Injustice codified

The son of the mid-20th century SNCC leader of the same name, the younger James Forman Jr. was a D.C. public defender in the 1990s and later the co-founder of a high school for students often labelled "at risk." Locking up our own: crime and punishment in Black America describes the process through which the country's Blackest city embraced unforgiving "public safety" strategies which led to mass incarceration of its own Black poor and youth.

Forman does not write to apportion blame for the rising toll of victims of an inhuman system. Rather, he wants to know why men of good will (these Black lawmakers seem to have been mostly men) could have constructed such a horror.

How did a majority black jurisdiction end up incarcerating so many of its own? ... [According to a 2014 Sentencing Project poll] how could it be that even after forty years of tough-on-crime tactics, with their attendant toll on black America, 64 percent of African-Americans still thought the courts were not harsh enough?

Forman's book is a catalogue of incidents of injustice -- of kids who made one mistake and ended up doing time, of women supporting a drug habit who get sent up to prison for half a decade because they couldn't get clean, of Black strivers who finally got a good job, only to lose their chance forever over a minor marijuana arrest. He certainly doesn't endorse our country's punitive response to Black crime -- but he's relentlessly determined to understand how D.C. got to such a system.

In Forman's telling, it begins with the scourge of heroin addiction in the 1960s (much of it brought home by draftees from Vietnam -- my note) and the violent crime that accompanied the drug business. Fifteen years later, cheap crack cocaine hit the streets and more violence came along. Neighborhood associations encouraged their members to prepare to defend their homes. They demanded more policing and tougher sentences. A pattern was set.

As they confronted this devastating crime wave, black officials exhibited a complicated and sometimes overlapping mix of impulses. Some displayed tremendous hostility toward perpetrators of crime, describing them as a "cancer" that had to be cut away from the rest of the black community. Others pushed for harsher penalties, but acknowledged that these would not solve the crisis at hand. Some even expressed sympathy for the plight of criminal defendants, who they knew were disproportionately black. But that sympathy was rarely sufficient to overcome the claims of black crime victims, who often argued that a punitive approach was necessary to protect the African America community -- including many of its most impoverished members -- from the ravages of crime.

A D.C. political struggle over decriminalization of marijuana in the 1970s became a contest between liberals who were branded as supporting white teenagers and hippies against Black neighborhoods where police allowed drug trafficking to immiserate the residents. In this, then majority-Black, city, marijuana law reform lost.

Although gun control measures were enacted in D.C. in the 1970s, this was over the objections of much of the Black community. As migrants from law-free Jim Crow regions, a substantial fraction of Black citizens were accustomed to the gun kept in the home as the last defense against marauding whites. You naturally didn't give up the gun to depend on the government while drug crime engulfed the neighborhood. And when gun control won, gun possession triggered mandatory minimum additional sentences as part of the "War on Drugs." Most of the community cheered taking the system's losers off the streets.

... the impulse to impose ever-tougher sentences would prove difficult to restrain. And this remained true even when the punitive measures adopted in D.C. and elsewhere did not achieve the desired results. In one respect the policies to combat drugs and guns have a similar impact: the majority of those punished have been low-income, poorly educated black men. In another respect they have had a similar lack of impact: they have failed to prevent marijuana use, and they have failed to protect the community from gun violence.

With determination and grit, qualified Black men (and later women) did integrate the D.C. police force. But the race of the officers failed to make much improvement for the communities policed. Black cops were not much different from many of their white counterparts: they were ordinary lower middle class people looking for a stable job. Their race didn't change law enforcement practices that reinforced race bias with class bias.

When the crack epidemic made violent crime even more common and devastating, Washington's black community overwhelmingly voted for long mandatory sentences for minor drug crimes in the 1980s. The horror had to stop. And the police, under siege from well armed criminals, and finding themselves unable to interrupt the drug plague, adopted the "warrior" posture. Forman spells out the consequences:

... the warrior model inverts the presumption of innocence. In the ghetto, you are not presumed innocent until proved otherwise. Rather, you are presumed guilty, or at least suspicious, and you must expend an extraordinary amount of energy -- through careful attention to dress, behavior, and speech -- to mark yourself as innocent. ... Even proof of innocence is dismissed by a system incapable of questioning the assumptions that led it to mark you as guilty.

... the menace crack presented in turn provoked a set of responses that have helped produce the harsh and bloated criminal justice system we have today.

And this distorted system remained in place when crack use had run its vicious course by the early 2000s.

Finally, in the second decade of the 2000s, Black citizens and Black politicians began to struggle for alternatives. Forman is not particularly hopeful. Some Black individuals may escape the worst effects of the militarized war on crime, but the inertia of the system remains punitive and pernicious for most.

• • •

This is a 2017 book. It remains to be seen whether George Floyd's public murder, Breonna Taylor's inadvertent execution by police, and Black Lives Matter's organized protests will make a substantial difference.

Forman reports that in studying the history of the terrible system he worked inside and against, he came to understand that

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

When I wrote about Rosa Brooks' puzzling book about D.C. policing, I concluded my unease was partly a consequence of its being written for someone else: in Brooks' case for her lefty mother. I realize too that I'm not Forman's audience in Locking Up Our Own. He's writing for Black leaders who've achieved some place and power within a racist system, demanding they turn their gaze on what their assimilation has wrought and who has been left behind.

Black Lives Matter has shown those same leaders what an aroused community looks like. Can it lead change?

• • •

As is often the case with books I post about, I first read this by ear, then obtained a hard copy from the public library. I'm glad I did. Forman's volume is illustrated with not-to-be missed contemporary cartoons from Black media that demonstrate how crime and punishment issues were being seen within the Washington community. I'll end with one sample from this fascinating set of historical images: