James Forman Jr. on The Drug War in a Black Community

type of drug. We're talking today about race and the war on drugs, two things that are inextricably linked in this country and many others. You know what I'm talking about. Racist sentencing law is involving crack versus powdered cocaine or the police stopping frisk policies that disproportionly affect young people of color. But how the War on drugs came to

be and who supported it as a complicated history. Today's guest is James Foreman Jr. Who wrote a book a few years ago called Locking Up Our Own Crime and Punishment in Black America, which landed up winning the Police Surprise for General Nonfiction in eighteen and being listed on all sorts of best sellers list. He's a distinguished academic. He's been teaching at Yale Law School for the last ten years. When he was younger, he came out of law school and clerked at the Supreme Court for Justice

Sandra Day O'Connor. But after clerking in the Supreme Court, what he did was relatively unusual, and it almost kind of reminded me a little bit of Obama's story where Obama leaves Harvard Law School and goes back to Chicago and become a community organizer. And what James decided to do was to go work at the Public Defense Years Office in d C. This was in the mid nineties, and so James, thank you so much for joining me. Welcome to Psychoactive. And let me just start by asking

you why did you do that. I had gone to law school intent on doing civil rights work. So when I was in law school, I worked for the NUBLE, a CP Legal Defense Fund for two summers, and I really took a lot of classes that were focused on voting rights and employment law, traditional areas that civil rights law covered. But when I became a law clerk, one

of the things that became very clear to me. And this is the early nineties, so we didn't have the term mass incarceration, but it was very clear to me that something terribly wrong and adjust was happening in our criminal system. Because I was working for Judge Is both on the Court of Appeals and then later the Supreme Court, and we were faced with cases where when I would read the underlying transcript, I would see clear evidence of

you know, legal malpractice, legal non performance. Lawyers just over burdened, not able to adequately represent their clients, and people who maybe some of them were guilty and getting longer sentences they deserve, some of them may have been innocent, and

still we're getting convicted. People were getting represented by attorneys that a three hundred, four hundred, five hundred cases at a time, just getting shuttled through the process, and the appellate courts, the courts that you go to an appeal, weren't willing to do anything about it. Their position was, well, you got a trial, you had a lawyer, you had a warm body. That's good enough. And as I looked out at the world, I thought, well, what can I do?

And it felt to me like working in that system, that criminal justice system, which is what we called it at the time, was the most important civil rights work I could do. And so even though it wasn't really talked about as civil rights work at the time, it

felt clear to me that it was. And the d C Public Defender Service where I went to work, which was only about a mile from the Supreme Court in terms of the offices, although very different in terms of decor and and that sort of thing, but it was one of the leading public defenders offices in the country.

So the chance to go work with a group of lawyers that included people like Charles Ogletree and Angela Davis, people who really set the bar for what counted as excellent representation, was just something that that I couldn't pass up. Mm hmm. Well, you know, let's just set a broader

context here. So when you started doing this in d C, it's the early mid nineties, and you know, in eight when there was a kind of lull between Nixon's drug War and then the drug War of the eighties, there were basically five hundred thousand people behind bars in the United States in federal and state prisons and local jails, of whom about fifty thousand were there for a drug law violation. By the time you get to the early two thousands, we've gone from five hundred thousand people behind

bars to over two million people behind bars. We've gone from having an incarceration rate that's kind of average for the world having one that is astronomically greater, in fact, the highest in the world. And among the people behind bars, we've gone from fifty thousand locked up on drug charges to five hundred thousand for whom a drug law violation was the principal offense. And that five hundred thousand doesn't even count all of the hundreds of thousands who get

reincarcerated on parole and probation violations connected to drugs. And it doesn't even count the people committing crimes of you know, prostitution or petty theft to support to drug habit And it doesn't even count the people involved in the drug business who are getting involved in violent crimes that are

as a result of the prohibitionist approach to drugs. So you're talking about a huge part of the prison population and jail population that's locked up in one way or another for either a direct drug glove violation, or something related. And when you break it out, you know, I was teaching at Princeton, living in New Jersey, and then I moved to New York and those two states. At that time lad the country, something like fifty of new admissions

to prison were for drug glow violations. The only place that was higher than that was Washington, d c. Where a substantial majority of all the people being sent to the jail in prison there were for a drug glow violation. And there you are, as a public defender working in the midst of this. I mean, what did it feel like, Well, we felt like warriors for justice. When ever you're a minority group, you know, whether it's you know, what the early abolitionists would have felt, or people in the civil

rights movement. And I know because that both my parents were in the movement. My mom came and visited our office and when the first thing she said was, wow, this reminds me of a movement office. And she was talking about the early sixties and SNICK, the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee where she was a member. So we we had that kind of righteous indignation, certainty that we were fighting an unpopular cause, but a just cause, and

that was the feeling that we had. Now having said that, we also knew our position was unpopular, right, So we knew all of the statistics that you've just mentioned. I mean, we were working as public defenders at a time when those statistics were being compiled. So I was going into courtrooms and facing judges and prosecutors, probation officers, social workers, bailiff's court martials who would all look at your client

