“Law School professor James Forman Jr. ’92 J.D. is the 2018 Pulitzer Prize winner in General Nonfiction for his book, “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.””
“In “Locking Up Our Own,” published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Forman wonders: How is it that the number of black elected officials has increased dramatically since the Civil Rights Era, alongside an almost equal increase in black incarceration? By exploring the decisions that many black mayors, judges, and police chiefs made – ostensibly in the hopes of stabilizing what they saw as struggling African American communities — Forman shows that these leaders had a significant, albeit unintended, role to play in the creation of the current state of the criminal justice system. The book was also named one of the “10 Best of 2017” by The New York Times.”