Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction

Part 1, Chapters 1-3

Part 2, Chapters 4-6

Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Part 2, Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2: “Consequences”

Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary: “‘Locking Up Thugs Is Not Vindictive’: Sentencing, 1981-82”

Chapter 4 addresses sentencing practices for drug and gun crimes in DC Forman starts with an anecdote about his time as a public defender, describing his concerns for a client, Tasha Willis, who faced a maximum sentence of 60 years for selling a $10 bag of heroin to an undercover police officer. The prosecution offered Tasha a five-year sentence in exchange for a guilty plea. Forman advised Tasha to take it, but she refused, claiming she needed drug rehabilitation, not prison. The prosecutor dropped the charges.

The anecdote about Tasha serves as a point of departure for Forman’s discussion of tough-on-crime policies. In the early 1980s, DC politicians lengthened criminal sentencing for drug and gun crimes. Former police chief Jefferson and a Black councilman named John Ray spearheaded this policy change, which established a precedent for punitive sentencing nationwide. The call for reform grew as drug use and violence surged. Dissatisfied with law enforcement’s response, Black communities took protection into their own hands by buying guard dogs and forming armed citizen patrol groups. Black communities also complained about the lenient court system. They called for an end to “revolving door justice” (127), lobbying to keep more people in jail before trial and for longer prison sentences. Carl Rowan, a prominent Black columnist, urged criminal justice reform with an article titled “Locking Up Thugs Is Not Vindictive.”

As chair of the Judiciary Committee, Clarke answered calls for reform. In 1981, he submitted a proposal to strengthen sentencing guidelines for drug offenses. Mirroring other states and the federal government, Clarke proposed a maximum penalty of 10 years for selling heroin and five years for selling cocaine (129). Tellingly, he did not raise the maximum sentence for marijuana, the drug he tried to decriminalize in 1975. Dissatisfied with Clarke’s proposal, Ray presented his own bill to the council. In addition to raising maximum sentences, Ray devised amendments establishing minimum sentences for drug and gun offenses, including a four-year minimum for selling heroin, two years for selling cocaine, and five years for committing a crime with a gun. Ray couched mandatory minimums in the language of racial justice, claiming that Black criminals received low sentences when the victims were Black. His proposal garnered support from civic and church groups, and from Jefferson. However, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the city council remained skeptical. The president of a local NAACP chapter, for example, called mandatory minimums “a club” when the crime problem required “use of a scalpel” (132). Similarly, the Department of Corrections urged the council to reject mandatory minimums on the grounds that they would strain the city’s correctional resources. Although the council rejected Ray’s mandatory minimums, they adopted his maximum sentences, which were harsher than Clarke’s.

In 1982, Ray launched a ballot measure known as Initiative 9 for mandatory sentences. Initiative 9 included a minimum of five years for people convicted of committing a crime with a gun, a minimum of four years for heroin, two years for cocaine, and one year for marijuana (139). Ray collected 24,000 signatures, most from middle- and working-class Black neighborhoods. Initiative 9 met with opposition from a broad coalition of elected officials, including Mayor Barry, members of the NAACP, and the National Conference of Black Lawyers. The two sides sought public support through pamphlets, speeches, radio appearances, and neighborhood visits. The political battle intensified in the weeks leading up to the vote. The National Rifle Association (NRA) supported Initiative 9, urging its members to “Vote Prison Time for Violent Crime” (143). Ray’s ballot measure passed with 73% of the vote (143). Drug prosecutions skyrocketed in the aftermath. Further, prosecutors began charging users with the more serious offense of selling drugs, which carried a greater penalty (144). Higher sentences also pressured offenders to accept plea deals guaranteeing jail time.

Forman argues that context is key to understanding Black people’s support of Initiative 9. Drugs and violence were interchangeable in the 1980s. Ray’s ballot was about mandatory prison terms, but his rhetoric stressed the inexcusability of drug dealing. He successfully merged the two issues, making mandatory minimums the sensible answer to DC’s drug problem. Opponents of Initiative 9 emphasized the root causes of drugs and crime, notably, poverty and discrimination. Aware that these problems were not going away, voters sided with Ray, preferring a bad answer to no answer. In hindsight, a better response would have been to treat addiction as a public health crisis, not as a criminal justice issue. Solutions might have included increasing treatment beds, placing offenders in pre- and post-trial diversion programs, and funneling addicts into treatment programs. Black and white leaders made no such proposals in the 1980s. As Forman argues, the US became the “world’s greatest jailer” not just because of federal policies (148), but also because of small decisions taken by individuals responding to the problems ravaging their communities.

Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “‘The Worst Thing to Hit Us Since Slavery’: Crack and the Advent of Warrior Policing, 1988-92”

Chapter 5 addresses the move toward aggressive policing during the crack epidemic. Forman starts with an anecdote about the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, a program for troubled teens he cofounded in 1997. Police raided the school in 2000, aggressively frisking students in search of contraband. They recovered nothing illegal.

Forman uses the charter school story as a springboard to discuss warrior policing, a trend that emerged in the 1980s. The warrior model presumes guilt instead of innocence. Fueled by the crack epidemic and drug-related violence, police targeted Black communities across the country. Warrior policing coincided with legal and policy changes, including mandatory minimums, longer sentences, and asset seizures. It also occurred within the context of rising unemployment among Black people, predatory lending practices, and the flight of the middle class to the suburbs. The election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the ensuing cuts to social programs increased poverty among Black people. Crack exacerbated existing problems, prompting the president of the NAACP chapter in Prince George’s County, Maryland, to call it “the worst thing to hit us since slavery” (158). Crack-related homicides rose, as did gun sales and gun violence, especially in poor Black areas. People under the age of 25 were the hardest hit. The violence had a heavy toll on Black people, who suffered from anxiety, hypervigilance, and behavioral problems (162).

The federal government intensified its War on Drugs in the 1980s. Congress not only lengthened sentences, but also established harsher mandatory minimums. Civic authorities, including a growing number of Black mayors and police chiefs, also took steps to curb crack use. Mayor Barry of DC supported aggressive policing, as did Mayor Maynard Jackson of Atlanta. Tellingly, Reverend Jesse Jackson referred to himself as a general in the War on Drugs (166). As Forman notes, if civic leaders were military generals, police forces were their armies. In 1988, DC police began trading their handguns for semiautomatic weapons, mirroring a nationwide shift to military-style equipment. Police also adopted military tactics to battle drugs by establishing roadblocks, conducting sweeps of entire apartment buildings, and giving their drug operations military-style names.

Although drug trafficking and gun violence arrests rose, aggressive policing came at a price. Innocent Black people were arrested, beaten, and killed by police. Police also seized the assets of drug offenders. As Forman notes, a long prison sentence and the forfeiture of property was a high price to pay for a minor drug offense, such as PCP possession, but the criminal justice system did not distinguish between drug kingpins, street-level dealers, and individual users. Forman argues that crack spurred this punitive approach. During the crack era, anyone who participated in the distribution chain was deemed responsible for the epidemic. Similarly, users were viewed as active participants in the problem. Overcrowding and assaults became the norm as the prison population grew. Inmates filed suit, to no avail. General antipathy toward criminals left prisons grossly underfunded and understaffed. Although the crack epidemic subsided by 2000, its legacy remains in the form of aggressive policing.

Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “What Would Martin Luther King, Jr., Say?: Stop and Search, 1995”

Chapter 6 focuses on pretext, or investigatory, stops, that is, the use of routine traffic stops to conduct searches to uncover evidence of serious crimes. Pretext stops became increasingly common in the 1990s as police ramped up efforts against drugs and guns. Even small amounts of marijuana discovered during pretext stops had serious legal consequences. Forman tells the story of Sandra Dozier, a woman arrested for marijuana possession during a stop and search. The prosecutor dropped the charges, but the incident left Sandra with an arrest record. Sandra lost her job when her employer requested proof of a clean record. As Sandra’s case shows, even without a conviction, a drug arrest can have serious repercussions.

Pretext stops became widespread in DC under Eric Holder, DC’s first Black US Attorney. In 1995, Holder gave a speech commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. Facing historically high murder rates, especially in Black areas, Holder asked his audience what Martin Luther King Jr. would think about the current state of Black people. He told the crowd that King would be shocked and disheartened at “what we have let happen to our community” (195). Rev. Jesse Jackson made a similar point during a visit to a Birmingham, Alabama, jail in 1995, reminding prisoners that “Dr. King died for you” (196). President Bill Clinton also invoked King during a meeting with Black ministers in Memphis, Tennessee, asking what King would say if he were to “reappear by my side today and give us a report card on the last 25 years” (196).

Holder spearheaded Operation Ceasefire, a pretext stop operation aimed at seizing guns. By embracing stop and search, Holder was emulating the federally funded Kansas City Gun Experiment of 1995, which empowered police to pull over and search drivers for minor traffic infractions (199). Many drivers consented to searches. Like Sandra, most were unaware of their right to refuse. Although police rarely found guns during pretext stops, they often found small amounts of marijuana. Thus, a policy developed to fight violent crime was used against minor drug offenders, most of whom were Black. This blatant discrimination did not raise alarms among the Black population, a silence Forman ascribes to the crack epidemic. Although the crack years were in the past, Black people remained concerned about drugs and violence. Their respect for Holder also made them amenable to his policies.