as you're the one that's bringing down the community. You're the one that is causing so much harm and degradation. You're the one that has to be punished. You're the one that has to be banished. So we believed we were right. But I'm not gonna lie. I mean, it's hard to work in a context when you see every day, um, people being sent to prison for long periods of time,

some subjected to, you know, unjust conditions. I mean, it's hard to have a client who's addicted, who wants help, but there's a year long waiting list for heroin treatment programs in the community, and the only way that she could get treatment if she was going to ever get some, and it wasn't even very good, but the only way she could get a shorter waiting list. Was after she had been arrested and was facing sentence. I mean, think

about that. What is it like to live in a community where if you know you're an addict and you call the government and you say, I want help. I don't have any money, but I want to help, I want treatment, and they say, okay, here, take a number, will call you back in a year to a heroin addict. But go out to the corner, sell something to feed your own addiction. Go sell five bags so that you get to keep one which you can then use. Then you get busted, then you're facing a maximum of thirty years.

So we'll spend hundreds of thousands millions of dollars to lock somebody up in that era when we wouldn't even invest enough to open a treatment facility for much less money to serve their needs. So we're working in that context and that environment, and it's hard. It is exhausting to face up to that injustice every day and to carry that burden with you and to know that as hard as your fighting, you lose more than you win.

M Oftentimes, even back then, to the extent there was treatment available almost the only way to get it if you were poor was basically through the criminal justice system. You know, there might be diversion programs. There were the emergence of these drug courts and things like this. There was pretending to provide strugtury me behind bars, but if you didn't have the money to pay for it, that was gonna be where it was gonna happen. Now I remember that, you know, here I'm teaching a prince in

the late eighties early nineties, beginning to advocate. I'm surrounded by a lot of my you know, generally liberally politically minded colleagues, and what I see going on there is there's sort of abandoning basic liberal values when it comes to the drug war. And if I asked why, I think there were basically two reasons. One was freaking out

about their kids, right. It's the way in which the war on drugs is oftentimes justified as one great big child protection act and therefore will pay any price, bear any burden, lock up as many people if it's just gonna make our kids a tiny bits. And the second part, which was more subtle in some respects, at least in their minds, was that the people getting locked up weren't our people right that when you looked at pictures of who was going to prison, it was overwhelmingly black and

brown people. I mean, I remember we started advocating to reform the Rockefeller drug laws in New York, these draconian drug laws, and nent of all the people getting locked up were black and brown, even though that was vastly disproportioned, it was much smaller percent or actually involved. I mean, you just saw this pervasive kind of otherism. There's no way that Americans would have endorsed this kind of mass incarceration approach if, in fact, most of the people going

to prison were white. How did that? I mean, here you are, living, in some respects the only majority black jurisdiction in America. It's not quite a state, but you know, I mean, what was that like for you in something in that type of context. Yeah, you know, it's an important point, and I and and I would love to hear your thoughts at some point on how you felt like you were able to shift the narrative with your

colleagues at Princeton. You know, you're sort of using those as a stand in for this part of the community that is both wealthy and whider um and therefore somewhat protected. How did you get them to care? Because they now do care, They now do understand the drug war is an issue. I was working in a in a different context, right, I was. I was having conversations with a different group of people than what you're describing, because I'm a black

lawyer operating in a majority black city. As you say, uh, and the dynamic there the politics around the drug war, even though it ended up leading to a similar set of policies and practice, Right, even though d C passes draconian laws and mandatory minimums and like I mentioned, a man maximum of thirty years um for selling even a small amount of of heroin um or cocaine, the motivations are more complicated, I think in the black community, and

a little bit different than what you described, which was sort of a view that, well, this isn't happening to our children, because in the black community people know it was happening to their children. Now, there is a little bit of a class story that we need to layer in here, right, which is that the black elites who are elected to office and who run government agencies do

receive some level of protection by their class status. But they don't receive total protection right there Still, for example, subject to the police officers doesn't necessarily know um their class background, and maybe doesn't even care if they do know UM. So there they received some level of protection, but they're not nearly as protected from the ravages of the drug war. Then, for example, the white colleagues you're

describing in Princeton. But another piece of the story in a majority black community is that there was this sense that even though members of our community were being targeted and being locked up, they were doing things that were wrong and we're harmful and we're damaging to our community, and they had to pay the price. It might not be fair that a white kid in New Jersey could carry drugs or even distribute drugs by sharing them with classmates or even selling them to classmates and get away

with it. That might not be right. But what's happening in our neighborhood, what's happening in Anacostia, what's happening in Shaw, what's happening in parts of DC that are being deeply affected by the drug trade. That has to be police and it has to be punished, And so maybe they should send more police out to Princeton to make this equal. But they shouldn't stop setting police Because I voter, citizen, grandmother, shopkeeper, parents. I still want to be able to walk to school

in peace and in safety. I don't want shots ringing out at all time of the day and night. I don't want my kids to be offered drugs on the way to school. I don't want to see a group of fifteen year old guys standing on the corner who need to be in school at eleven am and aren't in school and are obviously selling drugs, Like that's not fair and that's not safe, and that's not right, and

