James Forman, Jr., was a public defender in DC for six years, right after he clerked for Sandra Day O’Connor, and encountered the results of two decades of disastrous policies in the criminal justice system of the nation’s capital, many of which led to differential policing and mass incarceration of the city’s black residents. He discussed the history and causes of this system in his 2017 book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, which lays much of the blame for the high incarceration rates on policies embraced and advocated by black community leaders themselves. The book won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction this past April.
Forman’s parents met while working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (known colloquially as “snick”) during the civil rights movement, which he says spurred his decision to move off the career track into the public defender’s office, eventually moving from there into teaching at Georgetown’s and now Yale’s law schools. Where the 2016 documentary The 13th laid all of the blame for the high rates of black incarceration in the United States on two-plus centuries of racism and white domination – a view that is largely justified – Forman’s book lays bare the role that leaders in black communities played in supporting those policies. Foremost among them: Fighting early progressive efforts to decriminalize possession and personal use of small amounts of marijuana.
None of this worked, as Forman writes, and instead helped fuel a new DC underclass – as it did in other cities, including Detroit, the US city with the highest proportion of residents who are African-American – of blacks, mostly men, who were now de facto unemployable because they had criminal records. Such ex-convicts also could find themselves ineligible for certain government assistance programs, turned down for housing, and even unable to vote. Forman, as a public defender, worked with many such clients, but, in his own telling, he was struggling upstream against a system that simultaneously limited the advancement of African-Americans in its police force and judiciary and also aggressively pursued policies that further hindered the black community. He touches on greater arrest rates in black wards of DC versus white, the long-term harm of “stop and frisk” policies (formally known as a Terry stop, and of dubious constitutionality, especially when opponents can show disparate impact by race of police targets), and the formal and informal obstacles that efforts at community improvement can face from municipal police forces – even when officers and administrators are themselves African-American.
Locking Up Our Own is a sobering look at how we got here, but perhaps short on prescriptions for undoing forty years of damage. Marijuana decriminalization is finally happening, although it’s driven by white stoners and libertarians rather than black citizens and provides no procedure for vacating past convictions for trivial possession cases. Stop and frisk was ruled unconstitutional in NYC in 2013, but our current President and Attorney General have both explicitly endorsed the practice. Mandatory minimums remain popular, in large part because they serve “tough on crime” candidates well – and who would dare to stand up and say that criminals deserve shorter sentences? A path to greater African-American enfranchisement and sovereignty in majority black neighborhoods would likely be impossible in any system where higher level, white-dominated government bodies can invalidate city or state policies. Any change that starts at the bottom will fail without a change at the top.
Next up: Claude M. Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do.
