Locking Up Our Own:Crime and Punishment in Black America,
By James Forman Jr.

No matter how strong the medicine a doctor gives a patient, if the illness has been misdiagnosed the medicine will probably not help. So it is with mass incarceration. Professor James Forman, Jr.’s article, “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow” [link here] and 2017 book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, run circles around the popular literature about our criminal justice excesses, and sympathetically to those who have perhaps misdiagnosed the intent of those who created the mess. They are as worth reading as anything I have read in years. And getting criminal justice reform right is crucial to anyone’s vision of a liberal America…Republican or otherwise.