'Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in America' by James Forman, Jr.
It is highly problematic that in common parlance and academic analysis regarding racial relations inside the United States, there is virtual carte blanche acceptance of murder, theft and all manner of human rights’ violation against Black people, known the entire world over, with little or no legal intervention (and plenty of legal and extra-legal augmentation, facilitation, and support)—and certainly no restitution. Crimes were committed against Black people regularly and repeatedly. Yet this same victimized and traumatized population, victimized and traumatized incessantly over multiple generations is hyper-adjudicated by society, and oftentimes criminalized and capitally punished for crimes which may never have even occurred (Tamir Rice, 2016; Sean Bell, 2004; Emmet Till, 1957). James Forman, Jr.’s Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America puts this issue in stark relief as he outlines the socio-political contours he sees as the genesis of the systemic and systematic way American society controls Black and Brown bodies we now understand as Mass Incarceration (previously it was called slavery). Forman isolates factors like rampant crime, the massive influx of addictive substances and weapons not-native to U.S. shores inundating the streets of all-Black urban America, underemployment and joblessness resulting from apartheidist policies prejudicial to Blacks, all colluding to maintain a crushing poverty and lack of opportunity for Black people. This amid a general flourishing for American society at large. Collectively these ingredients created the perfect recipe for the shit cake Blacks unwittingly baked for themselves and were forced to eat: experiencing an intensified downward pressure socially and economically, with just a dash of policy influence, the Black community, led by a vanguard of newly elected and appointed Black officials (who themselves had been previously repressed) opted for rigid, repressive punition undergirded by an ethos of personal responsibility as the solution for the exogenously imposed poverty and lack of access to critical resources and opportunity Blacks faced.
With dexterity, sincerity, and perspicacity Dr. Forman does two things amazingly well: 1) he duly implicates the Black bourgeoisie and burgeoning Black leadership for adopting and enforcing problematic policy harmful to Black people, exposing what looks to be an obsession within the Black community of maintaining law, order, and respectability at any price (even when the law is not maintaining law, order or respectability irrespective of costs), but 2) he also paints a very clear tableau of the multitude of pathological abuses and violations Black people endured in this country, whether bourgeois or no, which helps to explain why so many Faustian bargains might be made and tolerated by Black people already eviscerated by White Supremacy, to try to establish any semblance of control and stability in their lives. Forman highlights the toxic inter-reaction of a) the powerful vector of racism on Black people in America, rampant and virtually unabated as it has been, and b) how its sustained presence retards, deforms, distorts and thereby perverts the governance of Black people, both as governors and those governed.
Forman introduces Locking Up Our Own by recounting a vignette of his time in the nation’s capital serving as a public defender. It is the 1990s during the throes of the “War on Drugs” and he is representing a young person whom we will call Brandon; a Black boy, in an all-Black courtroom, replete with a Black judge, juvenile prosecutor, defense attorney (the author), stenographer, and bailiff. Even the cellblock is all Black. The child’s crime: possession of marijuana to use, but not to sell, and a small handgun. Public Defender Forman is hopeful his client might get probation. Prior to sentencing, the Honorable Judge Walker launches into one of his famous Dr. King paeans, extolling manifold ways the Good Reverend Doctor fought to free Black people. To the public defender’s mind, there is at least a reasonable chance Judge Walker may see fit to keep Brandon free: his teachers, football coach and family members have all come forward to vouch for his ability to mend his ways; his lawyer even finds a supplemental program to help him with school. His Honor instead sentences the boy to six months in juvenile detention. Whether one is sympathetic to 15 year-old Brandon’s situation or not, Forman creates a compelling case that members of Brandon’s own community in positions of power—who could have been looking for ways to rescue the child from the criminal justice system—instead, see fit to initiate him into it.
