Forman, a Yale legal scholar who worked as a public defender in Washington, D.C., examines how mass incarceration was built not only by white politicians but also, in part, by Black officials, police, prosecutors, judges and residents responding to real crises of crime, guns and drugs in their own neighborhoods. Centered on Washington, D.C., from the 1970s onward, the book traces debates over marijuana decriminalization, gun control, the growth of a Black police force, mandatory sentencing, crack-era warrior policing and stop-and-search. At each step Forman shows choices made in the name of protecting Black lives that also widened arrest and imprisonment, and he stresses the alternatives that were proposed and not taken — jobs, treatment and investment alongside enforcement. The result is an argument about shared, if unequal, responsibility, and about the limits of punishment as a route to safety.
Author: James Forman Jr. · Original publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York), 2017
