'Advanced Concepts in No-Limit Hold'em' a boon for serious players

I read and reviewed a complicated poker textbook over at le day job. 

A prison is constructed brick by brick

 The last book of the year that we read for the political book club was James Forman Jr.'s Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. I'd learned of this book when Mom and I attended a talk at the Boston Book Festival with Forman and Chris Hayes, moderated by Kim McLarin (the third author who was supposed to be there, Carol Anderson of White Rage, was sadly unable to make it).

 

The talk--titled Racism in America: It's a Crime--was excellent and I wish I had taken notes, but a lot of it involved dissecting what gets talked about as "crime" politically and the ways in which it does and does not relate to actual crime, as in the reality of people doing illegal and/or harmful things. Forman spoke a bit about how, during the crime waves of the '70s and '90s, black communities asked for funding for a variety of solutions to these problems, which included more prisons and police, but also for drug treatment, community investment/development, better schools, etc., and higher (white-dominated) levels of government were happy to comply with the police stuff but not so much the rest of it.

 

This, then, was the sort of political context that shaped the subjects examined in Locking Up Our Own, which examines the role of black communities, especially the black political elite (mayors, judges, attorneys, etc.) in unwittingly helping build the mass incarceration machine that blights America today.

 

Forman's aim in this book is not to cast blame, but to understand the political contexts that made supporting increased punitive measures seem like a good idea at the time, and to examine why these policies didn't turn out the way people hoped they would. The first part of the book, "Origins," covers up through the 1970s, and examines three major topics: the War on Drugs, gun control, and the integration of the police force. A few common threads pop up through these three topics: One is the degree of lawlessness that black communities had previously been abandoned to, with white police officers ignoring crimes committed in black communities. Another common thread is the class divisions within black society, especially in light of the rise of what was basically the country's first black petit bourgoisie -- prior to the 1960s or so, there simply had not been a black elite, so the expectations put on that newly formed class were unprecedented and fragile. A third (but perhaps related to class) element is the variety of political traditions within the black community, something that I think gets erased from a lot of mainstream American political discourse as it disappears under triumphant numbers showing that 90-odd percent of black voters vote for Democrats. But there are black conservative traditions and black radical traditions and black liberal traditions, and questions of respectability politics and what racial solidarity really means permeate the newspaper articles, courtroom speeches, and other primary sources that Forman cites.

 

The second part of the book, "Consequences," takes us from the '80s up through the present day, with the most infuriating chapter being largely about Eric Holder and pretext stops. It's infuriating because by the time pretext stops became a thing, most of the other, smaller punitive measures had already been passed, so it seems like it should have been a lot easier to spot how this was going to go wrong. By the time we cover pretext stops, we've also established mandatory minimum sentencing, warrior policing, draconian drug laws, and all that stuff that lead pretext stops to be so devastating to so many people.

 

In addition to being very well researched, I was impressed at how effectively this book was organized. Forman starts off each chapter by discussing a case from his time as a public defender in Washington, DC, featuring a client trapped in the criminal justice system via whatever set of regulations will be covered in the rest of the chapter. This provides an emotionally engaging illustration of how each aspect of mass incarceration traps real people in grinding cycles of poverty, cutting them off from opportunities for education and employment.

 

The book ends with some discussion of the current state of the criminal justice reform movement, including what it's doing right and what it's doing wrong. His final conclusion is that the problem was built bit by bit and might have to be solved bit by excruciatingly small bit, and that activists should be prepared to be in for a long slog. While prison abolitionists will likely ultimately end up looking elsewhere for their ultimate vision of how to eliminate the carceral state, Forman's policy prescriptions all seem like vital and solid short-term reforms, and I think the book provides vital background on how good people can wind up supporting bad policies.

 

Our two-hour discussion of this book last weekend ended up focusing a lot on questions of what lessons people should take from it and apply to other forms of thinking about activism and policy. The chapter on police integration raises a lot of tough questions for proponents of increasing the diversity of hostile institutions as a method of reforming them; other chapters raise other tricky questions of policy-crafting and unintended consequences that none of us were smart enough to solve (that's what think tanks are supposed to be for, right?) but from which activists could probably learn what kinds of questions to ask when deciding whether to throw their support behind a proposal or not.

 

Anyway, for something as short and blessedly readable as this book (seriously, some policy history kinds of books are dry as hell), there is all kinds of stuff packed into it that you might not know about, especially if you are a sheltered white person who wasn't even alive for most of this, like myself.