Locking Up Our Own

Forman’s book is a must-read to learn why the War on Crime was not merely the work of one party or one racial group in society. Indeed, a number of people of color, including black mayors and black chiefs of police, strongly supported tough-on-crime measures.

The book raises the question of what it will take to reverse the trends of mass incarceration, given these realities.

This society inflicts the problems of unemployment, poverty, and the consequent range of problems disproportionately on the black population.

This is the obvious cause of violent crime – both for those who commit crimes, and those who become victims. Police are the only answer this society gives to violent crime. And so, as James Forman brilliantly shows through the lens of Washington D.C., Black politicians, as well as non-black ones, supported policies that created the modern system of mass incarceration that falls so heavily on the black population.

Foreman’s argument has often been misrepresented as somehow showing that the mass… show more.

To understand how a majority-Black city became the epicenter for the War on Drugs, destroying Black communities in the process, read this book. Although Washington, DC has long had Black leadership, it remained subject to the whims of majority-White federal authorities and thus to a governing body that has long been anti-Black.

James Forman, Jr. explains in his book, Locking Up Our Own, that the city’s Black leadership fully supported the coercive anti-crime policies implemented beginning in the 1980s. And, while some members of the Black community requested improved schools, drug rehabilitation clinics, and better city services, the… show more.

This book is an excellent companion to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness and adds some important nuance to the story of how the United States came to imprison a higher proportion of its population than any other nation on earth. Forman notes that many African Americans in communities afflicted by rising drug abuse and crime rates in the 1970s were desperate to solve these problems and advocated more law enforcement along with greater investments in schools, jobs, and housing to address the root causes of the crisis. Instead, they got only increasingly… show more.