Notes

Introduction

0.        See, e.g., Robert E. Pierre, “Oak Hill Center Emptied and Its Baggage Left Behind,” Washington Post, May 29, 2009; Anne Hoffman, “D.C.’s Juvenile Justice, Then and Now,” All Things Considered, October 26, 2012.

0.        William Sabol and James P. Lynch, “Sentencing and Time Served in the District of Columbia Prior to Truth in Sentencing” (Urban Institute, 2001), 4. Ninety-one percent of those convicted of felony offenses were men. Ibid.

0.        Marc Mauer and Tracy Huling, Young Black Americans and the Criminal Justice System: Five Years Later (Sentencing Project, 1995).

0.        See, e.g., Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New Press, 2010).

0.        Justice Policy Institute, “The Punishing Decade: Prison and Jail Estimates at the Millennium” (2000), 3, 5.

0.        Douglas Martin, “James Forman Dies at 76; Was Pioneer in Civil Rights,” New York Times, January 12, 2005.

0.        “He imbued the organization with a camaraderie and collegiality that I’ve never seen in any organization then or since,” recalled Julian Bond, SNCC’s communications director at the time and later the chairman of the NAACP. Joe Holley, “Civil Rights Leader James Forman Dies,” Washington Post, January 11, 2005.

0.        Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate (New Press, 1999), 121.

0.        Clarence W. Hunter, “Search Begins to Fill Superior Court Slot,” Washington Afro-American, April 19, 1986.

0.       Nazgol Ghandnoosh, Race and Punishment: Racial Perceptions of Crime and Support for Punitive Policies (Sentencing Project, 2014), 9.

0.       There are important exceptions to the tendency to overlook black actors. See, e.g., Randall Kennedy, Race, Crime, and the Law (Vintage Books, 1998), 370–72; Lisa Miller, The Perils of Federalism (Oxford University Press, 2008), 147–66; Vanessa Barker, The Politics of Imprisonment: How the Democratic Process Shapes the Way America Punishes Offenders (Oxford University Press, 2009), 149–51; Michael Javen Fortner, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment (Harvard University Press, 2015); John Clegg and Adaner Usmani, “The Racial Politics of the Punitive Turn” (unpublished manuscript, June 2016).

0.       See, e.g., David A. Sklansky, “Not Your Father’s Police Department: Making Sense of the New Demographics of Law Enforcement,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 96, no. 3 (2006): 1209–1243.

0.       Between 1970 and 2011, the number of black elected officials increased nationwide by 800 percent—from 1,469 to 10,500. Juliet Eilperin, “What’s Changed for African Americans Since 1963, by the Numbers,” Washington Post, August 22, 2013.

0.       Capitol View Civic Association Newsletter 4, no. 6, May 1979. Washingtoniana Collection, CA Box 11, Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, Washington, D.C.

0.       Craig K. Lisk and Fifty Residents to Marion Barry and Other Elected Officials, November 28, 1988, David A. Clarke Papers, Box 47, Folder 21, Special Collections Research Center, George Washington University Library.

0.       See, e.g., former U.S. Attorney and New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who said this on Meet the Press: “I find it very disappointing that you’re not discussing the fact that 93 percent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks.” He added, “What about the poor black child that is killed by another black child? Why aren’t you protesting that?” “Giuliani & Dyson Argue Over Violence in Black Communities,” Meet the Press, November 23, 2014. Giuliani’s argument is not a new one. The historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad describes such comments as “playing the violence card,” a rhetorical move dating to at least the late 1800s, in which dominant groups delegitimize discrimination claims from ethnic and racial minorities by pointing to violence within their communities. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, “Playing the Violence Card,” New York Times, April 6, 2012; Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard University Press, 2010), 97, 132.

0.       This has been an important theme in the work of the political scientist Lisa Miller. Lisa L. Miller, “Black Activists Don’t Ignore Crime,” New York Times, August 5, 2016.

0.       In fact, Giuliani’s criticism ignores the fact that, as we will see in chapter 4, the term “black-on-black crime” was first used by black commentators.

0.       I disagree with the political scientist Michael Fortner, who argues that “mass incarceration had less to do with white resistance to racial equality and more to do with the black silent majority’s confrontation with the ‘reign of criminal terror’ in their neighborhoods.” Fortner, Black Silent Majority, 23.

0.       See, e.g., Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 205–206; Elizabeth Hinton, Jullily Kohler-Hausmann, and Vesla Weaver, “Did Blacks Really Endorse the 1994 Crime Bill?,” New York Times, April 13, 2016; Miller, Perils of Federalism, 147–66.

0.       Ta-Nehisi Coates highlights the importance of class to black politics on matters of crime and punishment in “Black and Blue: Why Does America’s Richest Black Suburb Have Some of the Country’s Most Brutal Cops?,” Washington Monthly, June 2001.

0.       Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), 26–27.

0.       I acknowledge the existence of “linked fate” across classes within black America. Michael C. Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton University Press, 1994). But the degree to which blacks see their fates as linked varies based on context. As Cathy Cohen argues in her study of the black political class’s response to the AIDS and HIV crisis, “[N]ot every black person in crisis is seen as equally essential to the survival of the community, as an equally representative proxy of our own individual interests, and thus as equally worthy of political support by other African Americans.” Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1999), xi. My claim is that those accused of crime—who are disproportionately though not exclusively poor—have often been viewed as less worthy of political support by other African Americans. I discuss this further in James Forman, Jr., “The Black Poor, Black Elites, and America’s Prisons,” Cardozo Law Review 32 (2011): 791.

0.       Daniel J. Freed, “The Nonsystem of Criminal Justice,” in Report to the Task Force on Law and Law Enforcement (Violence Commission, vol. 13, 1969).