Many of those officials were among the first generation of African-Americans to be elected in significant numbers since Reconstruction, thanks to the civil rights movement. residents to complain to local officials.

What happened was this, Forman said: Skyrocketing crime and violence in the 1980s and 1990s, related to heroin and crack cocaine, prompted D.C. “What happened in this country over the last 50 years that was so powerful … that even in this majority-black jurisdiction with some measure of control over its local politics and its local criminal law … we were doing the same thing as the rest of the country?” asked Forman. 4 event at Alice Statler Auditorium was the capstone lecture for the Institute for the Social Sciences’ 2015-18 Mass Incarceration theme project and kicked off a legacy of the project: an annual lecture on the causes and consequences of mass incarceration, co-sponsored by Cornell’s Center for the Study of Inequality.Ī sobering statistic foregrounded his talk: One in three young black men in America is now emmeshed in the criminal justice system.ĭefending Brandon and other young black men was the “civil rights work of my generation,” said Forman, who identifies as biracial and whose parents helped lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s.īrandon, who is African-American, was given a harsh sentence – even though he lived in a city where the majority of the police force and city council, the district attorney and even the judge who sentenced him were all African-American. Through the story of that boy, Forman, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, outlined the key points of his award-winning book, “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America,” in a talk that analyzed the tenacious roots of mass incarceration and how society can stop their spread. was a public defender in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s, he defended a 15-year-old named Brandon, who was charged with possessing a small amount of marijuana and a gun. When Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Forman Jr.

Locking up our own by james forman jr