they need to be punished. And then there's one more thing that I just want to put on the table, which is that in the black community, that push towards punitiveness as a way of protecting ourselves is also matched by a desire for a deep investment in what we

might call root cause solutions. Those same black voters that want longer sentences or want the more aggressive policing, they also are asking for more investment and treatment programs, more investment in and education, more investment in after school programs. They're frustrated that the Recreation Center closes at four pm when it should be open until eight nine pm. They want the city to be spending money on those things. They want the federal government to be spending money on

those things. So they're asking for more of everything, more policing, more prosecutions, but more investment in social services as well. And what we get in the nineties is not all of the above, right, what we get is one of the above. We get this unilateral focus on law enforcement, police, prosecution, prisons as the solution. So those are some of I think the complicated dynamics that we need to layer in when we understand how it was that black communities came

to be behind some of these tough laws. Yeah, I mean, I mean, James, you know, it was a curious phenomenon for me because, I mean, even when I started writing and speaking about this, you know, at the height of the drug were in the late eighties, the racial elements to this stuff, the fact that the origins of the

drug laws were too in many rays were racist. I mean, if you look at the origins of the cocaine laws in the South, or the ways in which marijuana laws were directed in Mexicans, or the antiopium laws at Chinese,

so the origins of that were apparent to me. Um. It was also a history here when during alcohol prohibition, I mean, some of the leading champions to prohibit alcohol oftentimes were people from the black church, the black community who saw the devastation of alcohol in their communities and said, you know, let's support alcohol prohibition. And then, of course, where do the prohibition laws land up being disproportionately enforced

is in black communities and against black people. And I see all this going on, but I'm not really in a position Shin, as a young white academic, to be hitting the point of the racism of the drug war, in part because if I tried that, people coming from black community is saying who are you, white professor? Ideally professors saying this sort of stuff. Do you have any idea what crack cocaine is doing to our community? Don't you understand we need this tough stuff, we need this.

And I would sometimes say, well, you know, sometimes it's a matter of tradeoffs. Sometimes maybe you need if you want more of the good stuff that you're talking about, the investment in communities, one needs to find ways to spend less on the law enforcement side. But those arguments did not start to really get traction until the mid to late nineties. Yeah well if if if then, I mean I think not until later. Well, you know, I'm

just thinking about in June. I saw there was a recent Supreme Court decision with Justice Thomas, the most conservative guy in the court, writing it. And then you have you know, Justice so do Mai or the most liberal who is no choice but to sign on because the law is pretty clear. But both of them are quoting your book in their decisions to make a different argument. Oh yeah, I see what you mean. When you're when you're putting the date in the mid nineties, you're really

talking about within the black community specifically. So yeah, so

that that opinion that was fascinating. Justice Thomas was trying to recount a particular history of black support for the kind of laws that were at issue, that were that were being discussed in that case, right, mandatory minimums and um, some of the crack cocaine distinction, and you know, broadly speaking, he was making the point, which is correct, that many members of the Congressional Black Caucus supported mandatory minimums in

the eighties. Uh, that many leaders in the black community called crack the worst thing to hit us in slavery, which is actually a title of a chapter in my book. So he's making the point that listen to say that these just have a single, you know, racist origin is to misunderstand the history. And Justice Thomas was in d

C in the nineteen eighties. He was reading the same you know, black papers and other newspapers, and black media and and black speakers in the broader media who were making these claims that that crack cocaine was so damaging, and he draws on the book for that purpose. And then Justice, so to myor, says well, okay, yeah, but that's only part of the history. And then she expands it out to the nineties and she says, look, here's

the thing you need to know. By the nine nineties, when the racist impact and the racial impact of these laws started to become clear, many of the black elected officials who had supported these laws in the eighties, now by the mid nineties were opposing them. And we're pretty consistently, pretty uniformly saying we need to end these mandatory minimums,

we need to eliminate the crack cocaine distinction. And she makes the point which we talked about earlier, which is, yeah, they wanted tougher laws even back in the eighties, but they also wanted all these other things, all these other investments that they weren't getting. And a bunch of reporters called me that day and said, you know, check this out to justices are citing your book and for opposite conclusions,

and you know who's right. And what I said to them was, you know, this isn't gonna be satisfying to you. And but they're both right that they're correctly using the book, and I believe correctly using the history for different points.

And I do agree with you that by the nineties, certainly by the late nineties within the black community, there was a growing understanding, at least among experts I wouldn't say had broadened out into the general population that whatever the motivations had been in the eighties, now we were starting to see the terrible negative impact on the community.

