Locking Up Our Own

"When we ask ourselves how America became the world's greatest jailer, it is natural to focus on bright, shiny objects: national campaigns, federal legislation, executive orders from the Oval Office. But we should train our eyes, also, on more mundane decisions and directives, many of which took place on the local level. Which agency director did a public official enlist in response to citizen complaints about used syringes in back alleys? Such small choices, made daily, over time, in every corner of our nation, are the bricks that built our prison nation" (148).

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman Jr.

Had I not first heard of Forman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book via a podcasted interview with the author, I might’ve felt suspicious of it. The title and subtitle taken together veer close to sounding victim-blaming, but avoiding this book and what it says within on those grounds would be not only an unfortunate loss but, furthermore, a tiny example of the kind of well-intentioned oversimplification that Forman so clearly shows to be one of hearts of the U.S. American criminal prosecution system.

The son of two SNCC activists and himself a law professor and experienced public defender, Forman expertly explains how social movements and mores, legal precedents, institutionalized systemic racism, and local politics have all conspired to create the U.S.’s destructive system of mass incarceration, focusing particularly on black leaders in the D.C. area. For while books such as The New Jim Crow importantly demonstrate how mass incarceration uniquely effects black U.S. Americans, the complex and incremental steps that led to mass incarceration, not to mention the nation's extreme political shift to the right, are overlooked. Failing to look closely at these root causes—even local-level decisions which might at first seem inconsequential when considering a national crisis—could result in our community and nation never truly learning how ineffectual it is to attempt taking down the master’s house with the master’s tools.

While Forman uses a few stories from his work as public defender and a few from his experience as co-founder of the D.C. alternative charter Maya Angelou school to illustrate what these incremental steps have led to, this book is ultimately a history of policy. But despite what the less-than-promising phrase “history of policy” might suggest, this one is anything but dull. This history of policy focuses on local politics in a majority-black city of D.C. only newly granted home rule. This history tells of how marijuana there teetered on the edge of decriminalization as far back as the 70s—before new black leadership, watching the havoc heroin was wreaking on their communities, decided to treat selling and possession of this “gateway drug” much more harshly. It tells of how the fight to get black people hired first in police forces and eventually promoted to police leadership was one of the most important civil rights fights of its day. It tells of how thoroughly the hopes that these black officers would be more humane to black civilians have been dashed; it recounts and investigates the much-overlooked matter of class in black policing of the black community. Each step through this history is weighty and difficult to swallow: with hindsight, it is chillingly easy to see the pain and injustice these steps have wrought. But considered through the clarifying lens provided by Forman’s book, it is equally easy to see how the mass of these steps were also well-intended, an attempt to bring safety to a threatened community, or at the very least decisions made when stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Importantly, Forman also contextualizes this history, showing how the choices made in the black community, by black legislators, black police chiefs, and black judges, are inextricable from the white supremacist framework of the U.S. At times, these choices were made in response to this white supremacist framework, attempts to get around or ameliorate its damage. At other times, these choices were taken up by the white supremacist framework itself, subsumed into national policies of disenfranchisement, militarization of the police, mandatory minimums, and mass incarceration that disproportionately affect the black people that these choices were originally intended to protect. Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to (but which others may be thrilled to find sensitively discussed in their literature): gun violence, drug trade, death and murder, police brutality, racism, incarceration, rape. Discussion of these subjects is generally not graphic.

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