THEY WERE, AFTER ALL, THE PRIMARY VICTIMS:

Fortner also remembers the "constant and subtle terror" of living in the 15-story, red-brick housing project that occupied the now-vacant lot near where we're standing. Drug dealers loitered out front, making him scared to enter and leave. Addicts knocked on his door peddling stolen goods, like radios or an uncooked chicken. He kept his wallet with him in bed at night to hide it from addicts in his own family. Lying there, he flinched at the sound of gunshots.

At the age of 13, assisted by scholarship money, Fortner escaped to boarding school at Phillips Academy, in Andover, Mass. But the experience of Brownsville stayed with him as he built a career as an expert on racial politics, earning a Ph.D. at Harvard and a position as assistant professor in the City University of New York's School of Professional Studies. His past fed a sense of dissatisfaction with the literature on mass incarceration in the United States. Scholars and activists had rallied to help the prison population, Fortner felt, highlighting racism in a criminal-justice system that maintains an incarceration rate five to 10 times greater than other liberal democracies and locks up African-Americans at almost six times the rate of whites. But, as he saw it, that scholarship discounted the experience of working- and middle-class black people who cope with the consequences of drugs and crime. It overlooked the power of their activism. It obscured the important role they played in bringing about mass incarceration.

"The idea that black folks played a role in mass incarceration sounded ludicrous to most people."

In September, Fortner will publish a book that tries to correct that narrative. The study, Black Silent Majority (Harvard University Press), focuses on black activism and narcotics-policy development in New York in the decades leading up to passage of the Rockefeller drug laws in 1973, which Fortner identifies as a turning point in the spread of punitive sentencing practices. The book looks at how growing disorder and addiction drove many working- and middle-class people in Harlem and elsewhere to mobilize for tougher crime policies. When Nelson A. Rockefeller staged a news conference promoting his antidrug proposals, Fortner writes, the New York governor was joined by five leaders from the country's most famous black neighborhood.

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