M by just for our audience. When James referred to the crack cocaine disparity in the mid nineteen eighties, Congress past legislation where they basically said that possession or sale of small amounts of crack cocaine will get you the same penalty as sale or possession of one hundred times

as much powder cocaine. So you could get five to ten years behind bars mandatory minimum for possessing five grams of crack cocaine, it would take five hundred grams of powder cocaine, and by and large, you know crack cocaine. The people getting locked up for crack cocaine possession and sale were typically black, and those on powder were more

likely to be white or sometimes Hispanic. So that's the disparity we're talking about there, you know, James, I should say from where I was sitting, right, So I pop out in the late nineteen eighties. I write a series of articles and prestigious journals. You asked how I began

to move some of my colleagues. So I published a piece in the liberal journal Foreim Policy, in the conservative General Public Interest, and then in the you know, uh, prestige publication Science, all basically saying the war on drugs is doing more harm than good. And probably the person I'm debating more often than any other one back then is Congressman Charlie rangle right, and he's the famous Harlem congressman. And you know, the the you know, the successor to

the famous Adam Clayton Powell. He's chairing this Lick Committee are Narcotics, And he and I are going at it on Nightline and on you know McNeil, Lair Report and NPR and ABC and stuff like this, and he's trying to mock me as the white professor saying this stuff. And I'm basically going at him about how he is one of the biggest problems with American drug policy. Jesse Jackson, same thing. You know, he's declaring himself the leader, he is the general or on drugs. I think you mentioned

that Wrangle said he was the general too. They both they both wanted to be the general in the War on drugs, and and Wrangle had pushed through some of the most draconian policies. And mind you, it wasn't just on criminal justice stuff, right, you also had on needle exchange, where the public health people were beginning to say do it.

And then when you see is huge opposition within black communities in New York City, Mayor Dinkins becomes mayor, succeeding a conscience shuts down the one little trial needle exchange program and the Congressional Black Caucus initially opposes, you know, needle exchange, but the transition happens most rapidly among black political leadership. I mean, that's where you see they essentially lead beginning in the mid nineties, whether it's on needle exchange,

whether it's on sentencing reform that. And it's where you see oftentimes the younger Black leaders, the newer, younger members of Congress, and also with the state legislatures who were challenging the older generation. Right. And so that's where we

begin to get some actual momentum. And I should say there were exceptions, because what was pivotal when I started speaking out in eight was you had in Baltimore, you know, a new mayor, former chief Prosecutor, Kurt Schmoke, who's steps up at the Conference of Mayors basically saying the war on drugs is doing more harm than good. Right. You have on James Baldwin speaking up in eighties six saying we gotta legalize drugs because you keep it this way,

it's gonna be against black people. But I mean, I remember how Kurt Smoke bravely making this case as the as the black mayor of a majority I believe Black City is just being clobbered by both white and black members of the community and leadership and just seen as this kind of devian voice at the time. You know, you get to the mid nineties and it begins to evolve in a way that opens up the potential to begin to make some reforms possible, at least at the

state level. Man, that is so interesting your perspective. I wish, honestly, I wish I had been able to find access to some of those debates between you and Wrangel that in the in the eighties, because that would have been really rich for material for the book. But Smoke, right, Kurt Smoke, you're so he There should be an awar I don't know, are there. I don't know if there's a Kirch Smoke Award.

But now in this era, when there's an understanding, a really different understanding about drugs and there's more of a consensus that goes in that direction, somebody should honor him because you are so right. You are so right. Actually, James, the only award, the only word there is, is given out by the Drug Policy Alliance for you. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the bravest politicians in America. You know, he would have made for a great U. S. Senator

for Maryland. And I think one of the things that got in his way was the fact that he had been so courageous on this issue. We'll be talking more after we hear this ad. I want to say in your book, you talk about going to your students and getting these kind of blank stairs, and you say, without taking heroin into account, one cannot understand African American attitudes

towards the drug war. And you go back into a history which very few people know about how and why the experience around heroin in the sixties and early seventies shape things. And I wonder if you could elaborate on that. Yeah, absolutely, I think that if my students today, I mean, if they know anything about this era that we're talking about, um, they know maybe a little bit about the eighties and nineties and Crack, right, maybe some of them have watched

the Wire. Um, but you're right, there's very little um understanding about heroin in the nineteen sixties. But Heroin really devastated black communities in some analogous ways to what Crack would do uh in the eighties. Um and and and I think set the stage for some of these um punitive black attitude. Some of the political leaders that we're talking about, they were in college and shortly after college in the nineteen sixties, so they were very much alive

during this period of time. So in the nineteen sixties, the homicide rate doubled and in some cities tripled. And at the same time, at the same time as homicides rates rates were increasing, you also saw a massive influx

of heroin. For a complicated set of historical reasons. Some of it had to do with UM exposure in Vietnam and and folks coming home, but for all the sort of different reasons, the bottom line is that you started to see, especially in the late nineteen sixties, you started to see a huge uptick in heroin use and heroin addiction.

So in d C, which are the numbers that I know best, they test everyone entering the DC jail every year, and in the early nineteen sixties nineteen sixty three, about four of the people who are entering the jail are

testing positive for heroin. And by the end of the decade, less than ten years later, um it has become it has risen to almost forty and so you get this massive increase, right, you get this explosion, and it's then associated also with a lot of a public presentation of drug You so you get syringes that are being left in front of homes and businesses. You get people that are nodding off on park benches, You have people that are gathering on on stoops and some of them are

strung out. And you get neighbors again focusing on d C. But the same story you could tell in every black community across the country really kind of deluging their elected representatives saying you gotta do something about all of these heroin addicts are public spaces, don't feel they don't feel safe anymore. And I don't want to walk into my backyard and my back alley and find like multiple dirty syringes.

