Locking Up Our Own

James Forman Jr. spent years as a public defender in Washington, D.C. before writing Locking Up Our Own, and the book grew directly out of a question that troubled him in that job: how had a city led largely by Black officials, police officers and judges built one of the harshest criminal justice systems in the country, one that fell overwhelmingly on Black defendants. Forman answers by going back to the 1970s, when rising crime hit Black neighborhoods in Washington hardest and Black leaders, elected officials and community organizations, often reluctantly and in the name of protecting their own communities, supported tougher policing, harsher sentencing and expanded incarceration as the available tools to address it.

The book follows that history forward through the decades in which those choices, made under real pressure and with real support from the communities most affected by crime, combined with federal policy and funding to produce the scale of mass incarceration the country has today. Forman is careful not to flatten this into a simple story of betrayal; he shows leaders choosing among genuinely limited options, informed by the crime rates and fear their own constituents lived with, even as the long term results proved devastating.

Reading the book means encountering a version of criminal justice history that resists an easy villain, since it locates real agency and real responsibility inside the Black political establishment rather than treating Black communities purely as passive victims of a system imposed from outside. It suits a reader who already knows the broad outline of mass incarceration and wants the more complicated, locally specific history behind how it built consensus along the way.