James Forman Jr.

In April 2017, Forman published his first book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. The book examines tough on crime policies that were supported in many black communities in the 1970s but are now contributing to mass incarceration. In an interview, Forman stated about the issues addressed in the book: "When we think about our criminal justice system, I don't think we can imagine choices in isolation... And so what I'm trying to argue in the book is that we have to look at this system as a whole, and we have to look at all of its dysfunctions. And only until we do that will we really understand the damage that it's doing to people's lives. Sometimes, some people even say we need more prisons. But they also say, we need more job training. We need more housing. We need better schools. We need funding for drug treatment, for mental health treatment. We need a national gun control policy. We need a Marshall Plan for urban America. We need the federal government to do for black communities what it did for Europe after World War II -- to rebuild, to reinvest, to revitalize. That's the claim. But instead of all of the above, the black community, historically, has gotten one of the above. And the one of the above is law enforcement."

Locking Up Our Own was included on accolade lists such as the Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2017, the New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, the GQ Book of the Year as well was the longlist for the National Book Awards and the shortlist for the Inaugural Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice.

In the summer of 2007, the Maya Angelou School took over the school inside Oak Hill Detention Center, Washington D.C.'s juvenile prison. The changes enacted by the Maya Angelou School inside the prison were described by a court monitor as contributing to an "extraordinary" turnaround. The same year, the Transition Center was also opened to help young people transition from incarceration by helping them get GEDs and workplace credentials.

Despite these difficulties, the school was successful. By September 2004, the Maya Angelou Public Charter High School had grown significantly and opened a second campus location in partnership with the District of Columbia Public Schools.

In 2003, Forman began teaching law at Georgetown University. He remained at Georgetown until 2011, when he joined the faculty at Yale. There he teaches Constitutional Law and seminars entitled Race, Class and Punishment and another entitled Inside Out: Issues in Criminal Justice.

The school's name was chosen in a contest from an essay written by Sherti Hendrix, a member of the class of 1999, the school's first graduating class.

Forman was part of the 1999 documentary Innocent Until Proven Guilty, which focused on his work as a public defender and with the See Forever Foundation.

In 1997, Forman cofounded with David Domenici as part of the See Forever Foundation, a comprehensive educational program for teens, which later became the Maya Angelou Public Charter School. Domenici, a Stanford Law graduate and former corporate attorney first pitched his idea for the school to Forman in a D.C. coffee shop in 1995, and they began planning in earnest soon after.

In 1997, Forman took a leave of absence from public defense work to pursue opening the Maya Angelou School. In the fall, with some grant money and teachers hired on, the Maya Angelou Public Charter High School opened with twenty students selected from the court system, all of them either on probation or committed to the Department of Youth and Rehabilitation Services. The students had poor academic records and had often experienced trauma or struggled with mental health. In addition, Forman writes in Locking Up Our Own about ongoing struggles with local police targeting students of the school for searches and arrests.

Forman became a public defender in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 1994, a job he would hold for six years. He wrote about some of his experiences with clients in Locking Up Our Own.

In the 1990s, right after graduating law school, Forman began work as a law clerk for William Norris of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The next year he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

Forman attended Roosevelt High School in Atlanta. He went on to attend Brown University, from which he received his Bachelor of Arts in 1988. He received a Doctor of Law degree from Yale Law School in 1992.

Forman Sr. and Romilly divorced in the early 1970s when Forman was seven years old. Forman speculated in an interview that FBI pressure on civil rights groups at the time contributed to the strain on his parents' marriage: "There was also the period when...the FBI was putting incredible pressure on civil rights groups through the counter-intelligence program -- or the COINTELPRO program. And they were fomenting lies and distrust... They [Forman Sr. and Romilly] had a hard time in those years for a lot of reasons but I know, for my mom in particular, that that was one."

James Forman Jr. (born James Robert Lumumba Forman on June 22, 1967) is an American legal scholar and Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He is the author of Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, published in 2017 and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and a co-founder of the Maya Angelou School in Washington, D.C.

Forman is the son of James Forman Sr. and Constancia Romilly, who met through their activism and involvement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. Forman Sr. was the group's executive secretary handling internal operations from 1961 to 1966 and active during the 1964 Freedom Summer. Romilly, daughter of the British journalist and aristocrat Jessica Mitford, dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College to join the group in 1962 and would eventually become a coordinator of SNCC's Atlanta chapter. Forman has a brother, Chaka Forman.