美国国家公共电台 NPR 'Locking Up Our Own' Details The Mass Incarceration Of Black Men

 

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

James Forman Jr. may change the way you think about the mass incarceration¹ of African-Americans on drug charges. Foreman is a law professor at Yale who used to be a public defender² in Washington, D.C. He's also the son of a famous black civil rights leader. His father was head of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating³ Committee.

In his new book, "Locking Up Our Own," James Forman Jr. tells the story of how blacks in law enforcement, people who had battled for the right to serve as police and judges as well as politicians, made the war on drugs very much their own. Professor Foreman, thanks for joining us.

JAMES FORMAN JR.: Thanks for having me.

SIEGEL: You start your book with an observation at the trial of a young man who's charged with possessing a handgun and a very small quantity of marijuana. When he was sentenced, he was dispatched with a denunciation from the bench that he not only had violated the law; he had undermined the entire civil rights movement. How common was that?

FORMAN JR.: It was more common than I certainly would have expected. I mean when I became a public defender in D.C. in the 1990s, I did it because I imagined myself doing the civil rights work of my generation, fighting - we didn't call it mass incarceration, but we knew by that point that 1 in 3 young black men was under criminal justice supervision⁴.

And so when I go to court in that case and I have a judge who tells my client, young man, Martin Luther King fought and died for your freedom, and he didn't fight and die for you to be out there running and thugging (ph) and carrying a gun, that for me was really kind of the wakeup moment that there was a story that needed to be told.

SIEGEL: This is a black judge.

FORMAN JR.: Black judge.

SIEGEL: And it may very well have been a black police officer who had busted⁵ the young man. And by the time you were representing drug offenders⁶, there were lots of black cops and soon black police chiefs around the country. As you describe it, those men had broken color lines. They'd fought to be treated equally, and they're a part of the story of black empowerment that we often forget about.

FORMAN JR.: It's true that in the 1970s with the decline of formal Jim Crow, the work that my father and so many others contributed to, these new cast of black characters come into office. They're incredibly constrained⁷, right? There's only so much they can do. They're facing rising crime, rising heroin⁸ addiction⁹, rising violence. And so I try to tell the story of how this pressure cooker environment leads to a set of decisions that has been so damaging.

SIEGEL: Yeah. One reading of this story is that black cops turn out to be not that different from white cops in their attitude towards crime, in their attitude towards whom they're protecting, the middle-class households that are victimized by crime, not young people who get involved with drugs and commit crimes.

FORMAN JR.: Well, I think we have never had a good theory for what difference we expect black officers to make. I have people like - Martin Luther King Sr. in the book is arguing in 1940s in Atlanta, Ga., that we need one black officer in Atlanta for all of the 105,000 Negroes. And the theory is that black officers will be more aggressive in fighting crime that white officers have ignored.

Other people say we need black officers because they're going to be less brutal¹⁰. At the end of the day, I think my story is, we need black officers because African-Americans need a fair shot at good jobs in this country, but we cannot expect them and should not expect them to change the nature of policing.

SIEGEL: As you describe it, the - a major motivation for becoming a police officer for an African-American man or woman today was not to advance the civil rights movement but to have a job and to have good benefits.

FORMAN JR.: Yeah, and that's completely reasonable...

SIEGEL: Yeah.

FORMAN JR.: ...And appropriate.

SIEGEL: That's why a lot of white people become police as well.

FORMAN JR.: Yeah, and I - and you know, one of the things I say is that black people should be able to be firefighters. We don't think they're going to change how we fight fires in America. I feel the same way about policing.

SIEGEL: I want you to tell the story about how in the District of Columbia a handful of police officers got together to see to it that they would pass the exams to get not only hired but promoted and what an important development that was for the city.

FORMAN JR.: Yeah, well, you had Burtell Jefferson and Tilmon O'Bryant - were the leaders of this in the early 1960s. And at the time, they faced real discrimination because to get promoted, you needed to achieve a certain test on the written exam, and you needed a certain level of supervisor¹¹ evaluation¹² - you know, a qualitative¹³ assessment¹⁴. And no matter how well the black officers did on the written exam, they would get dinged by their white superiors on the qualitative assessment, and they never would get the promotion¹⁵.