Locking Up Our Own is then divided into two parts. The first, “The Origins,” establishes the social context—as localized in Washington, D.C.—identifying key legislative components Forman sees as laying the groundwork for mass incarceration. This milieu was influenced by the nation’s journey through the Civil Rights’ Movement, into a brief period of opportunity for poor and colored people. The result was a blossoming of Black leadership around the country—Representative John Conyers of MI, 1965; United States’ Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, 1967; Mayor Carl Stokes of Cleveland, 1967; Representative Charles Rangel of NY, 1967; Mayor Ken Gibson of Newark, 1970; Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, 1973; Mayor Maynard Jackson of Atlanta, 1973; Mayor Coleman Young of Detroit, 1973 (p. 19)—before massive deindustrialization and subsequent economic tumult upended Black ghettoes, leaving already wounded souls open for infection and infestation from a scourge as virulent as what may have been a manufactured, federally sponsored “War on Drugs,” followed by a sinister crack invasion (Alexander, Michelle, Esq. 'The New Jim Crow.' New Press, New York, NY pp. 49-58).
In addition to the emergence of Black political leadership within the ranks of the elected and nationally appointed official, Black faces also began to appear on municipal police forces. Forman observes that Black citizenry long had been demanding Black law enforcement (p. 79). Good-livers and other upstanding members of the Black community were frustrated that white cops either could not be bothered to, or just plain were unable to distinguish between respectable citizens and common criminals. A spokesperson for an organization called the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) in 1936 was quoted as saying:
Some white officers have no regard for the social standing of colored men or women. They use the same language to them [that is, to those of higher standing] as they do in the presence of gamblers and known harlots (p. 83)
Forman focuses on two officials within D.C.’s system of local governance who standout as spearheading the movement to ‘get tough on crime’: 1) John Ray, Esq. and 2) Police Chief Burtell Jefferson. Washington D.C. council member John Ray, is the wunderkind from rural Georgia, reared by his grandmother during the twilight of Jim Crow in a two-room shack inhabited by 15 people. He had to be up by six a.m. to tend cotton and tobacco and tap pine trees for turpentine. Ray was the only one of his 37 first grade classmates to graduate high school on time, a feat he accomplished with flying colors as senior class president and valedictorian of Herctoma High School’s class of 1961. He went on to the Air Force and wended his way to George Washington University for both undergrad and law school. Upon completion of his studies, Ray stays on in D.C. and enjoys several notable legal positions. Eventually, he successfully campaigns for an at-large seat on the Washington, D.C. city council in 1978 (pp. 131-2).
Burtell Jefferson, a native of D.C. was born a generation ahead of John Ray in 1925. Like Ray, Jefferson was also educated in a state-sponsored apartheided and inherently unequal education system. After high school, Jefferson was honorably discharged for his stint in WWll. Faced with the challenge that virtually every male in the 1940s confronted after completing high school and military service, Jefferson set out to find a job. An alumnus of Armstrong Technical High School, which espoused the Washingtonian (Booker T.) virtues of “labor, whether with the head or the hand” (p. 81), Jefferson fairly accurately self-assessed: “the only fields of financial stability available to me [as a Black man in America] were teaching, the United States Postal Service, and the fire and police departments (p. 90).” Initially, Jefferson opted to make mailbags at the post office. But the lure of almost doubling his salary + better retirement benefits made pursuing a position at the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department compulsory. Though securing a spot on the force was no crystal stair for any Black applicant as Forman does a superb job of elucidating, Jefferson passes all tests and completes the 16-week MPD police academy training program successfully (p. 91).
