. (The disparity was reduced in 2010 to 18-1.) Young black men, not white teenagers, have been the principal targets of arbitrary searches, which the Supreme Court ruled that police officers could conduct if they had a ‘reasonable articulable suspicion’ that the target might be involved in criminal activity. The court also sanctioned the so-called ‘pretext stop’, in which police use trivial traffic violations as an excuse to search for drugs or weapons – a practice applied to black drivers six times more frequently than to whites. According to a highway patrol officer quoted by Alexander, ‘You’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince.’ The court has proved largely indifferent to these racial disparities, on the grounds that they do not constitute lawful discrimination unless discriminatory intent can be proved, which is almost impossible.

  By 2000, black people were being imprisoned for drug offences at a rate 26 times higher than in 1983. (The rate for whites increased by a factor of eight; for Latinos, 22.) What’s more, Alexander showed that once you’ve been sentenced for a drug felony, you’re effectively sentenced for life. Having a record is enough; it doesn’t matter whether or not you’ve actually served time. You become a member of a despised ‘undercaste’, excluded from, and ostracised by, mainstream society. You are ineligible for welfare and food stamps, and can be banned from federally funded public housing, thanks to laws passed by Bill Clinton, who transformed the Democratic Party into a tough-on-crime party. (One reason Hillary Clinton was so unpopular among ‘woke’ young black voters was her support for such policies – which she belatedly apologised for – as well as her racially inflammatory talk of ‘super predators’.) If you want to restore your right to vote, you have to go through a bureaucratic process as onerous as the poll taxes and literacy tests of Jim Crow. Prosecutors can disqualify you from serving on a jury, without explanation. If you try to get a job, you’re likely to read in the employer’s advertisement a warning that felons are not welcome; this is perfectly legal. This cycle of punishment, shaming and exclusion all adds up to a more or less permanent condition of internal exile – what Orlando Patterson, in his 1982 book on slavery, called ‘social death’. Orange may be the new black on American television, but off screen – as a minister in Mississippi told Alexander – ‘felon’ is ‘the new n-word’. Except that the ‘genius of the new system of control’ is that ‘felon’ isn’t a racial epithet and ‘can always be defended on non-racial grounds’.

  *

  For much of the 1980s and 1990s, when the War on Drugs was at its height, it could count on a significant measure of support from black leaders and politicians, as Alexander herself concedes. Black people had often supported policies such as harsher sentencing laws, if only because they were more likely to live, or know someone who lived, in crime-ridden neighbourhoods. They had also been denied better options, such as an infusion of jobs and investment in the inner cities: the domestic Marshall Plan many black politicians had long championed. Worse, the ‘politics of respectability’, a prim, middle-class tradition of black protest, had led civil rights leaders to turn away in shame and embarrassment from convicts, the ‘most stigmatised members of the community’, and to focus instead on traditional, consensual demands such as affirmative action and civil rights enforcement. That the New Jim Crow was built and sustained with so little organised opposition from the people it most affected – and, indeed, with their ‘complicity’ – was nearly as scathing an indictment of the civil rights leadership as it was of white America.

  The New Jim Crow was initially ignored by the white intellectual establishment, which gave as little credence to its thesis as Alexander herself once had, but thanks to black readers it became a surprise bestseller and inspired a wave of new scholarship, as well as documentaries such as Ava Duvernay’s 13th (in which Alexander appears), about the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except, crucially, as punishment for a crime. Alexander’s thesis was embraced not only because she provided such extensive documentation for her argument, but because she gave a name to a scandalous reality: the unfreedom in which an increasing proportion of America’s black population lived, more than half a century after the end of legal segregation. In effect, she gave mainstream credibility to something many in black America had long suspected: that the mass imprisonment of black Americans amounts to a continuation of white supremacy, however much it is veiled by the colour-blind rhetoric of fighting crime; that black and brown people serving time for drug offences are prisoners of war, a war, moreover, that can never be won. The New Jim Crow has exerted an influence enjoyed by few other works of social science in America, transforming the way many Americans, of all races, understand their society. It has become ‘the secular bible for a new social movement in early 21st-century America’, Cornel West writes in his introduction to the 2012 edition. It is in no small part thanks to Alexander’s account that civil rights organisations such as Black Lives Matter, which emerged in 2013 in protest against police killings, have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s powerful memoir rode this wave of indignation, but Alexander helped create the wave.

