There was broad support, in Washington and elsewhere, for tough penalties for gun crime and the distribution of hard drugs.įor PCP dealers, said the Los Angeles Sentinel, a prominent black newspaper, in 1980, “no punishment was too harsh”. A 1982 ballot initiative to enact harsh mandatory minimum sentences for violent criminals passed in a landslide, with more support in black and poor districts than in their whiter and more affluent equivalents. In the 1980s, this trend toward punitive justice continued. “Quite the opposite: the leaders of the decriminalization effort were white and … it was blacks who killed marijuana decriminalization in DC.” “This was not a story in which a white majority, acting out of indifference or hostility to black lives, imposed tough criminal penalties that disproportionately burdened a black minority,” Forman writes. But in Washington, for example, it was a black electorate and leadership that killed a 1975 bill to decriminalize marijuana. In many cases, what was being handed down was the type of hardline answer to crime usually placed solely at the feet of conservatives like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. “What was going on? How did a majority-black jurisdiction end up incarcerating so many of its own?” He opens with a question that gnawed at him as he argued in front of black judges and juries, against black prosecutors and for black clients who were, in many cases, arrested by black officers in a city that was about 70% black: What was going on? How did a majority-black jurisdiction end up incarcerating so many of its own? James Forman Jr Forman worked there as a public defender for six years in the 1990s, at the tail end of its most violent years. The city was known, at various point through the century, as both “Chocolate City” and “America’s murder capital”. Now a professor at Yale Law School, Forman has Washington in his sights. “The words and deeds of … black law enforcement officials and politicians,” Forman writes, “so often overlooked in the histories of the war on drugs, are crucial to explaining why and how the war developed as it did in American cities.” For the most part, such leaders did so with the broad support of constituents seeking safety from the urban crises that colored the second half of the 20th century. Over the past half-century, in moments when black leadership has had the power to direct policy, such leaders have reliably chosen to embrace the types of “tough on crime” tactics that have led the US to becoming the most carceral nation in the world.

His book sets up camp, however, on a deeply uncomfortable truth.

James forman locking up our own