Forman begins by telling the story of a black juvenile he represented who was convicted on relatively minor gun and drug charges. He had no previous arrests, yet he was sentenced to six months in a detention facility that “everybody knew … was a dungeon,” instead of receiving probation and the chance to remain in school. Forman couldn’t help noticing that everyone in the courtroom was black, including the judge, the prosecutor, and court reporter, as well as the arresting officer. For that matter, so were the police chief, mayor, and the majority of the city council that wrote the gun and drug laws that his client was convicted of violating.
Forman recognizes the progress blacks have made since the 1950s, but “progress wasn’t the whole story.” In 1954, about one-third of the nations’ prisoners were black. The number was approaching 50% by 1994. The increase occurred as the political influence of blacks increased, especially after the passage of the Voters Rights Act of 1965. Forman is not surprised by this because a 2014 survey of Americans found that 64% of blacks thought the courts don’t deal “harshly enough with criminals.” (The comparable portion for whites was 73%.)
He also recognizes that the consequences he regrets are the result of policies made by people trying to save communities that “seemed to be crumbling before their eyes.” There was a dynamic in play that “drove elected officials toward a tough-on-crime stance in some predicable ways.” Yet, nobody has a sense of responsibility for the consequences “because nobody is responsible.” So, “even reluctant or conflicted crime warriors … become part of the machinery of mass incarceration [that] … continues to churn even to this day, when its human toll has become increasingly apparent.”
Forman does an impressive job explaining reasons why the tough-on-crime political responses led to tragic human costs in black communities that continue today. He makes a case for his views that I found deeply convincing and often very touching. I do have some disagreements with a couple of his points, but they are peripheral to his arguments. I applaud him for writing a book that has increased my understanding of a serious problem and made me more sympathetic with the problems so many in the black community must deal with, including many of the black males sentenced to prison.
Forman’s story unfolds primarily in D.C., with relevant highlights from other major cities with large black populations.
Appeal of prohibition / As in other large cities, blacks in D.C. are no more likely to use illegal drugs than whites living in middle-class neighborhoods. But blacks’ incarceration rates for marijuana possession are far higher than whites, with the gap not explained by more blacks being engaged in street-level distribution.
Because of this gap, David Clarke, one of two white members of D.C.‘s first city council, saw an opportunity in 1975 to promote civil rights and racial justice by greatly reducing the fine and eliminating prison sentences for possession of less than 2 oz. of marijuana. There was resistance, but passage looked likely except for the city’s long and troubled history with heroin. From the early 1960s to 1969, the percentage of new inmates in D.C.‘s corrections system who were addicted to heroin increased from less than 3% to 45%, and they were overwhelmingly young black men.
One response was to provide “methadone maintenance” for addicts. This was opposed, however, by those who objected to “masses of black citizens strung out—and completely dependent—on government narcotics.” Many black activists in D.C. “believed that whites wanted blacks to be addicted to narcotics, because it made them passive; … [and] methadone maintenance was a thinly veiled attempt to keep black people oppressed” (Forman’s emphasis).
Despite the opposition of local black pastors and others who “insisted that [marijuana] was a gateway to harder drugs,” Clarke’s proposal passed on the first vote. It required a second majority, however, to become law. It was at this point that the clergymen “turned up the heat.” They rallied, 150 strong, at the District Building, targeting Council Chairman Sterling Tucker, who needed their support to stay in office, and Mayor Walter Washington, who could veto the bill even if it passed the council. It worked. Tucker tabled Clarke’s bill right before the second vote was scheduled, effectively killing it.
Paralleling the D.C. debate over penalties for marijuana possession was a debate over gun control laws. Black-on-black violence was imposing a horrifying cost on the black community in D.C. and other American cities in the mid-1970s. Nationwide, the homicide rate was seven to 11 times greater for blacks than for whites. Some 85% of the victims killed by guns in D.C. were black.
Empathy for the victims’ families was accompanied by outrage against the murderers and criticism of judges who handed down light sentences for violating gun laws. Harsh prison sentences were demanded for possessing or selling a gun, or committing a crime in possession of one, without the possibility of plea-bargaining. D.C. advocates of these longer sentences knew they would be served mostly by blacks. But they felt this would prevent the small minority of criminals from terrorizing the majority of law-abiding black citizens.
D.C. politicians favored prohibition backed up with harsh penalties “even when the punitive measures … did not achieve the desired results.”
Yet, many blacks had an opposing view. Doug Moore, an influential member of the D.C. council who opposed reducing penalties on marijuana possession, also opposed gun restrictions. His opposition was based on black history. Moore argued that blacks need guns not just for individual protection, but also as “a tool of collective self-defense against violent whites.” Coleman Young, Detroit’s first black mayor, agreed. He proclaimed, “I’ll be damned if I’ll let them collect guns in the city of Detroit while we are surrounded by hostile suburbs and the whole rest of the state … where you have vigilantes practicing in the wilderness with automatic weapons.”
Forman writes that to “modern ears [those] claims may sound outlandish. But they shouldn’t.” They were rooted in the history of Jim Crow violence and were strengthened by such outrages as the assassination of Martin Luther King and other civil right leaders. But the hope that gun control in D.C. would reduce black-on-black killing resulted in a 12–1 city council vote for strengthening restrictions on guns in 1976. Tougher penalties for violating those restrictions were postponed until 1979 because of a temporary moratorium on the city council’s ability to change the city’s criminal law.
