Populism, Pluralism, and Criminal Justice

Abstract

The story that James Forman Jr. tells in his superb book, Locking Up Our Own,1 is local and nuanced. Forman explains that mass incarceration resulted from many small decisions made in many different places.2 Although all of those decisions were shaped by the legacies of racism and racial oppression, Forman shows that mass incarceration was not only a product of racism and racial oppression, or at least that the lines of causation are long and complicated. The story that Forman tells may therefore seem disconnected from the election of Donald Trump and from the nationwide resurgence of racism, nativism, and anti-Semitism since 2016. The fear and hate that Trump has whipped up have been anything but nuanced, and this is a national story, not a local one. It may therefore seem misguided to ask what Forman’s book can tell us about the distinctive challenges of the Trump era, other than to remind us of the continued, critical importance of local politics in criminal justice. Ultimately, though, Locking Up Our Own is about policing, prosecution, and punishment in a democracy. The direction that our national politics has taken in the past few years gives us reason to rethink democracy; not whether it is a good thing, but what it should mean, and what it requires to flourish. And Forman’s book does have some lessons about that, beyond “think local.” It can help us think more sensibly about the connections between criminal justice and democracy at the national as well as the local level. The most important lesson the book offers in this regard is that we should worry more about making criminal justice safe for democracy than about making democracy safe for criminal justice.