And the response of men like Burtell Jefferson and Tilmon O'Bryant was, we are going to study twice as hard, three times as hard. They set up special study sessions in Tilmon O'Bryant's basement. They would come together once a week. And over time, 14 out of 15 of them passed the exam with scores so high that even factoring in the discriminatory qualitative assessment, they had to be promoted.

SIEGEL: It's not hard to imagine the police lieutenant¹⁶ that emerges from that experience.

FORMAN JR.: Well, that's exactly right. And then one later in the decade when some civil rights advocates, including the editors of the Afro-American, D.C.'s largest black paper at the time - they call for affirmative action to hire more black officers in D.C. And Tilmon O'Bryant comes out and says he opposes that. And you know, that feeling that you're describing of somebody who comes up through the ranks, studies two times as hard, three times as hard - that does produce a kind of severity later when it seems as if people aren't behaving as you yourself would have behaved or at least as you imagine you would have behaved.

SIEGEL: What do you say to those people who hear in that speech from the judge in the case with which you begin the book, you have betrayed Martin Luther King; you have betrayed the civil rights movement? What do you say to people who say, well, there was - there is some disconnect here? Things - legal barriers come down in the 1960s. Social change is underway. The catastrophe¹⁷ that drugs wrought¹⁸ in inner-city neighborhoods, in black neighborhoods was at least a terrible disappointment to, if not a betrayal of, what people - what their parents and their grandparents had been struggling for.

FORMAN JR.: Well, I'm not sympathetic to that because I think that the nature of the problem changed. So yes, you didn't have Jim Crow. But we also had de-industrialization, right? We had jobs that were leaving. We had an education system that was failing. We had mental health programs that were not being adequately invested in.

So - and we have segregation¹⁹ that's getting harder - the lines are getting harder and harder around a particular group, which is to say low-income, black Americans. Today, a black person without a high school degree - their likelihood of going to prison has gone up 10 times since the 1960s. Jim Crow is gone, but life is just as hard.

SIEGEL: And those communities - you would say instead of economic development or social and economic justice, they get crackdown justice instead, is what happened.

FORMAN JR.: I think that's right. And most of the black actors that I write about are asking for economic development. They are asking for root causes to be addressed. Many people follow John Conyers, the congressman²⁰, and say, we want a marshal plan for urban America. They want more police, more prisons, better jobs, better schools, better parks. They want the whole thing, all of the above. Instead, they get one of the above, which is law enforcement.

SIEGEL: James Forman Jr. is the author of locking up our own, crime and punishment in black America. Thanks for talking with us.

FORMAN JR.: Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF PERPETUAL GROOVE SONG, "TEAKWOOD BETZ")

1 incarceration   

n.监禁，禁闭；钳闭

参考例句：

• He hadn't changed much in his nearly three years of incarceration. 在将近三年的监狱生活中，他变化不大。 来自辞典例句
• Please, please set it free before it bursts from its long incarceration! 请你，请你将这颗心释放出来吧！否则它会因长期的禁闭而爆裂。 来自辞典例句

2 defender   

n.保卫者，拥护者，辩护人

参考例句：

• He shouldered off a defender and shot at goal.他用肩膀挡开防守队员，然后射门。
• The defender argued down the prosecutor at the court.辩护人在法庭上驳倒了起诉人。

3 coordinating   

v.使协调，使调和( coordinate的现在分词 )；协调；协同；成为同等

参考例句：

• He abolished the Operations Coordinating Board and the Planning Board. 他废除了行动协调委员会和计划委员会。 来自辞典例句
• He's coordinating the wedding, and then we're not going to invite him? 他是来协调婚礼的，难道我们不去请他？ 来自电影对白

4 supervision   

n.监督，管理

参考例句：

• The work was done under my supervision.这项工作是在我的监督之下完成的。
• The old man's will was executed under the personal supervision of the lawyer.老人的遗嘱是在律师的亲自监督下执行的。

5 busted   

adj. 破产了的，失败了的，被降级的，被逮捕的，被抓到的 动词bust的过去式和过去分词

参考例句：

• You are so busted! 你被当场逮住了！
• It was money troubles that busted up their marriage. 是金钱纠纷使他们的婚姻破裂了。

