Jason Riley keeping it real. There are also a couple of books mentioned in the article that I wish I had time to read.
The Other Side of Mass Incarceration
Blacks have long held leadership roles in urban criminal-justice systems.
Jason L. RileyJuly 4, 2017 3:01 p.m. ET
Photo: Getty Images
By
Jason L. Riley
While working a summer job during college in the early 1990s, I met a law student named Darryl. We became fast friends, eating lunch together most days and sometimes grabbing a beer after work. Darryl came from a prominent local black family with a history of public service. We shared an interest in politics and criminal-justice reform and spent hours that summer discussing issues such as policing, drug policies and the death penalty.
After graduating from law school, Darryl took a job as a local prosecutor but wound up hating the work. He told me that he seemed to spend all day, every day prosecuting young black men. I asked him what he expected when he took the position, and he said he didn’t expect it to have the emotional effect it did. He didn’t doubt the guilt of the defendants or believe that these young men found themselves in this situation by dint of some racist conspiracy, but the work just wasn’t for him. He was deeply uncomfortable with his role in the state penal system. After only a couple of years, he left to become an assistant U.S. attorney.
I thought about Darryl while reading the new book “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America,” by James Forman Jr., a professor at Yale Law School. Before joining the academy, the author spent six years working as a public defender in Washington, and he vividly describes the world that my friend had quit.
While leaving court one day in the mid-’90s after defending a 15-year-old client named Brandon on gun and drug charges, a “racial reality” dawns on Mr. Forman. “It wasn’t only Brandon and the other young men in the cellblock who were black,” writes Mr. Forman. “So was everybody in the courtroom—not just the judge, but the court reporter, the bailiff, and the juvenile prosecutor. So was the police officer who had arrested Brandon, not to mention the police chief and the mayor. Even the building we were in—the H. Carl Moultrie I Courthouse, named after the city’s first black chief judge—was a reminder of the African American influence on D.C.’s legal system.”
Mr. Forman has written an honest and balanced book about the large role that blacks have played in the mass-incarceration phenomenon he and others on the political left today regularly denounce. “Locking Up Our Own” doesn’t play down the history of racism in our criminal-justice system, but it does explain why racial bias doesn’t tell the whole story. For decades, black officials have pushed for tougher laws against crime in an effort to keep law-abiding blacks safe. And they’ve done so at the urging of their constituents. A 2014 poll asked Americans if courts deal “too harshly or not harshly enough” with criminals. Seventy-three percent of whites and 64% of blacks responded “not harshly enough.”
As Michael Javen Fortner does in his insightful 2015 book about mass incarceration, “Black Silent Majority,” Mr. Forman delves into a history of the war on drugs that many liberals distort or omit altogether. The federal government’s role in the drug war is “only part of the story,” he explains. “The nation’s urban centers exercised their own power—especially when it came to policing. And African Americans, often underrepresented in federal and state government, featured prominently in many municipal governments.”
Some 130 cities—including New York, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Baltimore—had black police chiefs by 1990. More than 300 cities—including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Atlanta—had elected black mayors. “The words and deeds of these black law enforcement officials and politicians, so often overlooked in histories of the War on Drugs, are crucial to explaining why and how the war developed as it did in American cities,” writes Mr. Forman.
Though Mr. Forman worked as a public defender, his empathy for legal adversaries—the Darryls—he faced in court is clear. Of one veteran juvenile prosecutor, he writes: “She was part of a breed of race-conscious black prosecutors who prodded the system to value the lives of black victims. She was a reminder that for all my claims about punitive criminal justice being a civil rights issue, other black Americans believed just as passionately that rampant crime and violence remained the defining racial justice questions of the day.”
If we are going to have national “conversations” about race in the U.S., a book like “Locking Up Our Own” ought to set the tone. If it did, these debates would be not only more honest but also more civil.
The Other Side of Mass Incarceration
Blacks have long held leadership roles in urban criminal-justice systems.
Jason L. RileyJuly 4, 2017 3:01 p.m. ET
Photo: Getty Images
By
Jason L. Riley
While working a summer job during college in the early 1990s, I met a law student named Darryl. We became fast friends, eating lunch together most days and sometimes grabbing a beer after work. Darryl came from a prominent local black family with a history of public service. We shared an interest in politics and criminal-justice reform and spent hours that summer discussing issues such as policing, drug policies and the death penalty.
After graduating from law school, Darryl took a job as a local prosecutor but wound up hating the work. He told me that he seemed to spend all day, every day prosecuting young black men. I asked him what he expected when he took the position, and he said he didn’t expect it to have the emotional effect it did. He didn’t doubt the guilt of the defendants or believe that these young men found themselves in this situation by dint of some racist conspiracy, but the work just wasn’t for him. He was deeply uncomfortable with his role in the state penal system. After only a couple of years, he left to become an assistant U.S. attorney.
I thought about Darryl while reading the new book “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America,” by James Forman Jr., a professor at Yale Law School. Before joining the academy, the author spent six years working as a public defender in Washington, and he vividly describes the world that my friend had quit.
While leaving court one day in the mid-’90s after defending a 15-year-old client named Brandon on gun and drug charges, a “racial reality” dawns on Mr. Forman. “It wasn’t only Brandon and the other young men in the cellblock who were black,” writes Mr. Forman. “So was everybody in the courtroom—not just the judge, but the court reporter, the bailiff, and the juvenile prosecutor. So was the police officer who had arrested Brandon, not to mention the police chief and the mayor. Even the building we were in—the H. Carl Moultrie I Courthouse, named after the city’s first black chief judge—was a reminder of the African American influence on D.C.’s legal system.”
Mr. Forman has written an honest and balanced book about the large role that blacks have played in the mass-incarceration phenomenon he and others on the political left today regularly denounce. “Locking Up Our Own” doesn’t play down the history of racism in our criminal-justice system, but it does explain why racial bias doesn’t tell the whole story. For decades, black officials have pushed for tougher laws against crime in an effort to keep law-abiding blacks safe. And they’ve done so at the urging of their constituents. A 2014 poll asked Americans if courts deal “too harshly or not harshly enough” with criminals. Seventy-three percent of whites and 64% of blacks responded “not harshly enough.”
As Michael Javen Fortner does in his insightful 2015 book about mass incarceration, “Black Silent Majority,” Mr. Forman delves into a history of the war on drugs that many liberals distort or omit altogether. The federal government’s role in the drug war is “only part of the story,” he explains. “The nation’s urban centers exercised their own power—especially when it came to policing. And African Americans, often underrepresented in federal and state government, featured prominently in many municipal governments.”
Some 130 cities—including New York, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Baltimore—had black police chiefs by 1990. More than 300 cities—including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Atlanta—had elected black mayors. “The words and deeds of these black law enforcement officials and politicians, so often overlooked in histories of the War on Drugs, are crucial to explaining why and how the war developed as it did in American cities,” writes Mr. Forman.
Though Mr. Forman worked as a public defender, his empathy for legal adversaries—the Darryls—he faced in court is clear. Of one veteran juvenile prosecutor, he writes: “She was part of a breed of race-conscious black prosecutors who prodded the system to value the lives of black victims. She was a reminder that for all my claims about punitive criminal justice being a civil rights issue, other black Americans believed just as passionately that rampant crime and violence remained the defining racial justice questions of the day.”
If we are going to have national “conversations” about race in the U.S., a book like “Locking Up Our Own” ought to set the tone. If it did, these debates would be not only more honest but also more civil.