  It is difficult to criticise a bible, particularly one written with as much insight, rhetorical power and moral authority as The New Jim Crow. When James Forman, a law professor at Yale and the son of a prominent civil rights activist, first presented his criticisms of Alexander’s argument, colleagues nervously asked him why he was ‘critiquing a point of view that is so aligned with your own’. He agreed with Alexander that mass incarceration had turned convicted criminals into members of a stigmatised caste, condemned to second-class citizenship. He also agreed that one of the most destructive effects of mass incarceration was to lead the wider society to see poor black men as potential threats, social outcasts whose rights could be violated with impunity. But he believed that Alexander’s thesis obscured ‘some important truths’. One of them, he wrote in a 2012 paper entitled ‘Beyond the New Jim Crow’, is that mass incarceration is confined to ‘the poorest, least educated segments’ of black communities, much as it is among whites, still the largest group in US prisons. It could not therefore be said to ‘define’ the black condition, in the way that Jim Crow, whose restrictions affected all black citizens in the South, once did.

  Another gap in what he called ‘the New Jim Crow thesis’ was the importance of violent crime, as opposed to non-violent drug offences, in the rise of mass incarceration. While Alexander insisted that ‘nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of colour in the United States than the War on Drugs,’ Forman pointed out that only 25 per cent of America’s 2.3 million prisoners are drug offenders. Even if all of them were released tomorrow, America would still have the largest prison system in the world, and many of its inmates would be black and Latino men convicted of violent crimes. Nixon’s war on crime may have been cynical, but he wasn’t lying about the crimewave itself: reported street crime quadrupled, and homicides doubled, between 1959 and 1971. And as crime, particularly violent crime, surged in the inner city, so did black support for tough-on-crime policies, with the result that blacks were ‘actors in determining the policies that sustain mass incarceration in ways simply unimaginable to past generations’. This support went deeper than ‘complicity’, to borrow Alexander’s term; it often reflected a ‘pro-black’ concern for people living in neighbourhoods white police had neglected, precisely because whites didn’t live there. In fact, the incarceration rates in Washington, DC, the black-majority city where Forman worked as a public defender, were roughly equal to those in cities where black people had far less influence over sentencing policy. Racial bias alone could hardly explain why a ‘chocolate city’ like DC was locking up so many of its own.

  Forman’s eloquent new book, Locking Up Our Own, is about the politics of race, crime and punishment in DC. A gritty, often revelatory work of local history, interspersed with tales of Forman’s experiences as a public defender, it is a much quieter book than The New Jim Crow, more sombre in tone and more modest in its aims: it is not the kind of book that inspires a movement. As in his paper on The New Jim Crow, Forman isn’t interested so much in debunking Alexander’s account as in supplying richer contingency, irony and complexity. Where she sees a clear political project driving the growth of the prison system, he sees a series of small steps that, together, created something monstrous and seemingly indestructible. To borrow the terminology used by historians of the Final Solution, he is a ‘functionalist’, while she is an ‘intentionalist’. Another difference between them is his belief that blacks helped to create this system, driven less by shamefaced ‘complicity’ than by a desire to protect other black lives. Washington’s citizens, activists and politicians chose to lock up their own, Forman argues, often with the best of intentions, and with consequences most would come to regret.