Nobody wants to live like that. And so there's both a rise in heroin use, a rise in heroin addiction. There's a demand for a response, and there's also a deep distrust in the black community which goes back for centuries of government interventions and some government responses. So some of the Nixon administration, which did many, many, many terrible

things on many topics, including on drug policy. One little small thing that they were doing right at the time was they actually were investing in methodone and other heroin treatment centers. But what there was deep resistance to some of these centers from a very distrustful black community, including black nationalists, who said, listen, we're fighting for our people's freedom.

We are fighting a revolution, and we don't want our people to be strung out on heroin supplied by the pusher on the corner or Method one supplied by the government. Both of those are ways of keeping us down, their ways of keeping us unconscious, and their ways of keeping us out of the fight that we all need to be engaged in. We need all of our faculties to be able to fight for freedom and fight for justice

and fight for civil rights. So you have this anti drug from the left perspective, you have a distrust of government perspective. You have neighbors and regular folks just freaking out about this problem, and at the same time, you have the very beginnings of what will become right the prison prosecutor uh police approach that would end up being the dominant approach by the nineteen eighties and nine nineties. And it's like sitting there ready to seize on this opportunity,

and that's that's ultimately what happens. M hm. You know, essentially you bring up the method on issue, James. I mean, it was oftentimes referred to in black communities as the white man's chemical bracelet, as another form of social control. And I think what part of what helped to change that was when there was a fellow named Dr Benny prim, a liberal Republican and probably the leading black man in drug treatment circles nationally, who eventually entered the federal government

Health in Human Services under the first President Bush. But I think when he starts speaking up, that really moves things in New York and elsewhere. And I'll tell you another little story. It must have been I don't know, mid late nineties. I get a meeting with Reverend Calvin Butts, who's the head of Abyssinian Church in Harlem, one of

the most famous black ministers in the country. And people say, Ethan, whatever you do when you go up there, you know, you can talk about the arrest and Carsonarry don't talk about methanon, but what the hell? And so I'm meeting with him and I raised the issue of methanon and he says to me, let me tell you something. Let me tell you something about meth and I'm going, okay, here it comes, chemical bracelet, all this sort of stuff.

And he says, do you know that some of the most respected members of my church have been on methanon for many years? Do you know that some of the deacons in my church or on it? Do you know that many of their cases, not even their family knows. I just know because of my pastoral privilege. And then he says to me, could you imagine what it would be like if they felt free to speak up in church and say, I am a person who has been on methanon for many years and nonetheless have a family

and a job in leading good night. Can you imagine the transformation that would happen? You know. It's another point you raise in your book, which is that the people who are being victimized by the war on drugs oftentimes it's just young black men just being shipped into the system, but it's even people who are getting that's not a nintenance treatment, who are intimidated that their voices are not heard.

And that that's changed a lot now, But back then, there was no sense that such a person was even entitled to have a voice. Yes, the issue that you raise is exactly right. This is true throughout America. It's also true in the black community, which is that some of the people who are most directly harm, most directly affected, whether they are struggling with addiction, whether they're people who

are incarcerated, their voices aren't value. Their voices are very diminished when we talk about the problems with the system and what to do about it. I first saw this up close in d C. In the ES, the Public Defender Service had people who would o lobby city council, and we were very reluctant to send our clients and their families to advocate on some of these issues, whether it was a prisoner's right question or whether it was

a stop in frisk kind of question. And we didn't we didn't have an infrastructure to train people how to become effective advocates. It just wasn't a thing. And one of the reasons why that was the case is that there was a sense that our clients and their family members were so stigmatized and ridiculed. I talked before about how when they went into the courtroom and everyone looked at them as the enemy. So how are we going to send them down to the city Council to argue

um on this issue. Weren't we just gonna lose all all credibility? And they often wouldn't have wanted to go testify because they would have felt all that scorn and shane and stigma being heaped upon them right by everybody of the city council hearing who's saying, well, you know, you want to come and talk about this problem with prison conditions, but let's talk about what you even did

to be in prison in the first place. Or if it's the mom and you want to talk about disparities and then the drug law, well let's talk about why your kid was even out there in the drug game to begin with. What kind of mom are you to have allowed that to happen? Right? You can just imagine what a haunting and terrible experience that would be for for somebody. So in the nineties, in the two thousand's until really fairly recently, still too much, but but it

is changing. Those voices are left out of the conversation, and so you know, you get all those community members that I described to are outraged about the person that's nodding off on the bench and leaving the syringes or selling drugs on the corner. But nobody who's actually being directly harmed by the system's response is getting their voice heard. So that, to me, I think is one of the biggest things that has changed but still has to continue

to change. Um And in particular, what I believe is that organizations that care about these issues have to continue to develop the advocacy skills people really need to be trained and supported to become highly effective and to build on their life experiences and to be able to translate those into ways that persuade at the city, county, state, and national level. M hm, Now it makes sense. So here I'm gonna ask you a very challenging question now in part because I'm asking you to pack a lot

into this. So there are three significant points you make in the book. I mean, many others, but three that I kept highlighting. One was you talk about the simultaneous over and under policing of crime in black communities. The second is you point out that mass incarceration, the rise of mass incarceration is not the results of some great, big campaign being mandated from on high, but a result of small distinct steps with all sorts of different players.