Despite widespread public support for pretext stops and punitive justice, the policies were not without detractors. Federal judges expressed frustration at mandatory minimums and the harsh treatment of drug offenders. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) also criticized the racial effects of mandatory minimums, as did the Sentencing Project. Racial disparities in pretext stops propelled inequality in other parts of the criminal justice system. The practice targeted poor Black people, who then faced aggressive prosecutions and long sentences. These convicts then lost their right to vote and the chance to live in public housing. As Forman observes, many Black people would have avoided prison had DC decriminalized marijuana in 1975. Similarly, investing in urban revitalization policies instead of punitive justice might have spurred jobs rather than bloating the country’s prison population.

Part 2 Analysis

Part 2 of Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America addresses the growing severity of the US criminal justice system, focusing on harsh sentencing practices, warrior policing, and pretext stops, all of which disproportionately impacted poor Black people. Forman argues that The Mass Incarceration of Black People resulted not just from federal policy changes, but also from local efforts to curb crime:

When we ask ourselves how America became the world’s greatest jailer, it is natural to focus on bright, shiny objects: national campaigns, federal legislation, executive orders from the Oval Office. But we should train our eyes, also, on more mundane decisions and directives, many of which took place on the local level. Which agency director did a public official enlist in response to citizen complaints about used syringes in back alleys? Such small choices, made daily, over time, in every corner of our nation, are the bricks that built our prison nation (148).

Forman interweaves anecdotes, examples, parallels, and studies to explain mass incarceration in the US. He opens Chapter 4 with the story of Tasha Willis, a client facing a 60-year prison sentence for selling a $10 bag of heroin to an undercover police officer. In addition to serving as a point of departure for a broad discussion of the criminal justice system, the anecdote exemplifies how harsh sentencing guidelines impacted all drug offenders, even those who committed minor offenses. Forman urged Tasha to accept the prosecutor’s offer of five years in exchange for a guilty plea. Facing decades in prison, most offenders would have taken the deal, but Tasha refused, and the prosecutor dropped the charges. Had Tasha accepted the deal, she would have spent five years behind bars. In addition, she would have had to disclose her criminal record on employment, education, and housing applications. By coupling his use of statistical data and research studies with anecdotes like Tasha’s, Forman helps to illustrate the human cost of the legal and policy measures surrounding drug crime.

Forman’s anecdotes also serve the dual purpose of clarifying arguments and making his writing more engaging. He opens Chapter 5 with a story about students at the Maya Angelou Public Charter School in DC, a program he cofounded to support troubled teens. Police raided the school and aggressively frisked students in 2000, leaving the teens angry, fearful, and embarrassed: “Our students were forced to ‘assume the position’, with their legs spread, faces against the wall or squad car, and hands behind their heads” (153-54). As Forman notes, these aggressive tactics took bodily autonomy away from the students in a manner that reminiscent of slavery. The anecdote captures the impact of warrior policing, an aggressive policing model that emerged in the 1980s in response to the crack epidemic and drug-related violence. Forman presents the students in a sympathetic light, not only stressing their innocence (the police found no contraband), but also the circumstances that brought them to the charter school: “Many of our students had experienced trauma—they had lost parents, friends, and siblings to violence, addiction, and prison. Some had endured physical or emotional abuse” (153).

Forman revisits the anecdote at the end of the chapter, providing a resolution to the story and suggesting possible alternatives to warrior policing. The students met with the officers who had frisked them. One officer explained that the school was in a high-crime area and that neighbors had called to complain about drug dealing. The students explained that they weren’t selling drugs and didn’t deserve to be treated like criminals. As one student aptly put it: “We can be perfect, perfect, doing everything right, and they still treat us like dogs” (181-82). Another student echoed these sentiments: “How can you tell us we can be anything if they treat us like we’re nothing?” (182). As Forman observes, instead of warrior policing, officers might have adopted a model of law enforcement known as community policing, enlisting students as allies to make the neighborhood safer. He presents two advantages to community policing. First, it would invite cooperation between students and law enforcement. Second, it would encourage students to obey the law and help them find future success. By articulating these advantages, Forman demonstrates that alternatives to tough-on-crime policies can actually better achieve the results that drove such policies into prevalence.

Forman relies on a wide range of studies to support his claims about mass incarceration. In Chapter 4, for example, he cites statistics to convey the impact of Initiative 9, a 1982 ballot measure that established mandatory minimum sentences for drug and gun crimes: “In the two years following Initiative 9’s passage, as the system absorbed the law’s incentives, drug prosecutions skyrocketed nearly 300 percent, from 838 in 1982 to 2,277 in 1984” (143). Forman notes other important changes in the wake of Initiative 9: “In 1980, for example, only 3 percent of drug arrests were for sales, while 97 percent were for possession. Over the next four years, however, sales arrests increased by a factor of fifteen, to 45 percent, leaving only 55 percent for possession” (143-44). Such data help to bolster Forman’s arguments and ward off accusations that Forman is merely being lenient about crimes committed by Black people, a claim he explicitly wants to undermine in the text.

