Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

Content Warning: The section of the guide addresses racism and racial inequities in the US criminal justice system.

Forman published Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America in 2017, four years after the start of Black Lives Matter (BLM), a decentralized sociopolitical movement seeking to address anti-Black racism and racial inequality. BLM began in July 2013, when the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter started trending on social media after a jury acquitted George Zimmerman of fatally shooting Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager walking to a family friend’s home in a gated Florida community Martin had visited on several occasions. The movement gained national recognition the following year with two high-profile cases of police violence against Black people. The first was the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri, which sparked peaceful protests and violent riots that lasted more than a week. The second was the killing of Eric Garner by New York City police officers after a confrontation over the illegal selling of single cigarettes from packs without tax stamps. Video footage shows Garner repeating “I can’t breathe” 11 times after Officer Daniel Pantaleo put him in a prohibited chokehold. BLM returned to national attention after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, by Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer. As many as 26 million people participated in BLM protests that year, making it one of the largest social movements in US history.

Police brutality and racial inequality in criminal justice are key concerns of BLM. After Floyd’s murder, the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition of over 50 groups whose members include the BLM network, called for legislative changes surrounding policing. Notably, they called for bills to divest from policing and to invest in alternative public safety models. The slogan “defund the police” emerged to support removing funds from police departments and reallocating them to other forms of community support, such as education, youth services, and mental healthcare. BLM and other social justice groups believe that community programs addressing the root of crime, such as poverty, mental disorders, and homelessness, are more effective at curbing crime than policing.

Like BLM and M4BL, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America critiques the US criminal justice system, specifically, the rise of aggressive policing and the over-policing of poor Black people. Forman traces the role Black leaders played in implementing tough-on-crime policies. Key among these was their support for the War on Drugs, including the aggressive enforcement of marijuana laws, mandatory minimum sentences for drug and gun offenses, and stop and search methods of policing, which empowered police officers to stop drivers for minor traffic infractions to search for contraband. These tough-on-crime policies disproportionately impacted poor Black people and fueled mass incarceration.

After 40 years of increasingly punitive anticrime measures, the pendulum is finally swinging in the other direction, in part because of the work of social justice activists, such as BLM and M4BL. Currently, 24 states have legalized the recreational use of marijuana, while another seven states have decriminalized the drug (“Decriminalization.” NORML). Forman presents decriminalization as an essential step to rectifying racial inequities in the criminal justice system. Further, he promotes similar alternatives to policing as BLM and M4BL, such as investing in mental health services, education, and afterschool programs. Forman calls for an empathetic approach to criminal justice, one that combines accountability and compassion instead of focusing on punishment: “What if we came to see that justice requires ac­countability, but not vengeance? […] What if we strove for compassion, for mercy, for forgiveness? And what if we did this for everybody, including people who have harmed others?” (236).