Blacks’ role in unfair system explored
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 grievous problem trying to solve another.
Forman opens with a story from 1995, when, as a public defender in Washington, D.C., 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 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.
“How did a majorityblack jurisdiction end up incarcerating so many of its own?” Forman asks.
This is the exceptionally delicate question he tries to answer, with exemplary nuance and dramatic irony.
When he discusses policy 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 ■ “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 306 pages, $27) by James Forman Jr.
the legions of blacks who lobbied for more punitive measures to fight gun violence and drug dealing in their neighborhoods.
“Far from ignoring the issue of crime by blacks against other blacks,” Forman writes, “AfricanAmerican officials and their constituents have been consumed by it.”
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 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.”
Forman is a professor at Yale Law School and a cofounder of a charter school for dropouts. But his six years as a public defender are most relevant to the book. 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.