  *

  The rise of mass incarceration in the early 1970s was, of course, fuelled by white fear of black crime. But the fear of crime wasn’t confined to whites. Blacks in inner cities had far more reason to be afraid: they lived in poor areas where crime was more widespread, and where the police were often absent. White defenders of the police – the ‘Blue Lives Matter’ movement – often claim that inner-city blacks protest only in cases of police violence, never against the actions of black criminals. On the contrary, Forman writes, ‘African Americans have always viewed the protection of black lives as a civil rights issue, whether the threat comes from police officers or street criminals.’ Under-policing, a systematic negligence of black safety, has angered them as much as over-policing: harassment, brutality and unprovoked killings.​3

  Forman reminds us of something buried in Alexander’s account: ‘the astonishing levels of pain, fear and anger’ that gripped black communities during the heroin epidemic of the late 1960s. By June 1969, Forman notes, 45 per cent of the men in DC jails were heroin addicts; two years later, there were 15 times as many addicts in the capital as in all of England. ‘This was a black nation fresh off the battlefields of Selma and Watts,’ and ‘few doubted that blacks were a minority tribe under continual assault.’ Drugs were the latest existential threat to the nation’s survival – in Stokely Carmichael’s words, ‘a trick of the oppressor’ to keep down the black man. Hassan Jeru-Ahmed, a community activist and former heroin addict, criticised methadone programmes as ‘substituting one addiction for another’, and railed against drug dealers as ‘black-face traitors of our people who sell dope to our young boys and girls and make whores and thieves of them’. The sign outside the organisation he ran in the late 1960s, the Blackman’s Development Centre, read: ‘THIS IS DRUG CURE, NOT METHADONE MAINTENANCE.’ Styling itself as a nationalist anti-drug paramilitary group, the BDC fought heroin use by any means necessary, sometimes reporting users to the police or turning in dealers, sometimes meting out popular justice.

  The BDC disintegrated, but one of Hassan’s spiritual protégés, a local nationalist called Douglas Moore, took up his cause in the mid-1970s on the city council. Long controlled by racist Southern Democrats, DC won the right to elect its own mayor in 1973, when Congress passed the Home Rule Act; a year later, it elected a black mayor, Walter E. Washington, thereby joining a group of major cities led by black politicians. A number of these cities – Cleveland, Detroit, Newark – would be ravaged by deindustrialisation, but at the time they were laboratories for black political power. Washington’s victory was particularly sweet. It inspired the cover art of Parliament’s album Chocolate City, depicting the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building ‘coated in chocolate’. ‘They still call it the White House,’ George Clinton said on the title track, ‘but that’s a temporary condition, too.’

  In 1975, David Clarke, a white civil rights lawyer on the city council, introduced a proposal to decriminalise marijuana possession. He pointed out that marijuana arrests had increased by 900 per cent, that 80 per cent of those arrested were black, and that these arrests could leave a ‘lifelong stigma’. Whites in DC mostly supported the reform, which they saw through the lens of civil liberties and individual freedom. But Douglas Moore, who led the opposition to Clarke’s proposal, argued that marijuana was a gateway to heroin, and therefore a threat to black empowerment. ‘I want a strong, virile black thinking population,’ he said, and decriminalising pot would ‘make it possible for more black children who cannot think already to keep them from thinking’. Moore was echoed by the Superior Court judge John Fauntleroy, one of DC’s first black justices, and by Andrew Fowler, an influential black pastor. That Clarke was white made the policy of decriminalisation particularly susceptible to attack. Some, like Moore, suspected a plot to weaken blacks (he would later oppose gun control for the same reason); others accused white liberals like Clarke of ignoring the destructive effects of drug addiction on an oppressed community that had only recently won the right to vote. The Marijuana Reform Act was passed by eight votes to four, but it needed to be voted on a second time, and the black church lobbied successfully for its defeat.