You know, nobody fully being responsible almost reminded me of the way you described it is the way we think about the financial meltdown in housing and loan and all that in two thousand and eight, right where everybody's making small steps, nobody is ultimately responsible and it all kind

of adds up. And the third point you make is while we tend to focus on Washington, d C. In the federal government sense of the word, and the White House in Congress and all that, in fact, most of criminal justice and most of the war on drugs is operating at the local level. So now I wonder if you could pollo three together and sort of analyze that this is gonna make the question really tough. There's already tough, brother,

it's already tough. Keep going, I know, okay, But what really captive met in the book was you talk about the journey of Eric Holder from his years his U S attorney in in d C. To his years as Attorney General from Obama where he becomes the driving force in Obama's second term basically for criminal justice and drug law reform. Just you know, provide our audience with a sense maybe through the lens of Eric Holder as a

as a key character in all of this. Yeah, absolutely, um, So, I mean, I think Eric Holder in some ways is a perfect character to to to understand and the book in a lot of ways, and to understand especially the

trajectory from kind of the then to the now. You know, you've in a number of your comments you've talked about growth and evolution among black representatives that and elected officials that you've worked with over the years, right, whether it's Wrangel or Jackson, and and I think Holder is a really great example of this. So Holder is a local elected official in Washington, d C. So he has all that power that we're talking about that comes at the

local level initially, right. And you know a eight percent of prisoners in this kind tree are in state and local prisons, and of law enforcement in this country is state and local. So that's why, Um, for listeners who care about this issue, the place that they want to be focused on is their state capital. The place they want to be focused on is at the city level. Those are much more important than whether or not the federal government passes this law or that law on this topic.

It really is. And Holders an example of that. So he's a local elected official, uh, and then he gets becomes an appointed official as the chief prosecutor in the city. And Eric Holder is in a lot of ways, I think what we would call in the black community traditionally and my parents generation would call a raceman. And by which I mean he is somebody who deeply, passionately, like just every fiber in his body, he cares about black

people and he wants the black community to thrive. And in the eighties and nineties, he's looking out at the world as a judge and as a prosecutor, and he sees crack as the worst thing that's hit us in slavery. He sees the body counts, the homicide rate um getting two levels that had never gotten to throughout history. And he gives a speech uh in the early saying, listen, black people lost our freedom under Jim crow and we are losing our freedom now. But what's gonna keep us

from our freedom now is in segregation. It's not Jim Crowe. It's crime and violence and people are afraid to leave their homes. Right. So he draws a direct analogy from Selma to Washington, d C. In the early nineties, and he launches a very very aggressive stop and frisk vehicle campaign operations sees fire that leads to black drivers, black motorists, and especially young black people getting stopped and searched and

frisk at overwhelmingly disproportionate numbers. And he does it because he wants to get the guns off the street, right. He does it because he wants to create a safe community. And the tools that he feels like he has at hand is law enforcement. So he really does help to build the system of mass incarceration that we now know and called by that name. Having said that, by the time he gets into the federal government in the Obama administration, he's still a race man. And now he's looked at

this accumulated evidence and he's horrified. He doesn't tell the story the way I'm telling it. He doesn't identify his own actions in the way that I am, and elected officials and people in public life typically you know, don't do that. As academics, we say, oh, you know, I messed that one up. I was wrong. I make a mistake that's not really like how elected officials really roll. But regardless, he does then take a series of actions.

This time from the federal government standpoint to try to undo some of the damage um that has been caused. And my thing is, we're all going to make mistakes. I have made mistakes. We're going to take physicians that are wrong. To me, what's really important is are you willing to with an open mind except and evaluate new evidence, see when you're wrong, and act in response to try to shart a new course forward. And I think Holder can be very proud of the fact that he has

done just that. Now. Again, none of the individual actions that he took, either in the nineties or more recently, created this system or going to dismantle it. So when people say to me, well, what's the most important thing to do, I say, it's all important, right, It's all important. The question is finding where you fit in right? Where

can you how have influence? And every single person in this country, every single person who's listening to your podcast, they do have power, They do have the ability to help us chart a new course forward. It might be helping to legalize substances in the state that they're in. It might be ending disparities, ending mandatory minimums we still

have a lot of them. It might be getting clean slate legislation passed so that once you've served your time, your record is wiped clear and you get a chance to re enter society as a full citizen. The precise laws and policies that need to change are going to vary from county to county, city to city, state to state, but I can guarantee you that there's work to be done in every single city, every single county, in every single state. And I think it's really up to us.

Two sees that moment, you know, when Black Lives Matter really emerged so rapidly a few years ago, five six years ago, And for me, what was inspiring about it was it was as if there was a new civil rights movement that at last was not reluctant to embrace the drug policy reform agenda, treat drugs as a health issue, pro needle exchange of method on legalized marijuana, and mass incarceration in all of these sorts of things. And I think part of it is when you look at the

black people getting killed by cops. You know, you look at George Floyd right in Minneapolis, or or before him, you know, Philando Castile in Minneapolis. So you look at Michael Brown Ferguson, which set the whole thing off for Lecon McDonald in Chicago, or Terence Crutcher and Tulsa right, or even the Eric Garner case involving a guy selling Lucy's in New York. In every case which you have is the cops saying, oh, it only happened because they

were on drugs. So there's this constant way in which the drug pieces being somehow used to excuse or legitimize a killing of a typically are in black man. And so there's something inspiring about that that's forcing the issue.

