When I’m graduating from law school, deciding what to do with my life, one of those buildings had closed. If you walked the other way you got to the Atlanta federal penitentiary. “When I was a child, in my neighborhood … if you walked one way you got to the General Motors plant.

I could see differences in how I was policed when I was by myself versus how I was policed when I was with my friends.”Īnd there was another thing he could see. “Although I am mixed race and my parents raised me and my brother to consider ourselves African American, I’m so white that the police in my neighborhood didn’t always know it. “I could see disparities in policing practices a child,” Forman said. the late executive director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the Civil Rights Movement - described growing up in Atlanta in a working class and middle class African American community. And on November 15 at Georgetown Law, Forman - who taught at the Law Center from 2003 to 2011 - delivered the 2018 Hart Lecture (video below) based on the book: “Locking Up Our Own: Race, Class, and the Politics of Mass Incarceration.”įorman, the son of James Forman Sr. “And so I began to ask myself the question, how did this happen, how did it come to be? What was so powerful, what was so all encompassing, what was so overwhelming in this country over the last 50 years that even in a majority black jurisdiction, we were making the same policy choices, passing the same laws, seeing the same results as the rest of the country?” Locking Up Our Ownįorman began researching that question in what would become his book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2017), which won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and was named one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2017. the rest of the country was doing,” Forman said, noting that in the 1990s, one in three young black men nationwide was under criminal justice supervision (one in two in Washington, D.C.). And even with all that representation in local government, that ability to control and influence some of the things that were happening in local law … we were doing the same thing in D.C.

The chief prosecutor in the city was none other than Eric Holder. “The police force was majority black, the police chief at the time was African American, the mayor was black. Georgetown Law Associate Dean Kristin Henning.Īs Forman began to work through his anger, he realized that the city council that had passed the gun and drug laws that Brandon was being sentenced under was a majority African American city council.

James forman locking up our own