Prior to his appointment to Police Chief, Forman documents many instances of the racial discrimination Jefferson faces once on the force. As a Black officer, Burtell Jefferson is assigned to a predominantly Black precinct comprised of roughly 90% white officers. During this time, the then-current Metropolitan Police Department Chief was reported as saying: “[though] integration is the law of the land…I’m going to obey the law…[but] I’m not going to force colored and white to work together in a scout car.” MPD barred Black officers from using scout cars, limiting them to foot patrol (p.91). Tame as this statement may have appeared in light of other more hostile and vociferous stances to openly and violently resist racial integration touted by other senior law officials across the country like Gov. George Wallace (AL), Gov. Orval Faubus (AK), and Public Safety Comm. Eugene “Bull” Conner (Birmingham, AL), it still demonstrates two things: 1) this was a clear example of established leadership maintaining the status quo of racial apartheid between Blacks and whites in direct contravention of the law while branding professional actions as compliance with the law--saying one thing while doing another--and 2) a private citizen, who is also a meaningful functionary in society using personal and professional power to influence how society runs and works (or does not, as the case may be) for Black people. These two points bear mentioning because they show how broadly discretion is exercised for white people to a) enforce the law, or b) not enforce the law, as they see fit, all the while convincing themselves that they are law-abiding, upstanding and orderly citizens. Now let us consider Wallace, Faubus and Conner, other law officials throughout the Republic who refused to comply with civil rights legislation and Supreme Court decisions to disband segregation: they were all permitted to serve out their respective terms in office as well-paid, public officials, though they made it known overtly that they would stand in contravention of the law. To be sure, they also enjoyed the respectability, reputation, AND REMUNERATION of law-abiding, upstanding and orderly citizens. Whatever material wealth and other assets they acquired in their natural lives, they were able to pass down to their children—while their public and private stances blocked contemporaneous Black people from doing the same. The asymmetry of how whites experience the enforcement of law is startling; it is more art than a science, with no mandatory minimum sentences or rigid sentencing guidelines. What is more, they seem to always enjoy the fruits of good citizenship irrespective of whether they are actually good citizens or just predatory monsters perpetuating a system of exploitation and violation against others for their own selfish ends and to give their posterity an additional unearned boost. The cycle of crime against humanity, stymying one future to foster another, completes another revolution.
This brings us to Part 2 of Locking Up Our Own: “The Consequences.” As first-generation Black leadership finds itself beset in the quagmire of a crack cocaine invasion, a scourge which mangles and morphs ghettoes into post-apocalyptic war zones, it has to figure out what kind of policy might stanch the sheer destruction and devastation of an urban gangrene. Constituents are bedraggled and bleary-eyed by the sharp increase in crime and violence, clamoring for justice and peace. The “solution” proposed and enforced by the likes of Ray and Jefferson is mandatory minimum sentencing for drug and weapon possession, and proactive pretext stops—but only in the Black community. If ever there was an opportunity to invite a vampire into one’s home to be preyed upon forever, this would be it. It gave law enforcement license to wreak havoc on Black mobility and erode Black Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms; law enforcement already established to...wreak havoc on Black mobility and erode Black Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. But according to contemporaneous general wisdom, in 1982 John Ray waxes autobiographic, pointing out the hardship his grandparents experience dipping turpentine in the backwoods of Georgia. “We went through a depression and they didn’t sell drugs to their brother and sisters, didn’t sell drugs to young people…I don’t care who you are, there is no excuse for selling drugs (p. 142).” Six years later Rev. Jesse Jackson harmonizes, singing backup: “No one has the right to kill our children…I won’t take it from the Klan with a rope; I won’t take it from a neighbor with dope (p. 158).” But did Rev. Jackson, or Councilman John Ray, or Police Chief Burtell Jefferson equally advocate for mandatory minimum sentencing or pretext stops for suspected members of the Ku Klux Klan, a national terrorist organization equally detrimental to the Black community? Were any of the Klan’s ill-gotten assets seized or otherwise disgorged in an attempt to disrupt their activities? Funny, the criminal justice system could accommodate the decision to impose mandatory minimum sentences and justify extending the already far-too long reach of the law—exclusively for Black people—but no other part of American infrastructure could accommodate the Black community’s need for more jobs, home ownership, opportunities for quality education—the key ingredients to wealth accretion white communities had been receiving for multiple generations steadily—all federally supported, expressly excluding Blacks.
