{"id":6641,"date":"2018-05-19T03:30:32","date_gmt":"2018-05-19T07:30:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=6641"},"modified":"2018-05-19T21:09:07","modified_gmt":"2018-05-20T01:09:07","slug":"locking-up-our-own","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/19\/locking-up-our-own\/","title":{"rendered":"Locking Up Our Own."},"content":{"rendered":"

James Forman, Jr., was a public defender in DC for six years, right after he clerked for Sandra Day O\u2019Connor, and encountered the results of two decades of disastrous policies in the criminal justice system of the nation\u2019s capital, many of which led to differential policing and mass incarceration of the city\u2019s 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<\/a><\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

Forman\u2019s parents met while working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (known colloquially as \u201csnick\u201d) during the civil rights movement, which he says spurred his decision to move off the career track into the public defender\u2019s office, eventually moving from there into teaching at Georgetown\u2019s and now Yale\u2019s law schools. Where the 2016 documentary The 13th<\/em> 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

<\/a>Washington DC didn\u2019t achieve some semblance of home rule until 1973, and Congress still holds the power to overturn some laws passed by the DC council and could even, in theory, dismiss the city\u2019s council at will. This gives the city\u2019s residents a status not too much greater than those of territories like Puerto Rico or the U.S. Virgin Islands, although I suppose if two hurricanes knocked out power to DC for several months the federal government would be a little quicker to address the problem. DC\u2019s population is nearly half African-American, and the high rates of incarceration and different policing strategies in its neighborhoods with higher black populations have had a severe effect on the city\u2019s economy, including continuing high crime rates. Forman explains how DC got into this mess, going back to the end of the civil rights movement and explaining how it was actually a white progressive council member who tried to decriminalize marijuana possession, but found himself opposed by black church leaders, Nation of Islam leaders, and even some black city council members, all of whom ended up working together to scotch the proposal (which may not have passed muster with Congress anyway). When a similar proposal arose a few years later to create mandatory minimum sentencing to fight rising crime rates in DC – themselves at least in part the result of the crack cocaine epidemic – black community leaders were all for the new law, responding to residents\u2019 concerns about violent street crime and home invasions, but also enforcing a longstanding moral viewpoint that African-Americans could defeat stereotypes about them by, in essence, behaving better. If DC cracked down on even trivial crimes, even misdemeanors, the theory went, it would improve the quality of life for all DC residents while also working against white politicians and community leaders who worked to disenfranchise and\/or limit the economic mobility of people of color.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cstop and frisk\u201d policies (formally known as a Terry<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Locking Up Our Own<\/em> 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\u2019s 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 \u201ctough on crime\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Next up: Claude M. Steele\u2019s Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Forman, Jr., was a public defender in DC for six years, right after he clerked for Sandra Day O\u2019Connor, and encountered the results of two decades of disastrous policies in the criminal justice system of the nation\u2019s capital, many of which led to differential policing and mass incarceration of the city\u2019s black residents. He […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1009,96,225,252,481],"class_list":["post-6641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-african-american-history","tag-crime","tag-non-fiction","tag-pulitzer-prize","tag-social-criticism","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6641"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6643,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6641\/revisions\/6643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}