My guest tonight is a law professor at Yale Law School
and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book,
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.
Please welcome James Forman, Jr.
(cheers and applause)
-Thank you. -Welcome. Welcome.
-Welcome to the show. -Thank you.
Congratulations on winning the Pulitzer Prize.
I can see why it was awarded to you and your book,
because this is an interesting take on a subject
that has really been in many conversations:
criminal justice reform, mass incarceration in America.
You have tackled it
from a slightly different point of view.
Locking Up Our Own, what does that mean?
So I wanted to write a book
the put the African American community front and center.
I wanted to write a book with black characters,
with black judges, black prosecutors,
black police officers, black citizen activists--
basically asking the question:
in the last 50 years,
as America has embarked on this process
of incarcerating more and more people,
what was happening in the black community?
What were the debates that were going on?
To show the multiple perspectives.
You know, it's not a monolithic.
We're not a monolithic community.
To show all of those arguments that were happening.
So that's what the book tries to do.
And you come at this from an interesting place
because you worked in the criminal justice system.
You worked as a public defender.
One of the stories you tell near the beginning of the book
is really heart-wrenching.
And it's a tale of a black judge
who is looking at a young black man,
who is a defendant, and he says to him,
"Martin Luther King didn't fight for civil rights
for you to go out in the streets thugging."
Yeah.
And that made you really angry.
-Why? -Well, it did.
I mean, my client was charged with possession of a gun
and possession of a small amount of marijuana.
It was his first arrest.
I had a letter from a teacher and counselors
at his school attesting to his character.
His mother and grandmother were there in court.
I was asking for him to get a second chance.
And the judge gives him this speech, where he says,
"Listen, it might-- you might think your life is tough now,
"but let me tell you about what it was like back in the day,
back in Jim Crow," and he reasoned this speech.
And the reason it made me so angry is that I had become
a public defender, I was a public defender
because I viewed it as the civil rights issue of my generation.
So I imagined myself and other public defenders
in the Martin Luther King position.
And here the judge was flipping it on its head
and read-- and using this speech
along the way towards locking up another young black man.
And that felt, to me, just so offensive.
Now, what a lot of people may not know--
and I won't lie, I didn't know it
to the depths that it goes into in the book--
but a lot of people don't know that in America,
many black leaders and many black communities
were instrumental in igniting
and fueling the war on drugs.
The war that went on to incarcerate millions
and millions of black men in America,
and black women, as well.
This is a-a...
a difficult subject for many people to broach
because it's black communities, sometimes from top to bottom,
that made these decisions.
But in the book, you argue
that they thought they were doing the right thing.
Yeah, and I think it's important to point out
that they were constrained in lots of ways, right?
They didn't have all the options that were available to them.
So they didn't have money for housing,
money for education, money for rehabilitation programs.
-Right. -They couldn't get national gun control passed.
So they're... they-they were constrained.
But within those constraints, yeah, in many cases,
people made decisions that were like the decisions
that were made in the rest of America.
They made decisions that, um,
that-that didn't give people second chances,
that lengthen prison sentences,
that impose mandatory minimums.
And I wanted to... I wanted to show that,
but it was important for me while doing that
to not in any way suggest
that the system wasn't full of racism, right,
and that the system wasn't, uh,
a system that grew out of a history
and a legacy of slavery.
-So I wanted to show -Right.
how both of those things could be true.
There could be this historic racism
-that's still manifesting itself today, -Right.
and there could have been mistakes that were made
by some well-meaning African-American leaders.
When-when you speak to those leaders today,
if you have the chance to,
have any of them expressed their regret
at the decisions they made?
-Politicians aren't great at expressing regret. -Right.
Um, so, some that have stepped out of office
have said, "You know, we got caught up."
-Right. -It was... it was a terrible time.
Right? The homicide rate tripled in the 1960s in this country--
or it tripled in D.C., it doubled nationally.
In the crack years in the '80s and '90s,
um, it seemed like every day
in cities like D.C., New York, Atlanta, Detroit,
you know, people were dying-- multiple people a day.
And-and people...
A-And that made communities scared,
-and that made politicians want to respond. -Right.
And yeah, they've said...
Some people have said to me, "We went too far."
And some people you can see
are now choosing a different approach.
-Eric Holder is a great example. -Right.
He's featured in the book
as somebody that pursued some of these policies,
and now he's really leading criminal justice reform.
When you talk about criminal justice reform,
though, what does that mean?
-It seems like a term that's used broadly. -Yeah.
But what are some of the ideas that you genuinely believe
would alleviate the problem
of having an entire population of some countries
incarcerated within the United States?
Well, so, first of all,
we have to get rid of mandatory minimums.
We have to shorten prison sentences.
Right now, our pri... this... the maximum that you can get
for most crimes in this country is double and triple
-what it is around the world. -Right.
We have to stop putting people...
You talked about Meek Mill earlier in the segment.
We have to stop putting people on probation
for five and ten and 15 years at a time,
and then, as soon as they make a mistake,
as soon as they miss an appointment
with a probation officer,
test positive for drugs,
w.... you have these harsh judges revoking them
-and locking them up. -Right.
And we have to take the money that you save
and reinvest it in communities
to build the drug treatment programs that we know work
-if we would fund them adequately, -Right.
to fund the after school programs that all the research
shows work and keep kids out of crime
if we fund them adequately.
So I actually think we know what to do.
It's about building a political constituency to do it.
And that is starting to happen.
You mentioned in Philadelphia, Larry Krasner,
the new D.A., he's part of a generation
of new district attorneys around the country
that's saying, "You know what,
"the war on crime has been a failure.
We need new approaches."
And these are prosecutors saying that.
That was unimaginable five years ago.
It's-it's interesting that there are some, uh, D.A.s
who are stepping up and saying, "This needs to change."
What would you say is possibly the single biggest aspect?
Would you say education is the key?
Because I-I was shocked to-to learn in the book
that, for young black men who haven't completed high school
since the 1960s,
they are ten times more likely to end up in prison,
just by not completing high school.
Is-is that one of the key things that needs to be worked on?
Yes, both up front, because education keeps people
from getting arrested in the first instance,
-for the reasons you just mentioned, -Uh-huh.
but, also, there's a whole new movement,
which I'm a part of, to provide high-quality education
to people who are incarcerated.
Like, it's gonna take us a long time, right,
even with some progressive prosecutors,
it's gonna take us a long time to get out of being
-the world's largest jailer. -Right.
And... So while we have people incarcerated,
let's provide them high-quality education.
Because the research shows that for every dollar you invest
in education of somebody behind bars,
we, as a society, get five dollars in return,
because crime goes down, recidivism goes down.
People are more likely to be employed.
So I-I do think education is--
if you had to pick one thing--
and one of my arguments of the book
is you can't really pick one thing,
because there's fi... you know, 50 things we have to do--
but if you said, "Okay, Forman, yeah, I know,
but I got to focus on one,"
that's what I would choose.
It's a-a beautiful book, written so well.
It gives you the origins and the consequences
of where we are, and, um, it's deserving of every award.
-Thank you so much for being on the show. -Thank you.
-Appreciate it. -I really appreciate it.
Locking Up Our Own,
a fascinating book, is available now.
James Forman Jr., everybody.