Locking Up Our Own, by James Forman, Jr.
New book describes the role of black mayors and police officials in mass incarceration
By
Fred Mazelis
6 July 2017
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, by James Forman, Jr. 2017
James Forman Jr.’s book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, is one more in the substantial list dealing with the topic of mass incarceration in the US and its hugely disproportionate impact on African-American workers and youth.
Forman, now a law professor at Yale, draws on his own experience as a Public Defender in Washington, D.C. There are passages in Locking Up Our Own that provide eloquent testimony, from inside the courtroom, of the disruption and destruction of young lives at the hands of the misnamed criminal justice system. Forman was often helpless in the face of harsh sentencing guidelines, facing judges who pompously and outrageously lectured teenagers on how they had supposedly betrayed the struggle of Martin Luther King Jr. The author mentions that he “hated the Martin Luther King speech.”
Fifteen-year-old Brandon (not his real name), for example, was sent to juvenile prison for six months after pleading guilty to possession of a handgun and a small amount of marijuana. Forman negotiated a plea deal for another defendant, a woman in her mid-40s who faced up to 60 years in prison for selling $10 worth of heroin to an undercover cop. Denied the possibility of entry into a drug treatment program, she was offered the choice between five years behind bars, or a trial that could well have led to a far longer sentence. These are only two among many cases cited, and they are of course representative of what takes place thousands of times every day, involving defendants of all races and…