In the debate over both marijuana and gun control, D.C. politicians favored prohibition backed up with harsh penalties “even when the punitive measures adopted in D.C. and elsewhere did not achieve the desired results.” In both cases, “the majority of those punished have been low-income, poorly educated black men.” And the result was a failure “to prevent marijuana use [or] protect the community from gun violence.”
Black police are still police / Obviously, not all killing in black communities were blacks shooting blacks. While fewer in number, blacks were being killed by the police, who until the 1960s were almost entirely white. Many of those killings were clearly unjustified (e.g., the victim was jaywalking) and created the same resentment against police that they do today.
In response, blacks made three arguments for hiring black police officers. First, they would be more trusted in black communities and more likely to protect blacks. Second, they would be more respectful and less likely to use unnecessary force. Third, training and trusting blacks to use the police power would send a vital message to both blacks and whites. Forman takes us through the history of the gradual increase in the number of black officers, featuring Burtell Jefferson, who became D.C.‘s first black police chief in 1978, and Atlanta’s hiring of eight black police officers in 1948, with Martin Luther King Sr. playing a key role.
Black police were hired, but they were subjected to much the same discrimination as other blacks at the time. Forman tells us about separate and poorly equipped police stations for black officers, of them being required to enter though the back door of integrated stations, being assigned to foot patrols rather than allowed to use police cars, being forbidden to arrest white suspects, being denied promotions based on “suitability interviews” even when they scored well on written exams, etc. Over time, such blatantly discriminatory treatment of black policemen slowly eroded. But so did the hope that black policemen would act differently than white policemen. “A surprising number of black officers simply didn’t like other black people—at least not the poor blacks they tended to police,” Forman writes. Even those who considered themselves “concerned about protecting black neighborhoods … freely admitted to being markedly more aggressive about responding to such low-level infractions as drunkenness and loitering.” Black officers often expressed being embarrassed by the behavior of black offenders. In part, according to Forman, this conduct of black officers “reflected class divisions within the black community.”
He writes of his experience as a co-founder of a D.C. public charter school attended by many students who “had lost parents, friends, and siblings to violence, addiction, and prison.” The students (all black) “were routinely subjected to verbal abuse, stopped and searched for drugs or weapons, or even punched, choked, or shoved” by police officers (mostly black) without any rationale that Forman could see. He saw these abuses as “part of a larger pattern” reflecting that the police “had been trained to act like warriors.”
Predictable responses / As part of that description, he powerfully writes of what happened in “the late 1980s, when a terrifying new drug—crack cocaine—invaded Americas ghettos.” According to Forman, crack
spawned violent drug markets the likes of which American cities had never seen. In their fight for territory, heavily armed gangs turned urban neighborhoods into killing fields. … The menace crack presented in turn provoked a set of responses that helped produce the harsh and bloated criminal justice system we have today … enshrining the notion that police must be warriors, aggressive and armored, working ghetto corners as an army might patrol enemy territory.
Blacks were disproportionally homicide victims when the crack carnage began, but the new drug made things much worse. According to the U.S. Justice Department, by the mid-1990s there was a 1:35 lifetime probability of a black American male being murdered, compared to a 1:251 probability for a white American male. The demands for something to be done “seemed to come from everywhere,” but nowhere more vociferously than from “once-vibrant [black] communities [that] had been devastated.”
The responses of black politicians and leaders were predictable. Despite overcrowded jails, D.C.‘s mayor Marion Barry vowed, “We will find space to put those gun thugs and drug thugs who get convicted of carrying guns and selling drugs.” Atlanta’s mayor Maynard Jackson warned, “[If] a drug or gun sale resulted in a death, the seller deserves to roast or fry.” While serving as U.S. attorney for D.C., Eric Holder’s answer for reducing gun violence was, “Stop cars, search calls, seize guns,” and he initiated Operation Ceasefire to do exactly that. Knowing better than to inconvenience the politically influential, he exempted from the operation D.C.‘s second district, where most of the city’s movers and shakers lived.
Unfortunate consequences and root causes / Black leaders knew that the worst consequences of the war on drugs in D.C. and many other large cities were imposed primarily on the poorest people in black communities. Obviously, this was true of the killings and crime, but Forman is also deeply troubled by the lives that were destroyed or almost destroyed by the harshness of D.C.‘s criminal justice system on blacks who violated laws that were commonly violated with impunity by people in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods. This was also recognized by black leaders. Holder was acknowledging the obvious when he said of Operation Ceasefire that the “people who will be stopped [and arrested] will be young black males, overwhelmingly.”
Forman ends his book with mild optimism by mentioning the recently declining crime and murder rates, more lenient drugs laws, and the increased concern over the disproportionate attention the criminal justice system gives to poor black males. He comments throughout the book on the importance of measures to reduce the root causes of crime, such as poverty, joblessness, and poor education.
Unfortunately, he devotes little attention to how best to address these root causes beyond occasional expressions of support for such policies as more federal spending on welfare programs and a “Marshall Plan” for cities to promote urban revitalization. There is no suggestion that these programs might be worsening the root causes, if not outright creating some to them. He recognizes the lack of jobs in ghettos and points out that “a young black man without a high school diploma is more likely to be in prison or jail than to be employed in the paid labor force.” Yet he ignores the negative effect of occupational licensing and minimum wage laws on job opportunities for young people from deprived backgrounds, He also does not mention the advantages of school choice in improving the educational opportunities for young people—a surprising omission for someone who co-founded a charter school in D.C.
I am fully prepared to forgive Forman for those omissions, however, because they are likely the result of his experiences and understandings being different than mine. It is because of those differences that I admire Locking Up Our Own and I learned so much from reading it. I recommend it with enthusiasm.
