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  • Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and The Politics of Punishment by Michael Javen Fortner
  • Jessica Neptune
Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and The Politics of Punishment. By Michael Javen Fortner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. xii plus 350 pp. $29.95).

The fact that the United States incarcerates its citizens at an unprecedented rate in global history has become well recognized in recent years. With this book, political scientist Michael Fortner joins a growing field of scholars seeking to explain the rise of mass incarceration in the period directly following the civil rights revolution. As Fortner notes: "A curious thing happened after the civil rights movement ended. Many African Americans, who had just won new freedoms, found themselves captured once more after the 1970s" (10). This curious development in American history has prompted a burgeoning carceral studies subfield, in which historians trace the origins of mass incarceration not only to bipartisan punitive policymaking but also to liberal anti-crime and anti-poverty programs. It is a complex history tangled in unintended consequences and surprising political bedfellows, and is curious not only because it followed so closely behind the black freedom struggle, but also because it emerged at a moment when many penal experts understood incarceration to be a failed policy and anticipated deinstitutionalization on the horizon.

For Fortner, carceral state scholarship has too often ignored African American agency. Recalling from his own childhood the punitive politics of black community members in the face of devastating crime victimization, Fortner digs into the historical record to argue that a majority of African Americans supported punitive policy as far back as the late 1960s. While historians have debated how to understand the significance of crime rates in the making of punitive policy, Fortner aptly demonstrates that in black neighborhoods in New York City in the late 1960s and 1970s crime and drug addiction were serious concerns that cannot be reduced to either media hype or phantom constructions of white racial backlash. In black communities that were hit hardest by rising crime and heroin addiction, Fortner's "black silent majority" grew tired of falling victim to a criminal element towards which they felt declining sympathy and little racial solidarity. Their demands for harsh prison sentences and ramped up law enforcement, Fortner claims, were responsible for some of the most significant initial legislation that marked the punitive turn. As he puts it: "In New York, the black silent majority achieved its greatest legislative victory with the passage of [the Rockefeller laws] … while white liberals fought for rehabilitation and smarter policing … the black silent majority supported the regulation and removal of the poor, whom they blamed for urban blight and violence in the streets. After tilting the discursive terrain in the direction of racial equality during the struggles of the civil rights movement, working-and middle-class African Americans tilted it in favor of punitive crime policies and against economic justice for the urban black poor" (9).

Despite significant flaws in the overarching thesis of the book, Fortner presents a welcome challenge to a popular narrative that mass incarceration was a predictable and indeed inevitable reaction to civil rights advances and/or the ascendance of neoliberalism under which prisons function to control surplus African American labor. Fortner is at his best, and thinking most historically, in [End Page 748] his critique of these popular theories. The development of the carceral state was far from inevitable. Indeed, it would have seemed highly improbable to many just before the deluge of punitive changes to the legal system in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

To understand the curious rise of mass incarceration, Fortner sets his sights on Harlem in the era leading up to the 1973 Rockefeller drug laws. The Rockefeller laws were a watershed moment for draconian mandatory minimum sentences, representing the tidal wave of penal reform that gave way to mass incarceration. Fortner finds the traditional narrative of the drug laws as a political pivot by a liberal governor in an increasingly conservative Republican party to be inadequate. Instead, he argues that New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller's abandonment of rehabilitative solutions for the state's heroin epidemic...

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