Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

James Forman Jr. (b. 1967) is an American lawyer, legal scholar, and Pulitzer Prize winning author of Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. Forman’s educational background and professional experiences inform his writing on mass incarceration and the criminal justice system. Forman received his bachelor of arts from Brown University in 1988 and his juris doctor from Yale Law School in 1992. After completing his studies, he worked as a law clerk at the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals and the US Supreme Court. While clerking at the US Supreme Court, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor encouraged Forman to pursue a career with the NAACP or the Department of Justice. Instead, Forman joined the Public Defender Service in Washington, DC, a job he described as “the civil rights work of [his] generation” (“‘Locking Up Our Own’ Details the Mass Incarceration of Black Men.” NPR, 2017). Forman worked as a public defender for six years, representing adults and juveniles charged with a wide range of crimes, including drug and gun offenses. (Some of these cases serve as anecdotes in Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.