American law professor at Yale, public defender by formation, and one of the most careful contemporary writers on the political history of American mass incarceration. The son of civil-rights organizer James Forman Sr. (executive secretary of SNCC) and a graduate of Yale Law, Forman clerked for Sandra Day O'Connor and then spent six years as a public defender in Washington, D.C. — the experience that grounds his scholarship in actual courtroom practice rather than only archive and statute.
In 1997 he co-founded the Maya Angelou Public Charter School in D.C., a school for young people coming out of the juvenile justice system, which he ran for years before entering the legal academy. He taught at Georgetown before joining Yale's law faculty.
His major book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (2017) won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. The argument it makes is uncomfortable and necessary: the political construction of America's carceral state cannot be told only as a story of white backlash done to Black communities. In majority-Black jurisdictions like Washington, D.C., Black officials, ministers, judges, and voters were themselves frequently architects and supporters of the punitive turn — drug-warrior policies, mandatory minimums, aggressive policing — pursued in the name of protecting Black communities from the violence and disorder those communities were actually experiencing in the 1970s and 1980s. Forman's account does not let white politics off the hook (the federal drug-war infrastructure, the racially skewed sentencing, the gutting of the alternative remedies Black leaders had also asked for); it does insist that an honest history must include the tragic complicity of Black political leadership and the constrained menu of options it faced. The result is a more durable and useful account of how American mass incarceration was built — and a harder question about what it will take to dismantle.