Author James Forman, Jr., has written a fascinating book, Locking Up Our Own, describing the path we took to today’s situation where a very large number – 25% in some age cohorts – of black men are incarcerated.  He shows how many black leaders in the past pushed for strong justice, by supporting the war on drugs, for example, leading us step-by-step to the present.

We see drug use as a problem of crime, not as a health issue.  Forman asks how we might be better off if the first call were to a therapist/job program/rehab program rather than to the police.  This is an excellent question; yet Forman does not absolve the misbehaving individual of his own personal responsibility.  Forman’s point is that harsh prison sentences and lack of alternative punishments have a terrible effect on people, especially young people.  He asks whether alternative approaches might work better.

Forman makes some excellent points about racial disparate treatment, some chicken-and-egg problems.  Forman points out that poor and minority people are more likely to be hassled by police, which has been shown in several studies (although not more likely to be killed despite rhetoric to the contrary) and surely those communities behave differently towards police as a result, which causes the police to be tougher in response.

The author seemed surprised that black police were at least as hard as their white fellows when dealing with black suspects.  The officers are doing their duty, to their honor, and cannot turn a blind eye because of the suspect’s race.  Forman didn’t seem to think that they should take it easier on black people, but was nonetheless bemused that they are not.

The title itself – “Locking Up Own” – bothers me as it implies that there are “Us” and “Them” and that “we” should not be so tough on “Us”.  Forman comments that drug use rates are fairly constant among races and that the reason white folks don’t get arrested is because they can patronize safer venues to purchase.  It would be interesting to see whether that holds true if you look at poor neighborhoods in general.  For example, do poorer white folks and poorer black folks patronize the same dealers?  Are they both equally likely to get arrested or hassled by police?  In other words, is there something about a person’s race, or more likely, the person’s general attitudes, skills, background, experiences that make one more or less likely to offend and more or less likely to be arrested?

The book offers a few suggestions:

• Decriminalizing some drug use.  Forman doesn’t advocate making drugs completely legal, but treating some violations as misdemeanors, especially related to marijuana.
• Give addicts more than one or two chances to get clean and stay clean.
• Offer mercy.  He ends the book on an eloquent story about a young mugger who had never been in trouble before.  Forman visited the victim and asked him to request mercy and for the young man to go to a job program.  The victim kindly agreed and the young mugger has stayed out of trouble.
• Placing young offenders in job programs.
• Thinking through the consequences, with an eye to racial imbalances.
• Employers to not immediately fire someone on probationary status for an arrest.

One of the last sections covers some of the semi-deceptive pretexts that police use to search vehicles, such as claiming the windows are too dark, then using those searches to find a gun or small packets of marijuana.  The driver should not have had the drug in the first place, but the deception and trickery used is a problem.  The racial imbalance comes because the pretextual search program described in Washington D.C. deliberately excluded a city section that was low crime.  Unfortunately one could blame the the search program as racist when in fact it was designed to be efficient.

Forman did not mention any of the problems that growing up without a father are known to exacerbate, nor did he talk about how to change behaviors so fewer people use drugs, sell drugs, get into fights, join gangs, hang around on street corners.  He referenced an “all of the above” type of general solution, including jobs, welfare, health care, without looking at the problems that even these well-meaning solutions can bring.

Overall Locking Up Our Own is well-written and the author uses anecdotes from his public defender career and historical research to make his point.  It is not polemic or shrill, doesn’t deny the need for policing, doesn’t sugar coat the violence.  It is easy to read and thought provoking without being academic, in fact I read it on the beach on vacation.

4 Stars