To my mind the book’s title, Locking Up Our Own is meant to be at least partially satirical. Forman makes painfully obvious the impotence Blacks newly installed into positions of oversight—after so long a slog uphill—would have actually been able to wield over any one but other Blacks…deploying the same malfunctioning deathtrap of a justice system calling itself protection and service, law and order. Of course, the painful irony is that what created the unsavory conditions in which Black people—bourgeois and bottomed-out alike—found themselves in from the start, was the pressure cooker of civil and human rights’ crimes committed against them by White Supremacy—perpetrated by actual white citizens—over centuries. Black people proving to no one in particular that they can be upstanding, respectable and self-governing by excessively imposing law and order on their own, presumably to demonstrate their acceptability to the white hegemony failed to notice that white people were not doing, nor had ever done, the same. White people never felt compelled to rabidly demonstrate their disgust and outrage at all of the many and varied ways that White Supremacy was stymieing Black growth by ravaging Black wealth, Black chances for success, Black opportunity, and most importantly Black life. No similar mandatory minimum sentences were ever imposed for those whites suspected of and/or known to be guilty of destruction of Black property (Tulsa, OK 1921), permanently disappearing innocent activists advocating human rights for Black people (Medgar Evers, Nobel Laureate Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), murdering and/or enslaving private Black citizens who may or may not have committed any crime at all (any day in America from 1619-present for Black people like Solomon Northup, Emett Till, The Central Park Five, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile), the convict leasing system. Though these crimes against innocent Black people may have been happening behind closed doors or under cover of night, none of these practices were happening ‘in secret.’ Everyone knew that Black people were getting tortured and brutalized and murdered. No white citizens were getting stopped and frisked by local authorities. No vehicles driven by whites were given pretext stops and searched for fire arms not properly registered or the remnants of missing Black people. No homes were being ransacked or destroyed looking for Black bodies or artifacts which belonged to Black people who had gone missing. And if ever crimes against Black people did go to trial, all-white juries repeatedly returned not guilty verdicts. In summary: white people not only have never hyper-penalized white people when they commit crimes against Black people; over the breadth of history, white people—backed by the hegemony created by them to support them—have never thought it criminal at all to abuse Black people, or commit crimes against them (http://jacksontelegraph.com/2017/06/30/mass-grave-of-dozens-of-tortured-black-men-found-in-deceased-kkk-leaders-estate/). It was thought to be right and proper.
While Forman paints a very clear picture, positioning the ugliness of racial apartheid front and center in a thesis about its intended victims’ inability to establish order and stability in their already crippled communities by resorting to the criminal justice system, he does not seem to take the next and necessary step to indict it. I am concerned that Forman, like many academic writers, accepts the regular and repeated crimes committed against Black people as axiomatic—as though they were merited by Black people or simple reflexive, involuntary apoplexy on the part of whites. This is wrong. What white people were doing to Black people was wrong; their behavior was criminal. During the Civil Rights’ Movement in the middle of the last century Freedom Riders were regularly warned that their safety could not be guaranteed. Activists had to be trained in non-violence, specifically, not retaliating with the same violence with which they would most certainly be greeted. The violent crimes of assault and battery, committed by the average white citizen against Black people was thought to be normative and unimpeachable, business as usual. Activists were said to be meritorious of abuse for standing up for their fellow man and non-violently fighting for Black people’s right to vote, earn an honest wage, own property, receive equal protection under the law (rights supposedly guaranteed as per the 14th Amendment, adopted 9 July 1868, almost 100 years earlier)…all rights which had been criminally and violently repressed with little or no regard for Black life whenever Black people tried to assert them. Forman points out that during the search for Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner in 1964, the bodies of two other Black men were dredged up from the riverbanks; there was no evidence their deaths had even been reported, let alone investigated by local authorities (p. 74). Though the deplorable treatment of Black people in America may have been a quotidian affair, it needs to be understood that this deplorable treatment was criminal irrespective of if the law of the land 1) perpetrated this hateful treatment in the first place, and/or 2) otherwise facilitated and supported it.
