Scott-Heron’s very traditional wish list reveals another important explanation for black support of law and order. Not for the first time, many middle-class African Americans subscribed to the “politics of respectability”: The race advances, the view goes, when black people demonstrate that they are capable of living up to white standards of morality and conduct. Among the black elite, advocacy for lenient criminal-justice policies was deemed an admission that black interests were allied with the interests of criminals. That sort of solidarity would hardly help the cause. For many bougie African Americans—certainly those in cities like Washington and Atlanta, where light-skinned blacks dominated the middle class—colorism was also at work: The fact that their dark-skinned hoodlum cousins were getting locked up was not a problem. Indeed, one of the primary arguments for allowing African Americans to join Atlanta’s police department in the 1930s and ’40s was that they would be better able than white officers to distinguish between elite blacks and the riffraff.

As Forman tells the story, the politics of respectability converged with other cultural and social influences to shape tough-on-crime attitudes in the black community. He builds on, among other things, two conclusions associated with the work of the Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy. In Race, Crime, and the Law, Kennedy argues that African Americans suffer more harm from underenforcement of the law than from overenforcement. He also notes that “racist” can be, from the perspective of African Americans, an inaccurate way to describe criminal-justice policies that burden primarily black criminals. Forman doesn’t endorse these views. Rather, he demonstrates how influential they were in the black body politic during an era of high crime.

At the same time, he avoids any hint of the “gotcha” spirit that some commentators found in Michael Javen Fortner’s Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, which mines similar territory. Whereas Fortner’s analysis could be read as a rejoinder to the Black Lives Matter movement—implying that early support for harsh sentencing in drug cases undercut later critiques of the policy—Forman’s experience as a D.C. public defender gives him more street cred. His stories about clients make it clear that, however well-intentioned black middle-class power brokers were in fashioning conservative approaches to criminal justice, the policies that resulted were devastating to the larger community.

Some of those stories will stay with me a long time. One woman lost her hard-won job at FedEx because she got arrested for possessing a little bit of weed, and then couldn’t get the job back even after the prosecutors dropped the case. Her arrest record will follow her like a curse for the rest of her life, all because cops pulled her over, supposedly for the infraction of driving a car with dark tinted windows. Though Brandon, a scared 15-year-old kid, had a gun, he never used it. He was sent to jail for six months anyway when a cop found him carrying it (along with a small amount of pot). Forman doesn’t tell us how things turned out for Brandon, but few boys sentenced to D.C.’s notorious Oak Hill juvenile-detention facility left better off than they came in. Sending a nonviolent kid there was like sending him to a finishing school for criminals.