His first book is the critically acclaimed Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, which explores how decisions made by black leaders, often with the best of intentions, contributed to disproportionately incarcerating black and brown people.

Professor Forman has written many law review articles, in addition to op-eds and essays for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Nation, and The Washington Post. Last year he took his teaching behind prison walls, offering a seminar called Inside-Out Prison Exchange: Issues in Criminal Justice, which brought together, in the same classroom, 10 Yale Law students and 10 men incarcerated in a CT prison. teaches Constitutional Law and a course called Race, Class, and Punishment. That school, which had long been an abysmal failure, has been transformed under the leadership of the Maya Angelou staff the court monitor overseeing D.C.’s juvenile system called the turnaround “extraordinary.”Īt Yale Law School, where has taught since 2011, James Forman, Jr. A decade later, in 2007, Maya Angelou School expanded and agreed to run the school inside D.C.’s juvenile prison.

So in 1997, along with David Domenici, he started the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, an alternative school for dropouts and youth who had previously been arrested. Professor Forman loved being a public defender, but he quickly became frustrated with the lack of education and job training opportunities for his clients. After clerking, he joined the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., where for six years he represented juveniles and adults in felony and misdemeanor cases. He worked as a law clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Forman graduated from Atlanta’s Roosevelt High School, Brown University, and Yale Law School. is a leading critic of mass incarceration and its disproportionate impact on people of color.

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