Research plays an equally persuasive role in Chapters 5 and 6. In the former, Forman cites studies to convey the impact of President Reagan’s cuts to social programs: “During [Reagan’s] first year in office, Congress [passed] legislation that changed the formulas governing eligibility and payouts for certain means-tested entitlements. These changes led to a roughly 2 percent increase in the poverty rate” (157-58). With these statistics, Forman is able to draw attention to the underlying causes of crime, setting him up to defend the claim that tough-on-crime measures do not get at the root of the problem.

In the same chapter, Forman cites studies to describe the rise of crack, the drug that ravaged American cities in the 1980s, thereby tracing the correlations between crack and mass incarceration. All levels of government responded to the crack epidemic. At the federal level, Congress lengthened sentences and established increasingly stiff mandatory minimums for crack offenses in 1984, 1986, and 1988. People caught selling small amounts of crack received the same sentence as those selling 100 times the amount of cocaine (164). DC’s leaders also targeted drug crimes with various law enforcement operations proven to be effective: “In the first eighteen months of Clean Sweep, the MPD made forty-six thousand arrests—one for every fourteen D.C. residents. This was more drug arrests per capita than in any other comparable American city” (176). According to the Sentencing Project, young Black men were the primary targets of aggressive policing, with one in four young Black men somehow tied to the criminal justice system (205). In 1991, the group found that the US had surpassed Russia and South Africa as the world’s largest jailer, a status it still retains (205). Forman claims that pretext stops played a central role in this development, an argument supported by statistics: Black people are about two and a half times more likely to be pulled over for pretext stops. Moreover, the disparities are present regardless of gender (212). All these data speak to one of Forman’s key claims, namely, that the tough-on-crime policies and legislation coming out of the War on Drugs directly contributed to the mass incarceration that characterizes the US criminal justice system today.

Relying on research studies, Forman also ties mass incarceration to violent crime and takes care to show the racial dimension of this link. Violent crime rose dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s. Violence impacted all segments of the population, but none more than the Black community: “In 1989, DC was 30 percent white, but nine out of every ten homicide victims were black” (161). This trend continued throughout the 1990s. According to one study, DC’s murder rate increased nearly threefold between 1985 and 1995, with Black residents being the primary victims (194). Trends in DC mirrored those across the nation. A Department of Justice report shows that a Black American man had a 1-in-35 chance of being murdered over his lifetime in the mid-1990s, a risk eight times higher than a white man’s, whose chances were 1 in 251 (161-62). Similarly, a 1997 survey by the Department of Justice reveals that Black people experienced “violent victimization at rates 50 percent higher than those for whites” (194). Black people understood that they were at greater risk than white people, as evidenced by a 1994 survey: “58 percent of blacks said there was an area within a mile of their house where they were afraid to walk alone at night; 45 percent of whites said the same” (195). These statistic go to show that violent crime poses a particular problem for Black communities, thereby giving indications as to why mass incarceration has impacted Black people so significantly.

In this section of the book, Forman continues to use analogies and parallels to clarify his arguments and make his writing engaging. In Chapter 5, for instance, he likens urban hospitals in the US to trauma units in war zones, specifying that a Vietnam veteran “compared the emergency room of DC General to a Navy battle aid station” (162). This comparison is of a piece with the Iraq war policy of sending military surgeons to train in large, urban hospitals to “prepare mentally and physically, for the horrors of the front lines” (162). Forman contextualizes DC’s criminal justice debates by drawing parallels with events happening across the country. Much like Black leaders in DC, Black leaders in Los Angeles lobbied for criminal justice reform to combat crime and the spread of PCP (137). Johnnie Cochran, the first Black assistant district attorney of LA, also adopted tough-on-crime policies to stop Black-on-Black crime (139). Forman also compares Operation Ceasefire in DC to the Kansas City Gun Experiment, a federally funded program aimed at increasing pretext stops in high-crime areas. Like Operation Ceasefire, police in Kansas City were instructed to pull over drivers and use any available pretext to conduct searches. Pedestrian stops also increased after the implementation of the Kansas City Gun Experiment. The program, which received national news coverage, was a model for Operation Ceasefire and other stop and search operations in police departments across the country. These examples help to form a picture showing that tough-on-crime initiatives constituted a nationwide pattern rather than a phenomenon isolated to individual communities.