I am grateful to my agent, David McCormick, who saw what I hoped to do, and to my brilliant editor, Alex Star, who helped me to do it.
I am blessed to have good friends and colleagues who took time from their own busy lives to read and comment on drafts, including Reginald Dwayne Betts, Kenneth Mack, Richard Banks, Vesla Weaver, David Sklansky, Kim Ford-Mazrui, Lisa Miller, Jeff Fagan, Risa Golubuff, Heather Gerken, Dan Richman, Bernard Harcourt, Don Herzog, Robert Post, Randall Kennedy, Aziz Rana, Frank Zimring, Lisa Daugaard, Dorothy Zellner, Christopher Muller, and Andrew Wise. Tracey Meares pushed me to produce drafts for our summer writers’ lunches, reminding me that before anything could be good, it first had to be. John Witt read multiple drafts, offered wonderful suggestions, and was endlessly encouraging.
Arthur Evenchik read every word of every chapter, dozens of times. Arthur’s eyes were the first to see a draft, and the last to review any changes. In between, we spent hundreds of hours discussing and debating the ideas and arguments that appear in these pages. I am forever in his debt.
I received generous feedback from faculty workshops at the University of Michigan, Georgetown, Cornell, Berkeley, Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Temple, the University of Virginia, and Stanford. I also appreciate the probing questions from students in Sharon Dolovich’s After Guilt class at NYU Law School, Vesla Weaver’s Race and Politics of Punishment seminar at Yale College, Michael Leo Owen’s Politics and Punishment seminar at Emory University, and Fordham Law School’s Seminar Series on Advanced Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure hosted by Deborah Denno. The research was supported by Lenny Bernardo and a fellowship from the Open Society Foundations, as well as by my hosts at OSF’s New York, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., offices.
If there are better librarians than those at the Yale Law Library, I have yet to meet them. Jordan Jefferson and Julie Krishnaswami in particular worked wonders, resolutely tracking down elusive material. Deb Tropiano handled thousands of details graciously. I also benefited from spectacular seminar students and research assistants, including Aaron Littman, Tina Thomas, Cynthia Liao, Haran Tae, Meghan McCormack, Tamar Lerer, Cal Soto, Wendy Zupac, Sarah Tallman, Kristen Lang, Silvia Ibrahim, Marbre Stahly-Butts, Irina Vaynerman, Michelle Mangan, Kate Mollison, Tian Huang, Alexandra van Nievelt, Megan Hauptman, Anna Arons, Katherine Demby, Tyler Hill, Jackie Delligatti, Allan Bradley, Olivia Schwob, Micah Jones, Ashley Dalton, Rebecca Ojserkis, Rachel Baker, Jerelyn Luther, Andrea Katz, Asli Bashir, Rakim Brooks, Christopher Pagliarella, Elisabeth Ford, Dvora Toren, Erica James, Hillary Vedvig, Brandon Thompson, Kelley Schiffman, Jonas Wang, Alexandra Barlowe, Marian Messing, Ravi Bhalla, Julie Hutchinson, Sam Brill, Rachel Luban, Carolyn Lipp, Aubrey Jones, the students at the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program at Manson Youth Institution, and, above all, Matthew Lee, Renagh O’Leary, and Jesse Schreck.
I relied on terrific librarians and staff at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, the Special Collections Research Center at the George Washington University Library, the Legislative Services Office of the Washington, D.C., City Council, and the Washingtoniana Collection at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, the central facility of the D.C. Public Library.
Many people agreed to be interviewed for this book, and I couldn’t have completed the project without them: Roger Wilkins, Angela Davis, Nkechi Taifa, Clifford Alexander, Cynthia Jones, Don Braman, June Jeffries, Jack Evans, Greg Mize, Kathy Patterson, Keith Stroup, Kim Taylor-Thompson, Laurie Robinson, Pat Wald, Lenese Herbert, Ronald Sullivan, Ron Weich, Hallem Williams, Ted Gest, Brenda Smith, Albert Herring, Charity Tolliver, John Bess, Carol Thompson Cole, Esi Mathis, Frank Smith, Julie Stewart, Ron Weitzer, and Harold Brazil.
Others helped indirectly, but just as essentially. My colleagues at the Public Defender Service in D.C. taught me how to be a lawyer. Owen Fiss, Akhil Amar, Catharine MacKinnon, Harold Koh, Jeffrey Lehman, Randy Hertz, and Adolph Reed, Jr., guided me into the academy. Charles Lawrence, Mari Matsuda, and Kimberlé Crenshaw convinced me, and many others, that legal scholarship could include our stories. Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld believed in this book before I did, and their enthusiasm persuaded me.
David Domenici and Cheryl Mills put me up during research trips to Washington, D.C., and Lucca and Indigo Domenici-Mills filled the evenings with laughter, break dancing, and Forbidden Island. When the going got tough, I could count on Sharon Brooks, Elizabeth Alexander and Ficre Ghebreyesus, Miriam Gohara and Marcus McFerren, Vesla Weaver and Chris Lebron, and the entire Black Family Dinner posse. Murray Zimiles lent an artist’s eye at a crucial juncture. Abby Rezneck and Miles Ehrlich offered encouragement, Peet’s Coffee, and gelato.
Writing this book was a family journey. My mother, Constancia Romilly, and my stepfather, Terry Weber, came to New Haven countless times to offer child care when I needed “just one more weekend to write.” My wife, Ifeoma Nwokoye, sustained us, all while completing a grueling graduate school program and launching her own career as a nurse practitioner. My grandmother Jessica Mitford died two decades ago, but she left behind Kind and Usual Punishment, a powerful indictment of American prisons that I consult regularly. Published in 1973, before the mass incarceration era had arrived, her book is a reminder of how entrenched the crisis described on these pages truly is.
This book would not exist if not for my father, James Forman. He gave every ounce of his being to the black freedom struggle. He taught me that African American history is American history, and that it is worth writing about. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of him, and miss him.