Locking Up Our Own Quotes

“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.”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“Understanding African American attitudes and actions on matters of crime and punishment requires that we pay careful attention to another topic that is often overlooked in criminal justice scholarship: class divisions within the black community.21 Although mass incarceration harms black America as a whole, its most direct victims are the poorest, least educated blacks. While”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“In 1966, a nationwide study validated their fear, finding that police officers were almost never convicted or punished in the aftermath of abuse allegations.93”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“Fannie Lou Hamer spoke openly about their guns: “I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won’t write his mama again.”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“(At PDS, we often lamented that there were never waiting lists for prison—just for alternatives to prison.) But”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“But such a simple account fails to acknowledge the world that pretext stops create—a world in which Ms. Dozier is arrested for an offense that white drivers commit with impunity.”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“But when they are carrying out investigatory or pretext stops, they are much more likely to stop black and other minority drivers: blacks are about two and a half times more likely to be pulled over for pretext stops.66 Moreover, the disparities are present regardless of gender. Black men are more than twice as likely as white men, and black women are more than twice as likely as white women, to be subjected to a pretext stop.67 In fact, black women are more likely to be pulled over for pretext stops than are white men, despite the fact that white men carry guns and commit violent crimes at much higher rates than black women do.68”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“During his first year in office, Congress did just that, passing legislation that changed the formulas governing eligibility and payouts for certain means-tested entitlements.7 These changes led to a roughly 2 percent increase in the poverty rate, the brunt of which was borne by African Americans.”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“Most of all, the fight against crack helped to enshrine the notion that police must be warriors, aggressive and armored, working ghetto corners as an army might patrol enemy territory. At”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“The condescension was rooted in class. Those who fought for the hiring of black police occupied one stratum of black society; those who actually became officers occupied another. Eugene”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“One victim, Harrison F. Finley, was a World War II veteran and the father of two young children. He was shot to death in front of his own parents while being arrested on charges of “resisting arrest” and “disorderly conduct.” (The former was suspiciously common in cases where the police shot or beat someone; the latter was described by the Afro as “a catch-all charge that covers practically everything from talking loud to necking.”75) The”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“As the historian David Krugler explains, “African Americans were not so much rioting as fighting back, counterattacking, repelling violence; above all, resisting.”79”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“Keeping blacks subjugated required that they be unarmed. Alabama’s law was typical: “Any freedman, mulatto, or free person of color in this state” was forbidden “to own fire-arms, or carry about his person a pistol or other deadly weapon.”76 Blacks caught breaking the law were subject to incarceration—which, in the early twentieth century, often meant being sold into debt servitude and forced to work in conditions that approximated slavery. According to Douglas Blackmon, “In an era when great numbers of southern men carried sidearms, the crime of carrying a concealed weapon—enforced almost solely against black men—would by the turn of the century become one of the most consistent instruments of black incarceration.”77”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“gun crime: it wasn’t equally distributed throughout black America. Rather, it was concentrated among the poorest blacks, who were forced into living conditions that generated violence. Few”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“As the tough-on-crime movement gathered force, those who had been arrested or convicted rarely participated in debates over criminal justice policy, in D.C. or nationally. They rarely told their stories. And their invisibility helps explain why our criminal justice system became so punitive.”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“Mass incarceration is the result of small, distinct steps, each of whose significance becomes more apparent over time, and only when considered in light of later events. The”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“No: it was blacks who killed marijuana decriminalization in D.C.”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“Fowler, Hines, and the rest of the city’s black clergymen claimed that the majority of D.C.’s citizens shared their opposition to Clarke’s bill.”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“But class divisions influence criminal justice debates in black communities in less obvious ways as well: they explain, for example, why black elected officials have been much more likely to speak out against racial profiling (which harms African Americans of all classes) than against unconscionable prison conditions (which have little direct impact on middle-class or elite blacks).23”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“by the year 2000, the lifetime risk of incarceration for black high school dropouts was ten times higher than it was for African Americans who had attended college.22”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“Donald Trump, whose signature contribution to political debate had been his relentless propagation of the lie that Barack Obama is not an American citizen, ran the most racist presidential campaign since the arch-segregationist George Wallace’s 1968 bid. While”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America