Mass incarceration affects millions of people in the United States, disproportionately locking up poor and working-class African Americans. However, the issue doesn’t impact the black population equally. While Michelle Alexander’s framing of the issue as “the new Jim Crow” helped popularize the discussion of mass incarceration, wealthier African Americans are less likely to be imprisoned and more likely to be the judges, politicians, and bailiffs implementing mass incarceration, while poor and working-class whites also fill jails across the country.

James Forman, Jr. grapples with this reality. In his new book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, Forman, a professor at Yale Law School, draws on his six years as a public defender to interrogate how it is that he often found himself in a Washington D.C. courtroom with a black judge, black prosecutor, and black bailiff, in a city with a black police chief and black mayor, all of whom carry out aggressive policing and sentencing practices.

While Forman doesn’t minimize the criminal justice system’s roots in racism, he addresses the silence in many books on criminal justice when it comes to the role of the black political class in implementing and carrying out these policies.