  Among the fiercest advocates of harsher sentencing for drug offences were black police officers. Forman tells the ambiguous story of these ‘representatives of their race’ in a remarkable chapter on the career of Burtell Jefferson, who became DC’s chief of police in 1978. Born in 1925, Jefferson grew up in an era when the mere idea of joining the police was unfathomable for blacks. The city of his youth was Southern and segregated, and like most Southern police forces, Washington’s had grown out of the slave patrols whose purpose was to control, discipline and punish blacks. Police brutality was common in black DC, and was almost never punished, even when it resulted in death. When the first black officers were hired, they were assigned to black neighbourhoods like the 9th Ward, never to white areas. Jefferson started out in the 9th Ward, and with his friend and fellow black officer Tilmon O’Bryant, organised a study group to train black officers for the exam they needed to pass to be promoted. The Jefferson study class became legendary: not only did it result in the integration of the police force at higher ranks, it launched the careers of more than twenty senior black police officers, who went on to work in other major cities. ‘But that’s where the celebration ends,’ Forman writes. For all his efforts to end discrimination inside the police force, Jefferson did little to curb discriminatory policing, or police brutality, in black neighbourhoods. He also became a defender of the War on Drugs, and of mandatory minimum sentences that undermined the discretion of judges in favour of prosecutors.

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  As Forman emphasises, Jefferson was hardly unusual. The National Organisation of Black Police Executives also called for a ‘nationwide war on drugs’ and mandatory minimums. The integration of a white-dominated police force was, of course, a civil rights victory, but did black police officers behave any differently from whites when they were patrolling the inner city, as civil rights activists had hoped? Some early studies indicated that black officers tended to perform better than whites in black neighbourhoods, but whatever racial kinship they felt was often frayed by class difference, not to mention the stress and danger of police work, and they were sometimes harsher than whites in punishing minor crimes. ‘It turned out that a surprising number of black officers simply didn’t like other black people – at least not the poor blacks they tended to police.’

  *

  In The New Jim Crow, Alexander depicts the War on Drugs as a war on black America, but, as Forman shows, the war intensified already existing class divisions among blacks. When open-air drug markets began to emerge in DC in the late 1970s, local activists and politicians joined Burtell Jefferson in calling for longer mandatory drug sentences, including 15 years for the sale of heroin. In 1982, John Ray, a black city councilman, proposed a bill to introduce mandatory minimums for violent offenders and drug dealers. It passed with 73 per cent of the vote; the only precinct where it failed to attract a majority was a wealthy, mostly white area near Georgetown. As Forman notes, the racial impact of mandatory minimums had not yet made itself felt, and the notion of ‘non-violent drug offenders’ was inconceivable: drugs and violence were all but synonymous. For black people in working-class neighbourhoods, most of whom did not use drugs, harsher sentences and tougher policing provided a short-term fix in the absence of a national commitment to provide the investment, jobs and schools that might have addressed the root causes of crime. By the early 1980s, they were worried that unless extreme measures were taken, their communities would be destroyed.

  But things were about to get worse: the crack epidemic of the mid-1980s caused far more destruction than heroin had, partly because of the nature of the high, but largely because it arrived as factories moved overseas, the urban economy was gutted, and the Reagan administration slashed protections for the poor. Concentrated in slums that middle-class and even working-class blacks had fled for the suburbs, the black poor had never been more vulnerable. In the famous words of an NAACP leader, crack was ‘the worst thing to hit us since slavery’. DC became America’s ‘Murder Capital’, as guns, including Uzis and other military-grade weapons, poured into the city; around half of the 483 murder victims in 1990 were black and under 25. During the Gulf War, the army sent surgeons to train in DC hospitals, on the grounds that they had ‘begun to resemble military trauma units’.

  Hardly anyone was left unscathed, thanks not only to the drug dealers, but to the police, emboldened by the ‘warrior’ style of law enforcement that took hold in some cities in the 1980s. Forman witnessed this while working in a charter school he helped found. His students – many of whom had lost relatives to violence, addiction and prison – were frequent targets of police raids. All of them were black, but so were most of the officers. Whenever his pupils gathered outside the school, they were at risk of a ‘stop-and-frisk’ search, in which they were forced to ‘assume the position’: legs spread, faces to the wall, hands behind their heads. They were a potential threat merely because they were on the street in a ‘high-crime’ community.

  For most whites, cities like DC might as well have been Baghdad. Whites, who never doubted that the police’s job was to protect their lives and property, adjusted rather easily to the expansion of police powers over black Americans. They were mostly unmoved by the argument that drug use and crime among poor blacks were the result of economic deprivation, discrimination and racism, or that society had a responsibility to remedy these problems. The military revolution in American policing was never evident in their communities, although it would be portrayed on TV shows where the police were seen as modern-day gladiators.