And the question will be I think, to some extent, as a younger generation of black activists and allies begin to age up, begin to have their own kids, begin to freak out about their own kids, will they land up becoming more conservative as well, or will they keep to the kind of youthful enthusiasm um that they've demonstrated over recent years. What do you think? Wow, that's why I'm not really in the prediction business. But I do

really like how you frame that question. I think, yeah, I'm not I'm not in the prediction business, but I am you know, I'm in the hoping business. The thing that I hope that some of this new generation will focus on is really trying to build up alternative structures and alternative approaches for how to respond to really what

are real and genuine and pressing social problems. So to me, the libertarian take on drug policy has never had any appeal to me personally and what I mean by that, And this gets a little bit to your question about sort of over policing under policing, which is that in the black community, whether you're talking about drug policy, whether you're talking about poverty, whatever, it is that you're talking about, these issues harm black communities especially, And this is what

a little bit was behind right when Wrangle was making fun of you or attacking you in the eighties, even though I think he was wrong right on that the ultimate issue. Part of where he is coming from, and part of where a lot of the people that I write about are coming from, is they're like, look, this problem of addiction, this is real. Do not minimize it, Do not say well, it'll just like let's just do

nothing and it will be fine. That for me anyway, I know there's a lot of people and may probably you have a lot of listeners that are like down without analysis I'm not. I believe that whether we're talking about drugs or whether we're talking about violence, I don't care the issue that you're talking about in the black community because of a history of racism that goes back to slavery, which we have in this country for longer

than we haven't. Because of that and Jim Prow and all of the inequities that persist to this day in the black community, we need a robust, affirmative, trauma informed, community based, and government led and government supported set of responses. So I don't want people to call nine one one and send a police officer when there's somebody who's strung out on the corner. But I also don't want there

to be no number to call. That's why I'm inspired by cities where activists are developing alternative systems three one one systems where you can call a number and not get a police officer, but you can get a social worker, a mental health worker, a counselor who can come and respond because that person might be in need and they

might want help. And I'm not for coercion, but I am for building up a very very robust network so that everybody can access services as quickly and efficiently and with as much care as we would all want for our child. So my hope is that this new generation, alongside the critique of what happened over the last fifty years, right alongside that, will be an equal commitment to building a new set of approaches going forward. Let's take a

break here and go to an ad. One of the things that also came out in your book was you talked about I think while you were still working in the Public Defender's Office, you're involved in starting this charter school, the Maya Angelo School, educating people in the juvenile justice system, And that seems exactly like the sort of thing one needs a tremendous proliferation of. I mean, is that what you're talking about, And do you think it's possible for

these things to be multiplied a hundred of thousandfold and more. Well, yes, but it requires a significant investment. The Maya Angelo School, I mean, it's a good example of the kind of thing um that we are going to need, and we're gonna need more government support for to do programs like this.

So when I in the nineties, when I was a juvenile defender in d C. And I was very frustrated by the fact that even when I would win a case and my client would be protected from the worst parts of this system, they would go back to the same nothing that they were involved in beforehand. There they oftentimes had been already pushed out of the traditional public school, and they were they were those kids that I talked

about before that people were upset about. Who are fourteen fifteen years old who were outside at eleven am on a weekday, And people are like, why aren't they in school? Well, sometimes they weren't in school because they had been pushed out of the regular school. Sometimes they weren't in school because they had already been tracked into the least engaging classes.

I was so frustrated when I would go to visit schools with some of my juvenile clients and I would see these alternative schools with outdated curriculum and no you know,

functioning equipment, and and no useful, meaningful textbooks. I mean, it was it was a kind of thing that if your child were put into that environment, you'd be sitting in in the Board of Education like you'd go on like a hunger strike out of out rage that they considered this adequate education for your child, but because the kids are poor, because the kids are of color, because their parents, although they care a lot about education, don't

have the resources or the access to influence public officials. Nobody was objecting. So we said, well, what if we start an alternative school with a job training piece. Because so many of my clients what they said was, you know, I want a job, I want good teachers, I want small classes, but I also want a chance to work and make money. Because I'm poor, I have no money. I can't take my girlfriend to the movies on a weekend.

