Street roots., July 07, 2017, Page 7, Image 7

Street Roots • July 7-13, 2017
News
Page 7
M.W.: M any o f the measures that
contributed to mass incarceration were strongly
supported by the Black community. H ow do
you account fo r that?
W IK I C O M M O N S
Jam es Forman Jr., the author o f “Locking Up O u r Own ” discusses
how black leaders came to support a racist criminal justice system
BY MIKE WOLD
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
t is well documented how mass
incarceration reinforces a racial caste
system in America. But James Forman
Jr., a longtime public defender in
Washington, D .C ., and now a Yale professor,
points out that many African-American
leaders supported the policies that led to
mass incarceration. His book, “Locking Up
Our Own,” explores why and how they
supported policies that ultimately harmed
the Black community.
Forman takes us back to the late 1970s
and early 1980s, when first heroin and then
crack were epidemic among young Black
people, along with associated theft,
muggings and murder. Many civil rights
leaders saw drugs as destroying the gains
from civil rights. At the same time, black
majority cities such as the District of
Columbia were for the first time in control
of their own law enforcement.
Forman comes with a pedigree in this
area. His father, James Forman, is a
distinguished name among the Civil Rights
Movement through his participation in the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating
I
Committee, the Black Panther Party, and
the International Black Workers Congress.
According to Forman Jr., black leaders
who called for harsh penalties on drug
dealers and users also advocated for better
jobs, better schools and better housing. The
only thing they got was more policing. It
took a decade or more for them to realize
the mistake that they had made.
M ike Wold: Why did you decide to become
a public defender?
Ja m es Form an Jr.: I wanted to do civil
rights work. At the time, the criminal justice
system wasn’t understood as part of the
domain of civil rights organizations. The
NAACP Legal Defense Fund had a unit on
the death penalty, but not on general
criminal justice. I worked in their death
penalty unit.
I saw cases where lawyers that had not
prepared their defense, had not called
relevant witnesses to provide mitigation,
hadn’t cross-examined people. There was
the Rodney King beating and the
subsequent acquittal. The United States had
passed Russia and South Africa to become
the world’s largest jailer. One in three young
black men was under criminal justice
supervision. I was drawn into the idea that
the civil rights issue of my generation was
the criminal justice system.
M.W.: H ow did you feel about your clients?
J.F.: You stand next to somebody who the
systems have failed, all systems, foster care,
public housing, services for veterans. Many
of our clients have fathers that served in
Vietnam and didn’t get the treatment that
they deserved. As a public defender, you
have the opportunity to provide the best
possible representation to somebody who’s
been denied the best. It’s an honor to have
that obligation and that opportunity.
M.W.: You also founded a school fo r your
juvenile clients.
J.F.: My juvenile clients kept telling me “I
want a job and I want to go to a good
school.” So, along with a friend, I started
what was first an after-school tutoring and
job-training program.
J.F.: One of my first cases in the book is
“Brandon” — 15 years old, pled guilty to
possession of a gun and $15 worth of
marijuana. I argued for probation. I had a
letter from his coach and his teachers. His
mom and grandmother were ready to
provide him supervision.
Brandon was African-American. The
prosecutor was African-American. She was
asking for him to go to Oak Hill, a juvenile
jail in D .C . that you should call a dungeon. It
had no functioning school, no job-training
program, no drug treatment program, no
mental health programs.
The judge is African-American. He looks
at Brandon and says:
“Mr. Forman has been telling me that you
had a tough life and deserve a second
chance. Let me tell you about ‘tough.’ Let
me tell you about Jim Crow. Let me tell you
about segregation,” he told Brandon. Then
he said, “People fought, marched and died
for you to be free. Dr. King didn’t die for you
to be running and gunning and thugging and
carrying on. Actions have consequences,
and your consequence is Oak Hill.”
The judge had used the same history that
brought me to the courtroom. He flipped it.
It was an argument for locking this kid up. It
wasn’t just the judge and the prosecutor, (it
was) the city council that passed the laws, a
majority Black city council. The police force
was majority Black. The police chief was
Black. All the guards that I met in Oak Hill
were African-American.
We had this dramatic history of racism in
the criminal justice system, books like “The
New Jim Crow.” Alongside those stories,
which I very much agree with, there was
something else, people like this judge. I
wanted to write a book that told their story
in a way that was nuanced, empathetic, that
tried to explain their choices, while keeping
my critical position of, these were mistakes,
this wasn’t the right way to go.
M.W.: Racism doesn’t have to be conscious
or intentional to operate.
J.F.: That’s exactly right. And when
people are in the middle of a crime wave,
they tend to say, “Let’s just lock them up.”
When people get desperate, they get
fearful and angry. This country has a long
tradition of harsh justice. It’s tempting to
focus on the executive branch: Nixon
declared the war on drugs, and Ronald
Reagan declared a war on crack. But a huge
part of the story are the micro-acts, the
small steps that individuals make.
I write about a city council member, one
of the White guys. He supported marijuana
legalization. He gets letters complaining
about junkies “in front of my doorstep.” He
sends them off to a government agency. But
what’s the agency? The department of
mental health? Addiction services? Drug
rehabilitation? No, the police chief. This is
the failure of imagination. Those choices
across 50 states, the federal government,
D .C ., 3,000 counties and 50 years add up to
the system that we have now.
M.W.: D o you see social class as playing a
part?
See UNBUILD IT, page 10