  Forman is well aware that ‘racialised fear’ drove the federal government’s response to crack, particularly the 100-1 cocaine-crack sentencing ratio. But he shows that black leaders also embraced the war rhetoric, not so much to placate whites as to reassure black people of their commitment to black safety. In his 1988 presidential campaign, Jesse Jackson proclaimed himself ‘the general in this war to fight drugs’; Charles Rangel, Harlem’s longest-serving congressional representative and one of the most powerful figures in New York’s black political machine, was second to none in his opposition to drug decriminalisation. There were 130 police departments led by black police chiefs, including Ike Fulwood, who became DC’s senior police official in 1989, a year after the city’s ‘year of shame’, marked by a series of crack-related murders. A protégé of Burtell Jefferson, Fulwood was intimately acquainted with the impact of the drug war: his brother Teddy, a longtime addict, was awaiting trial for crack possession at the time of his swearing in. Fulwood sometimes expressed sorrow about the scale of arrests in DC – they were ‘a sad commentary on the situation in the District’ – but this did not make him a reformer. Operation Clean Sweep, which he set up, led to the formation of specialised units modelled on military special forces. ‘This is the jungle,’ one officer in the Rapid Deployment Unit said. ‘We rewrite the constitution every day down here.’

  In the first 18 months of the operation, the DC police made 46,000 arrests – one for every 14 residents. They seized cars, houses and jewellery purchased with drug money. Female prisoners were raped with impunity; those who protested at being arrested were put into solitary confinement. In spite of these tactics, which won the support of the Afro, the city’s leading black newspaper, the murder rate continued to rise. In 1992, Fulwood resigned; a few months later his brother Teddy became the 401st murder victim of the year, shot dead a few blocks from the home where they grew up.

  By then, the racial disparities of the drug war – and its failure to stop drug trafficking or violent crime – had become so flagrant that black support for it was eroding. But – and here Forman departs significantly from Alexander’s account – the drug war was no longer the primary means by which black people were ensnared in the prison system. It was merely another front in a broader, and increasingly militarised, war on crime in poor communities. In 1995, Forman’s client Sandra Dozier was driving home with her two-year-old daughter when she was stopped by officers (one of whom was black) because her windows were allegedly too heavily tinted. This kind of ‘pretext stop’ was first used during the drug war, but in DC in the mid-1990s its purpose was to search for weapons, as part of a programme called Operation Ceasefire. Dozier didn’t have a weapon, but the officers found a small amount of marijuana in her glove compartment. She began to cry, because she had just been hired by FedEx, which required proof of a clean criminal record. Although the charges were dropped, the arrest was not removed from her record and she lost the job, all because of a ‘single line on a Superior Court printout’.

  The architect of Operation Ceasefire was a much admired ‘race man’, Eric Holder, the first black man to serve as attorney general for DC; he was later Obama’s attorney general. In a speech on Martin Luther King day in 1995, Holder said that King hadn’t fought against Bull Connor, the racist police chief of Birmingham, Alabama, so ‘we’ could ultimately lose the struggle for civil rights to ‘misguided or malicious members of our own race’. The target of the operation was violent criminals, but the police interpreted their mandate more broadly, and people like Dozier paid a high price. Drivers in predominantly black neighbourhoods were no more likely than whites to be in possession of drugs, but they were far more likely to be stopped, searched and arrested than whites, or the upper-middle-class blacks of the racially mixed, prosperous neighbourhoods of the Second District, which was explicitly excluded from Operation Ceasefire.

