Summary
Black lives matter. Today, this stands for opposition to aggressive policing and punitive criminal sentencing. But in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, as a violent drug trade snuffed out or ruined countless black lives, more assertive policing in black communities was considered a civil rights imperative. Does racial justice require sympathy for criminal suspects who are disproportionately people of color or a crackdown on the criminals who victimize the residents of poor neighborhoods? Yale Law School professor and former public defender James Forman Jr. addresses this question in his poignant and insightful new book, “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.”
Were tough-on-crime policies foisted on black communities by racist white politicians and police? “Locking Up Our Own” tells a more complicated story. Black communities desperate for relief from a plague of drugs and drug-related crime did not foresee the downsides of aggressive law enforcement and demanded law and order: “Mass incarceration,” Forman writes, “is the result of small, distinct steps, each of whose significance becomes more apparent over time, and only when considered in light of later events.”
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