6 offenders   

n.冒犯者( offender的名词复数 )；犯规者；罪犯；妨害…的人（或事物）

参考例句：

• Long prison sentences can be a very effective deterrent for offenders. 判处长期徒刑可对违法者起到强有力的威慑作用。
• Purposeful work is an important part of the regime for young offenders. 使从事有意义的劳动是管理少年犯的重要方法。

7 constrained   

adj.束缚的,节制的

参考例句：

• The evidence was so compelling that he felt constrained to accept it. 证据是那样的令人折服，他觉得不得不接受。
• I feel constrained to write and ask for your forgiveness. 我不得不写信请你原谅。

8 heroin   

n.海洛因

参考例句：

• Customs have made their biggest ever seizure of heroin.海关查获了有史以来最大的一批海洛因。
• Heroin has been smuggled out by sea.海洛因已从海上偷运出境。

9 addiction   

n.上瘾入迷，嗜好

参考例句：

• He stole money from his parents to feed his addiction.他从父母那儿偷钱以满足自己的嗜好。
• Areas of drug dealing are hellholes of addiction,poverty and murder.贩卖毒品的地区往往是吸毒上瘾、贫困和发生谋杀的地方。

10 brutal   

adj.残忍的，野蛮的，不讲理的

参考例句：

• She has to face the brutal reality.她不得不去面对冷酷的现实。
• They're brutal people behind their civilised veneer.他们表面上温文有礼，骨子里却是野蛮残忍。

11 supervisor   

n.监督人，管理人，检查员，督学，主管，导师

参考例句：

• Between you and me I think that new supervisor is a twit.我们私下说，我认为新来的主管人是一个傻瓜。
• He said I was too flighty to be a good supervisor.他说我太轻浮不能成为一名好的管理员。

12 evaluation   

n.估价，评价；赋值

参考例句：

• I attempted an honest evaluation of my own life.我试图如实地评价我自己的一生。
• The new scheme is still under evaluation.新方案还在评估阶段。

13 qualitative   

adj.性质上的，质的，定性的

参考例句：

• There are qualitative differences in the way children and adults think.孩子和成年人的思维方式有质的不同。
• Arms races have a quantitative and a qualitative aspects.军备竞赛具有数量和质量两个方面。

14 assessment   

n.评价；评估；对财产的估价，被估定的金额

参考例句：

• This is a very perceptive assessment of the situation.这是一个对该情况的极富洞察力的评价。
• What is your assessment of the situation?你对时局的看法如何？

15 promotion   

n.提升，晋级；促销，宣传

参考例句：

• The teacher conferred with the principal about Dick's promotion.教师与校长商谈了迪克的升级问题。
• The clerk was given a promotion and an increase in salary.那个职员升了级，加了薪。

16 lieutenant   

n.陆军中尉，海军上尉；代理官员，副职官员

参考例句：

• He was promoted to be a lieutenant in the army.他被提升为陆军中尉。
• He prevailed on the lieutenant to send in a short note.他说动那个副官，递上了一张简短的便条进去。

17 catastrophe   

n.大灾难，大祸

参考例句：

• I owe it to you that I survived the catastrophe.亏得你我才大难不死。
• This is a catastrophe beyond human control.这是一场人类无法控制的灾难。

18 wrought   

v.引起；以…原料制作；运转；adj.制造的

参考例句：

• Events in Paris wrought a change in British opinion towards France and Germany.巴黎发生的事件改变了英国对法国和德国的看法。
• It's a walking stick with a gold head wrought in the form of a flower.那是一个金质花形包头的拐杖。

19 segregation   

n.隔离，种族隔离

参考例句：

• Many school boards found segregation a hot potato in the early 1960s.在60年代初，许多学校部门都觉得按水平分班是一个棘手的问题。
• They were tired to death of segregation and of being kicked around.他们十分厌恶种族隔离和总是被人踢来踢去。

20 Congressman   

n.（美）国会议员

参考例句：

• He related several anecdotes about his first years as a congressman.他讲述自己初任议员那几年的几则轶事。
• The congressman is meditating a reply to his critics.这位国会议员正在考虑给他的批评者一个答复。