And so I try to tell the story of how this pressure cooker environment leads to a set of decisions that has been so damaging. They're facing rising crime, rising heroin addiction, rising violence. They're incredibly constrained, right? There's only so much they can do. They'd fought to be treated equally, and they're a part of the story of black empowerment that we often forget about.įORMAN JR.: It's true that in the 1970s with the decline of formal Jim Crow, the work that my father and so many others contributed to, these new cast of black characters come into office. As you describe it, those men had broken color lines. And by the time you were representing drug offenders, there were lots of black cops and soon black police chiefs around the country. SIEGEL: And it may very well have been a black police officer who had busted the young man.

in the 1990s, I did it because I imagined myself doing the civil rights work of my generation, fighting - we didn't call it mass incarceration, but we knew by that point that 1 in 3 young black men was under criminal justice supervision.Īnd so when I go to court in that case and I have a judge who tells my client, young man, Martin Luther King fought and died for your freedom, and he didn't fight and die for you to be out there running and thugging (ph) and carrying a gun, that for me was really kind of the wakeup moment that there was a story that needed to be told. I mean when I became a public defender in D.C. How common was that?įORMAN JR.: It was more common than I certainly would have expected. When he was sentenced, he was dispatched with a denunciation from the bench that he not only had violated the law he had undermined the entire civil rights movement. SIEGEL: You start your book with an observation at the trial of a young man who's charged with possessing a handgun and a very small quantity of marijuana. Professor Foreman, thanks for joining us. tells the story of how blacks in law enforcement, people who had battled for the right to serve as police and judges as well as politicians, made the war on drugs very much their own. In his new book, 'Locking Up Our Own,' James Forman Jr.

His father was head of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He's also the son of a famous black civil rights leader. Foreman is a law professor at Yale who used to be a public defender in Washington, D.C. may change the way you think about the mass incarceration of African-Americans on drug charges.

Locking up our own book