Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

This is the best book about how we have came to have so many young black men in jail and prison. The statistics are familiar but shocking - to take one as an example, roughly 30% of young black men that are high school dropouts are *currently* in jail or prison. That's a stunning failure for those men, of course, but it's a failure for the rest of our society as well. Many analysts point to white racism or the war on drugs as the causes of that incarceration, and they're of course not totally wrong. But Forman's contribution is to point out incompleteness of that narrative, as the incarceration boom had complicated origins. There are two of those additional factors that Forman analyzes with unique skill and detail. The first is the get-tough-on-crime stance taken by many black politicians and civic leaders in the 1980s and 1990s, These were times when the crack epidemic wrought particular havoc in the black community in Washington, DC - on which Forman focuses - and which created a demand for get-tough policies by the black middle class that was disproportionately the victim of crack-fueled crime. The second is the trend towards pretextual searches of cars in Washington - Eric Holder's version of Rudy Giuliani's stop-and-frisk - which was designed to reduce gun possession in DC. Those searches were deliberately executed with greater vigor in poor, black neighborhoods, and the result was that many poor blacks were arrested for minor drug offenses when officers found marijuana in their cars while looking for guns. It's a Greek tragedy, and it reminded me favorably of Randy Shilts' brilliant treatment of the AIDS epidemic in And The Band Played On. Forman's background as a former public defender in DC is a great strength of the book, but it also makes the narrative somewhat DC-centric. Incarceration increased throughout the country - were the political and justice dynamics the same in Mississippi and Ohio, to take two examples, as they were in DC. That remains an open question. The book is frustrating, too, in that Forman offers no easy cure for the problems. More drug treatment programs, more constructive diversion programs for youthful offenders, more nuanced reading of arrest records by current and prospective employers? Those would all be good, to be sure, but I left this book feeling that it would take these things, and at least a handful of similarly benign trends, before we will really get a handle on these problems. But it is to Forman's credit that he offers no silver bullet for the problems. Life is sadly frustrating at times.

Locking Up Our Own tells the story of the implementation of the War On Drugs focusing on Washington D.C., a majority black city with blacks dominating both politics and the criminal justice system. Forman, now a Law Professor at Yale University, incorporates experiences gained during seven years as Public Defender during the 1990s into his writing. A key point I didn’t understand before reading the book was the intensity of black support for anti-crime and anti-drug policies that selectively targeted their own communities. The heroine epidemic of the 1960s and the crack epidemic of the 1980s both caused many deaths and major social upset in the black community. Guns played a major role in many robberies and murders committed to support a drug habit. During January of 1988, for instance, 37 people were murdered in Washington D.C., mostly using guns and for reasons related to drug use. The twin ideas of putting away drug offenders and getting guns off the street, ideas strongly supported by black citizens of Washington D.C. and other cities, played a significant role in the creation of what has come to be known as mass incarnation. Here is how it worked. In 1994, Eric Holder, then serving as the United States District Attorney for the District of Columbia, initiated “Operation Ceasefire.” The goal was to “stop cars, search cars, seize guns.” The program was very popular and did result in the confiscation of many guns. When a car was being searched, however, other crimes were also noted and charged such as possession of any cocaine or marijuana that might be found in the glove compartment or under the seat. “Pretext stops” became common. That meant stopping drivers for any infraction including such things as possibly having the car windows tinted too much. In 1996 pretext stops including searches of the entire car were allowed by the U.S. Supreme Court as long as there was any legal reason for the stop. The general consensus was that with all the traffic laws out there, everyone violated at least one of them every time they drove anywhere. This allowed for nearly anyone to be stopped on a legal pretext. But there were exceptions. In Washington D.C. and other cities, black neighborhoods had disproportionately high rates of murder using guns. That statistic was used to justify conducting pretext stops to seize guns only in black neighborhoods. While many illegal guns were found, far more people were charged with drug crimes as a result of the searches. Nonetheless, black support was strong because of the fear of violence that continued to take place in the community. Not until much later was it recognized how much violence mass incarceration itself visited upon the community. Many of the politicians who advocated for strict enforcement and harsh penalties for both guns and drugs also advocated for programs to rehabilitate offenders. Some called for a new Marshall Plan to rebuild crumbling neighborhoods. Unfortunately, only the punitive measures were significantly funded. Locking Up Our Own won a Pulitzer Prize in the category of General Non-Fiction. It is a very readable book – well written with good stories. I highly recommend it to anyone who cares about the directions our criminal justice systems have taken us.

Great read on historic events to lead to today's environment and societal challenges pertaining to the topic.

Living most of my life in a small city in rural America, I know little of inner city black American lives. I found this book to be very enlightening as I learned that through the past 40 years most people in the inner cities shared the same concerns of drug and gun violence as people in rural locations, and they resorted to similar policies to protect their communities and their children from the scourges of cocaine, heroin, and gangs. The book did not explore why rural areas (that are greater than 90 percent white ) apparently did not enact as punitive laws against poor whites as inner city blacks did against poor blacks. But I came away from reading this book that rural white attitudes toward drug and gun violence are similar. Though I have not come across similar pleas in rural white America for leniency in criminal sentencing in selected cases, I think this author’s ideas have merit. This book is extraordinarily well researched and very readable. Excellent book!

His Grandma (Jessica Mitford) would be bursting with pride and rightly so. Carefully researched, journalistic flair in the writing and accurate & opinionated. If it isn't influential (which it won't be with Trump & the right wing morons in charge) then it should be. How relevant is the book to the UK - don't know as I'm not an expert. But I think, if we are honest with ourselves, probably more relevant than we would like it to be.

Beautifully written, presenting clear arguments and enough historical background to inform non-USA readers and younger people not familiar with the past. Statistics and attitudes are of course shocking in places, although expected given the subject matter. I recommend this book very highly indeed.

Very readable account of why multiple apparently quite minor policy decisions have led to the disaster which is today's US policy regarding incarceration.

Don't define people by the very worst thing they have ever done, is this book's generous message.