Locking Up Our Own by James Forman Jr.

I recently finished the book “Locking Up Our Own” by James Forman Jr. The book is a deep dive into Washington D.C. and it’s relation with police, lawyers and jails. I love the book because it was so patient to walk back far enough in history to give a real consideration to a time when many black leaders were completely on board with mandatory sentencing and with a large swath of policies that aren’t supported by many leaders period, and certainly aren’t heard often from black leaders. I like the point that you can’t really understand America’s response to the crack epidemic without understanding the heroin epidemic. Being born in ‘81 my reference has always been crack into opioids with little knowledge or focus on what came before. I was also blown away to understand how significant black newspapers were in the framing of the questions of decriminalization, mandatory minimums and more during the 1970s. I know that journalism has been on the ropes for years in our country, I’m glad that the two black owned newspapers from Minnesota are going strong (Insight News and the Spokesmen-Recorder). Getting to see comic depiction of D.C.’s crime issues as well as read from editorials was a really helpful tool in being transported back in to the 1970s and the 1980s.

In reading this book I am reminded how much I believed in the “War on Drugs” and how much I believed in “Just Say No”. I wonder if my parents knew it was bullshit. My parents were former weed smoking Chicago hippies but they had moved out to rural Massachusetts and my parents instilled all sorts of scare language that was really unproductive in helping me understand the United States. I remember drive through the South Side of Chicago with my mom and she told us that if she said “duck” we were all compelled to immediately duck our head down from gunfire. I understand the principle to protect your children. I also understand the danger of stray gunshots, this year we’ve lost multiple children to stray gun shots. I don’t think that duck command was helping anyone. My dad drove me to Walker-West Jazz Academy on Selby when I was in high school in St. Paul. He said “no matter how close we lived to this neighborhood, I would want to drive you cause this doesn’t feel safe”. I grew up knowing that if we saw a lot of black faces in a neighborhood we weren’t safe. This is a stupid way to live life, it’s also a stupid thing to teach rural kids. My cousins who grew up in Milwaukee were endowed with some modicum of street smarts that involved things as simple as knowing how to take mass transit alone, but also a sense of when it was time to come in to the house cause the energy was getting bad around the block. I think those kids maybe could’ve gotten some nuanced lessons from their family about how to ensure your safety and how to be aware of your surrounding. My parents came from Milwaukee and Chicago. But they were raising boys out in Williamstown, MA. I wasn’t getting smarts that helped me carry myself, I was just getting this knee jerk vibe of “you will fucking die if you go into this neighborhood”. I got the same thing on TV screens at home, pictures of downtown Troy, stories of crack dealers stopping in Pittsfield between Toronto and New York. The Just Say No campaign, neighborhoods being torn apart by turf wars. This book gave me a lot of context both for how the reaction to crack had everything to do with increase of violence related to heroin in the 1970s. You can see justifications from Eric Holder when he was the Attorney for D.C. about indiscriminate searches of cars in poor neighborhoods to shake out guns, drugs and more. But you see this willingness in the policy to inconvenience that average driver on a thoroughfare for the dim possibility of shaking out something significant from a search. It’s demoralizing and it’s a willingness to criminalize black life in total because it is unfairly matched up with criminality. It’s the policy that was the de facto lesson of my travels into black neighborhoods in my youth. And this auto-criminalization of a neighborhood limits opportunity, limits growth and in many ways self-prophesizes the neighborhood slipping. It was all bullshit. It was even Band-Aids on a severe injury. It was Band-Aids on the wrong arm, it was Band-Aids on the wrong person. This book lines up a lot of the foundational views that created the climate ripe for the War on Drugs in one of the cities most impacted by said war. I strongly recommend this book.