Locking Up Our Own Crime and Punishment in Black America

One of the central themes of James Forman's Locking Up Our Own is the way that the Black community and Black politicians have for decades been asking for these kinds of bothand solutions. Not only more police officers but also investments in jobs and poverty alleviation and mental health and addiction services.

Pulitzer Prize winning author of Locking Up Our Own, Crime and Punishment in Black America. Just an essential book for this moment.

you write, quote, For residents of the city's poorest neighborhoods, especially young people, this treatment became part of a social contract, a tax paid in exchange for the right to move.

the book was essential reading and it was utterly essential for this moment.

Justice Thomas is citing to James Foreman's Pulitzer Prize winning book locking up our own and noting that it is true that DC council members and even the mayor of DC at the time they were in favor of these increased sentences because they were worried about public safety DC is a majority minority city and was at the time and they were concerned about the black community more broadly but.

And the history that he acknowledged and surfaced in his box concurrence was partly true but largely incomplete so this is kind of like a weird sort of rehashing of that whole move and you know I don't know why he's engaged in this kind of law office history but it would be great if he would continue reading the books and add more of that in.

And just to note this is another example I think of the sniping in the footnotes that we've really seen over the last couple of weeks with these opinions like you know last week it was Kagan and Kavanaugh mixing it up you know here.

The lack of coverage of the redistributive part of that history is really appalling because it's a big part of both the Hinton book both both the Hinton and Foreman books and the Sophead that you've cited.

we talked to James Forman Jr., who wrote a book called Locking Up Our Own, which is about the role that Black people, Black elites, but not always Black people in Black neighborhoods, invest in parties in Black neighborhoods, you know, whether it's the old church ladies or Black elected officials played in mass incarceration.