America’s war on crime began in the 1970s and was strongly supported by black leaders in some of the country’s largest cities. Former public defender James Forman Jr. joins us to talk about how policies from that era lead to an overrepresentation of people of color in American prisons. Forman won the Pulitzer Prize for his book on the topic, “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
This episode originally aired on May 14, 2018.