  In 2013, the DC city council reversed its 1975 decision on marijuana, substituting criminal penalties for possession with a small civil fine, a move backed by the most culturally conservative institution in the black community, the church. Now the crack epidemic was over and the rate of violent crime was falling, black Americans saw mass incarceration, not drug addiction, as the greatest calamity to affect them since the defeat of legal segregation. Obama and other black lawmakers, many of them influenced by The New Jim Crow, crafted a reform agenda that emphasised reducing penalties for non-violent drug offenders. Incarceration levels began to fall somewhat, and by 2014, as Forman noted recently in the New York Times, the incarceration rate for black men had dropped by 23 per cent from its peak in 2001.

  The problem with the emphasis on non-violent drug offenders, however, is that they account for only about a quarter of prison inmates. (The number of marijuana offenders behind bars is particularly low: six out of every ten thousand prisoners.) Before mass incarceration can be dismantled, Forman argues, another border will have to be crossed, allowing a more merciful attitude towards those who have committed violent crimes, a disproportionate number of whom are black, brown and poor. If you think this line can’t be crossed, he says, consider The Wire. Apart from the heroin addict Bubbles, none of the characters involved in dealing ‘would be eligible for clemency under the Department of Justice’s guidelines’, yet admirers of the show don’t think of it as ‘being primarily about a bunch of ruthless thugs’. That’s because the violent acts of people like Omar, Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell are ‘not the only things we know about them’, or that define them.

  *

  Whether Americans can cross this border in real life is another matter. Fear of crime is etched into the American political unconscious, albeit that it is sometimes expressed as fascination, even envy, notably by white fans of gangsta rap. A more forgiving attitude has developed in black and Latino communities, if only because so many of their children have been trapped in the prison system. Punitive attitudes among whites will be much harder to dislodge. A growing number of white politicians, including conservatives like Newt Gingrich, have become critics of mass incarceration, and unlikely converts to drug rehabilitation, both because of the enormous cost of the prison system, and because more and more disaffected young whites – many of them in Trump country – have succumbed to heroin and crystal meth addiction. According to the New York Times, drug overdoses have increased the death rate of young white adults in the US to higher levels than at any time since the Aids crisis, making theirs the first generation since the Vietnam War to experience higher death rates in early adulthood than the preceding generation. (As the law professor Ekow Yankah noted, ‘white heroin addicts get overdose treatment, rehabilitation, and reincorporation,’ while ‘black drug users got jail cells and “Just Say No”’ – the anti-drugs advertising campaign fronted by Nancy Reagan.) But new doubts among white politicians haven’t translated into an understanding of the uniquely destructive impact that mass incarceration and warrior policing have had on black lives, much less into support for a radical overhaul of the criminal justice system.

  The racial obstacles to white compassion were on distressing display during Obama’s second term. The deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Walter Scott in North Charleston and Philando Castile in Minneapolis were grisly evidence that the use of lethal force by the police against black people was a national problem. As Franklin Zimring demonstrates in a careful statistical study, When Police Kill, police are less at risk of death in the line of duty, thanks to the growing sophistication of police armour, but killings by the police have not declined, and the ‘kill ratio’, once 3.8 for every officer killed, now stands at 15 to 1.​4 Blacks make up only 12 per cent of the US population, but about 26 per cent of those killed by police. Black Lives Matter was founded to protest against these killings, many of them captured on cell phones. Yet even this irrefutable form of proof left little impression on conservative whites; in fact, Black Lives Matter was denounced by Trump supporters and by Blue Lives Matter as a racist, even a ‘terrorist’ organisation. Whites weren’t roused to protest even by the killings of young black men such as Trayvon Martin by ‘armed civilians’ invoking stand-your-ground laws.

  If this were another country, without a history of racial domination, one could imagine a different response to police killings, even a multi-racial alliance against warrior policing and mass incarceration. After all, more whites than blacks – 55.7 per cent of the total – are killed each year in confrontations with the police, just as more whites are behind bars. But, according to a 2014 Gallup poll, whites hold the police in higher esteem than any profession other than the military and small business. Their admiration is rooted in the history of race and policing. In his acute study The Condemnation of Blackness (2010), Khalil Gibran Muhammad showed that after Reconstruction white sociologists invented a new category: black criminality. Black crime was understood to be different from, and more intractable than, crime by poor whites or immigrants, whose misbehaviour could be explained in terms of social causes. ‘White criminality was society’s problem,’ and could be reduced through government policy, while ‘black criminality was black people’s problem,’ reflective of their ‘culture’, if not their biological make-up, and largely impervious to remedy. Black criminality, according to Muhammad, became a ‘tool to measure black fitness for citizenship’, and to ‘shield … white Americans from the charge of racism, helping to determine the degree to which whites had any responsibility to help black people’.

