Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

Content Warning: The section of the guide addresses racism and racial inequities in the US criminal justice system.

Forman published Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America in 2017, four years after the start of Black Lives Matter (BLM), a decentralized sociopolitical movement seeking to address anti-Black racism and racial inequality. BLM began in July 2013, when the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter started trending on social media after a jury acquitted George Zimmerman of fatally shooting Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager walking to a family friend’s home in a gated Florida community Martin had visited on several occasions. The movement gained national recognition the following year with two high-profile cases of police violence against Black people. The first was the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri, which sparked peaceful protests and violent riots that lasted more than a week. The second was the killing of Eric Garner by New York City police officers after a confrontation over the illegal selling of single cigarettes from packs without tax stamps. Video footage shows Garner repeating “I can’t breathe” 11 times after Officer Daniel Pantaleo put him in a prohibited chokehold. BLM returned to national attention after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, by Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer.