YALE SCHOOL OF LAW PHOTO
James Forman Jr.
When James Forman Jr. first came to New Haven to teach at Yale Law School he thought things might be different from what he had been seeing in Washington, D.C. — black people in authority locking up their own.
In the case of New Haven, he found black public school officials, at least to some degree, deciding harshly the fate of black students.
Forman, a professor at Yale Law School who won the Pulitzer Prize this year for general nonfiction for his book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, found that out while a Yale Law clinic represented a New Haven public school student facing 180 days of expulsion from school for some minor infraction.
“The lawyer arguing for expulsion on behalf of the school system was African American, the hearing officer was African American,” Forman recalled on a recent episode of the WNHH FM program “Criminal Justice Insider with Babz Rawls-Ivy and Jeff Grant.” (Andrew Kaplan sat in for Jeff Grant on this episode.)
“Coming from D.C. I was used to that. I thought it would be different here,” Forman said. “I’m not saying that it was representative but that was my first hearing and I saw some of the same things.”
Forman said his student client did end up being expelled from school. The decision was rooted in the kind of fear that plagued the hearts and minds of many urban communities where black folks, particularly those of middle and upper classes, felt under siege as drugs and violence transformed neighborhoods from places of pride to places of fear.
“There’s a sense of fear,” he said. “People want their neighborhood to be safe — that’s first and foremost. People are angry when their sense of safety is violated.”
He said when a grandmother on her way to church or an NAACP meeting is robbed or shot people are naturally upset and want something done.
“It makes people kind of vindictive,” he said. “They say, ‘We have to get rid of these folks causing all this damage. There is a real sense of fear and I think a legitimate sense of fear.’”
Forman’s book traces the little-discussed role that African-American politicians and ministers played in pushing the mandatory minimum sentencing laws for drug offenses that ended up disproportionately imprisoning and destroying the lives of people of color. The book features Forman’s own firsthand look at those effects on real people’s lives when he served as a public defender in Washington D.C.
Rawls-Ivy, a native New Havener who grew up in the soon-to-be former Church Street South apartment complex, said that she remembered how the home of her youth had transformed into a place that she described as “crazy” in the 1980s. But after reading Forman’s book, she was surprised that black people weren’t more thoughtful about the consequences of cleaning up communities with solutions that resulted in long-term incarceration for many black people.
“How did we as black people not be thoughtful about this?” she asked. “How do we reconcile our part in this hyper-mass incarceration story?”
Forman suggested that part of the way African Americans can reconcile their role is to acknowledge the role that class politics and respectability politics have played and continue to play in the policies that create mass incarceration and disproportionately impact black and brown people.
“We have these class divisions and respectability politics,” Forman said. “People get into positions of power and authority and they say to people, ‘You are out there creating mayhem, you’re threatening all of this [that we’ve achieved.] You make us look bad.’ That’s an impulse we have to resist.”
And though there were black elected officials and other black leaders in Washington, D.C. and other major metropolitan areas with large populations of black people who asked for the law enforcement to crack down on the real mayhem that they saw destroying their communities. That wasn’t all they asked for. As Forman documented in his book, they also wanted more money for jobs, for schools, and healthcare.
“They wanted a Marshall Plan for urban America,” Forman said. “They wanted a whole package of investments.”
Click the Facebook Live video below to catch the entire Forman interview or above to listen with Soundcloud.
“Criminal Justice Insider” airs every first and third Friday of the month on WNHH FM at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Listen to the full interview by clicking on the audio player above or Facebook Live video below.
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