  It still is. And so long as most white Americans continue to associate crime – what Donald Trump characterised as ‘the American carnage’ – with blackness, they are likely to see the war on crime as the guarantor of what they feel to be their embattled security, like the equally futile war on terror. Locking Up Our Own is a sobering chronicle of how black people, in the hope of saving their communities, contributed to the rise of a system that has undone much of the progress of the civil rights era. But, as Forman knows, they could not have built it by themselves, and they are even less likely to be able to abolish it without influential white allies, and dramatic reforms in the structure of American society.

• Columbus Dispatch
  http://www.dispatch.com/entertainmentlife/20170424/book-review-locking-up-our-own-explores-blacks-role-in-unfair-system
  Word count: 1024

  Book review: ‘Locking Up Our Own’ explores blacks’ role in unfair system

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  By Jennifer Senior / The New York Times
  Posted Apr 24, 2017 at 11:16 AM
  Updated Apr 24, 2017 at 11:16 AM

  James Forman Jr. divides his superb and shattering first book, ″Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America,″ into two parts: ″Origins″ and ″Consequences.″ But the temptation is to scribble in, before ″Consequences,″⁣ a modifier: ″⁣Unforeseen.″⁣

  That is truly what this book is about, and what makes it tragic: How people, acting with the finest of intentions, could create a problem more grievous than the one they were trying to solve.

  Forman opens with a story from 1995, when, as a public defender in Washington, he unsuccessfully tried to keep a 15-year-old out of a juvenile detention center with a grim reputation. Looking around the courtroom, he realized that everyone there was African-American: the judge, the prosecutor, the bailiff. The arresting officer was black, as was the city’s police chief, its mayor and the majority of the city council that had written the stringent gun and drug laws his client had violated.

  ″What was going on?″ Forman asks. ″How did a majority-black jurisdiction end up incarcerating so many of its own?″

  This is the exceptionally delicate question that he tries to answer, with exemplary nuance and dramatic irony. When he discusses policy decisions made in the 1970s, the audience knows what’s coming — that a grossly disproportionate number of African-American men will become ensnared in the criminal-justice system — but none of the players do. Not the clergy or the activists; not the police chiefs or the elected officials; not the legions of African-Americans who lobbied for more punitive measures to fight gun violence and drug dealing in their neighborhoods.

  "Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 306 pages, $27) by James Forman Jr.

  ″Far from ignoring the issue of crime by blacks against other blacks,″ Forman writes, ″African-American officials and their constituents have been consumed by it.″

  The list of those who supported such measures may seem surprising. It includes Maxine Waters, the California congresswoman, and lawyer Johnnie Cochran. In 1988, when running for president, Jesse Jackson told The Chicago Tribune: ″No one has the right to kill our children. I won’t take it from the Klan with a rope; I won’t take it from a neighbor with dope.″

  Eric Holder, who would become President Barack Obama’s attorney general, may have played the most surprising role in escalating the war on crime. During the mid-’90s, as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, he started an initiative that gave Washington police wide latitude to stop cars and search for guns. ″I’m not going to be naive about it,″ Holder said in 1995. ″The people who will be stopped will be young black males, overwhelmingly.″

  Part of the power of ″Locking Up Our Own″ is that it’s about Washington — the majority-black city that hundreds of thousands call home, regardless of who’s in the Oval Office or Congress.

  Forman is a professor at Yale Law School and a co-founder of a charter school for dropouts in Washington. But his six years as a public defender are most relevant to the book — and set it apart. The stories he shares are not just curated to make us think differently about criminal justice; they are stories that made Forman himself think differently.

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