Just as importantly, it bears reiterating that hardly any of the white perpetrators of these wanton and willful crimes committed against Black people were ever indicted. This means that their lives were not really disrupted and may have even been materially improved as a result of their actions. No lawyers had to be hired, no capital had to be sequestered to post bail, no detention was required which might have jeopardized employment. Parents remained with their children presenting an air of stability and normalcy in the home, and most gallingly reputations and respectability, along with income generation remained intact. This leads to the other major criticism I have about the current discourse with respect to race in America—unfortunately, Forman’s scholarship in Locking Up Our Own is not withstanding: it does not rigorously enough tabulate the cost of racism to the injured party. Thankfully Forman at least judiciously maintains receipts, documenting the various machinations creating the beleaguered nation of Black people; a population trying to scrape by on the most meager of resources constantly under assault from within as well as without. But this is where my patience with academic writing about Black people in America totally vanishes: It is imperative that when we discuss race inside the U.S. we always discuss 1) material assets attained by Black and Brown people, which can be transferred inter-generationally to Black and Brown offspring as has almost always been the case with whites, 2) access to opportunity by Black and Brown people which will eventually lead to the acquisition of assets which can be handed down to Black and Brown offspring, 3) retention and control of all said assets by Black and Brown people, and most importantly, 4) any and all reasonable impediments thereto. The story of America is working hard to amass wealth to pass on to surviving generations over centuries. The story of Black people in America is 100% about all of the ways white society deliberately and strategically—almost always in criminal fashion—1) blocks Black and Brown people from acquiring any assets and/or 2) strips Blacks and Browns of any assets they might have actually acquired, also over centuries. Viewing the slice of history treated by Locking Up Our Own through the lens of asset acquisition for Black people, we see very clearly that a structural campaign for the reverse took place: governmental seizures of assets was rampant in Black neighborhoods all across the country.
This book tracks the proof of Langston Hughes’ “Dream Deferred.” It shows how a population which has been strategically atrophied and debilitated will continuously and successively make unhealthy and unconstructive decisions for itself, especially when exogenous forces are always at play, only endorsing and enforcing the bad decisions and never answering any other calls for help, let alone acknowledging and accounting for the damages for which it is responsible. This is the problem Locking Up Our Own attempts to tackle: the hegemony—peopled and powered by private citizens—putting its victims into impossible situations, victimizing though never acknowledging or repairing, forcing the victims to contort and pervert their own innate sense of morality and self-preservation to accommodate the abuse which they cannot control, and against which they cannot defend. It is in this context one can appreciate the immensity of the crimes against humanity Black people have suffered as a result of White Supremacy. From slavery, to Jim Crow—including "separate but equal" and the convict leasing system—to redlining, to the Civil Rights' Movement, to deindustrialization, to the War on Drugs, to Mass Incarceration...essentially, we are victims of Stockholm syndrome on permanent house arrest, living under martial law. Given this history there would be no opportunity to amass any wealth we could bequeath to our children from one generation to the next, let alone multiple successive generations in perpetuity. For Black people wealth acquisition is like "Groundhog's Day": every generation is the first on the job. Yet we are asked to compete with those who have enjoyed multiple generations of inter-generational wealth transfers--at our expense--and told that we have equality...the fuck?!?!? In light of this reality we as Black people need to love ALL OF US, especially the "known gamblers and harlots"...they might have the best chances of amassing the capital of which we are in dire need to build up our community.
The gross double-standard that Forman’s research highlights can only be classified as apartheid. One population is literally permitted to get away with murder while the other is hyper-penalized for the crime of poverty, a condition which was imposed upon it via the active commission of unadjudicated crimes by the former in the first place. The effects of apartheid in America emerge vividly: the strategic campaign to retard Black people 1) economically, 2) politically, and 3) socially is manifest in the way that Black leadership is retarded, the way Black people treat each other is retarded, Black people’s wealth accretion is retarded, Black people’s political access and ascension is retarded. And therefore, Black people’s growth in society is retarded. Black leadership in effect was tasked with managing those tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free (whose condition was created by the very nation purporting to ameliorate the same for those arriving from abroad) while being helpless to actually provide any real solutions to change its constituents’ circumstances for the better—they could only do so for the worse. Inadvertently or on purpose, Forman makes the perfect case for how absurdly abused, traumatized people maintain the cycle of abuse by oppressing its own. To my mind, this is the theme of Locking Up Our Own: how hurt people hurt people.