James Forman, Jr., “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America”

It’s 1995–James Forman Jr. is a public defender in Washington DC. He is trying to keep a 15-year-old out of a juvenile detention center with a grim reputation. He is failing…

Looking around the courtroom, Forman realized that everyone associated with the case was African-American: the judge, the prosecutor, the bailiff. The arresting officer was black, as was the city’s police chief, its mayor and the majority of the city council that had written the stringent gun and drug laws his client had violated.

“What was going on?” Forman asks. “How did a majority-black jurisdiction end up incarcerating so many of its own?”

This is the question that James Forman, Jr. addresses in his important new book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

James Forman Jr. is professor of law at Yale Law School. He has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, numerous law reviews, and other publications. A former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, he spent six years as a public defender in Washington, D.C.