And so David Dominici, who was a lawyer in d C um really kind of envisioned this and together we put it together with lots of support from my colleagues at the Public Defender's Office and lots of people around d C and we created what was initially a school for twenty kids. We now have a couple of campuses. We run the school now inside DC's juvenile prison. And our basic idea is that the kids that need the most and the best should get it. We normally give

them the least and the worst. But what if we actually gave them our best. What if we gave them small classes and engaged teachers, and a robust curriculum and opportunity to work outside of school. What if we really invested in them and try to create a sense of family in the school and a sense of high expectations while we supported them along the way counselors and mental health workers because many of them are suffering with trauma, sometimes never diagnosed. What if we did that and we've

now done that. But let me just go back to the point where we started. It's expensive. We're still not adequately funded um by public sources, so we have to try to raise private money, which is hard. So, yes, programs like ours can transform lives. They can change the statistical trajectory, they can change individual trajectory. They can help

communities heal and thrive. But they can only do it if we're willing to say, you know what, that kid that's fourteen years old and has been arrested or has dropped out of school and has four or five years behind and whose parent is incarcerated, they're gonna need more support, and that's going to cost more money. But that's the kind of thing. You're absolutely right. It's one example. There

are many more. That's the kind of infrastructure that I think that we need to build in communities, in black and brown communities, in poor communities of all colors across this country to to to give people the opportunity that

they deserve. Well, you know, I guess you know, I mean, just to conclude all this here, we are now in a period where in the last couple of years, the number of shootings and homicides has increased in many parts of the country, where the fear of crime, especially violent crime, is growing um where people are beginning to to freak out. The rates are, of course dramatically lower than they are back in the late eighties and early nineties, but people

were getting accustomed to having very low rates. At the same time, we're also in an era were unlike under Reagan, Bush and Clinton, you know, where governments are spending more money to some extent. Then I look politically, I mean, you brought this up in your book that just a few years ago. You know, you still have public opinion polls showing a substantial majority of blacks, not as much as whites, but substantial majority of blacks still saying they

want more policing. And you see, you know, black voters overwhelmingly especially older voters supporting Joe Biden over the competitors in the Democratic primary who are much more supportive of criminal justice reform. When we look forward these next few years, are we going to see some shutting down? You know, nothing freaks people out and makes it conservative like fears of rising crime. What's your take on these trends right now? I think it's hard to know, obviously, you know, it's

hard to be sure. And and one thing that we do know is that of all the things that we don't want to be in the prediction business about its crime rates because nobody would have predicted a twenty year steady decline starting in around two thousand, late late nineties. You just couldn't have known that was going to happen. Um. I do think in the world that I operate in and what I see with with teenagers and young people, the impact that the pandemic has had cannot be overestimated

in terms of driving whatever is happening right now. Having said that, what I do believe is that we aren't going to go back because I think that there is a consciousness around some of those mistakes and they impact that they have had. I think if you look for example, at President Biden's speech that he gave in response to rising crime rates. It was as different of a speech as as a Biden would have given years ago as

you could ever possibly imagine. It was addressing the same topic, crime is going up and what are we gonna do about it? But there was nothing in that speech about building more prisons. And in fact, there was a lot in that speech about community based responses to crime, violence interruption, violence prevention, hospital based interventions. There's a proposed five billion dollar investment in community based violence prevention. These are credible

Messengers programs. These are programs like Cure Violence, where they're going out into the neighborhoods, they're working with young people. When a shooting happens, they're going to the hospital, they're talking to the person who was shot and the family was shot because they don't want a retaliation. This is one of the things that we we do know about violent crime in particular, is a huge percentage of it

is retaliatory. So if you can interrupt that initial retaliation, then you can start to have isolated incidents as a posed to what you and I saw in the eighties and nineties, right, which is incident, retaliation, retaliation, retaliation. All of a sudden, you've got ten twenty thirty shootings instead of one. So I I don't believe. Uh, this is where you know I said before, I don't do predictions, but I do do hope. I am a hope for person, and I don't believe that we are um going to

make the same that that similar set of mistakes. It may be that some of the momentum gets slowed, there's no doubt about it. But I think that we've made too much progress, uh to ever go back to the days when you were on Nightline UM talking about harm reduction and Charlie Wrangel was telling you that you were a naive liberal and what we needed to do was have more police and more prosecutors and more prisons. Yeah.

You know. One of the things that I think you you point in the book that distinguished the crack era was the ways in which the war on drugs also became a war against violent crime, much more so than with drew in the hair Own era. And I think part of the success of the drug policy reform efforts over the last twenty years has been that it's more and more disentangled that the people have become more sophisticated

understanding that. You know, one reason we need to legalize marijuana is so that it just stops being a pretext for cops arresting vast numbers of young people. One reason we need to expand access to treatment is because we want to reduce the violence on on the streets and drug markets. So I think there's a more sophisticated perspective

on this stuff today, which really is promising for the future. James, I want to thank you too, because I thought your book was a very brave and nuanced and thoughtful book, and I think it's a book of historic significance. I think it amply deserved the Politz there, and I just wish you all the best on your continuing engagements to try to promote more sensible policies from your vantage points. So thank you, very very much. Thank you. Psychoactive is

a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Naedelman. It's produced by Katcha Kumkova and Ben Cabrick. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesis, and Darren Aronovski. For Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick for iHeart Radio, and me Ethan Nadelman. Our music is by Ari Belusian and a special thanks

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are something I recommend to long term couples frequently. You know. I think ecstasy saved my marriage. Terry and I were at a real low point and we got a cabin on the Pacific coast and took a weekend away and did eat. I recommend pot all the time, a little bit of pot. Subscribe to Cycleactive now see it, don't miss it.