Books by Prof. Forman Jr.
Locking up Our Own by Call Number: General Stacks HV9950 .F655 2017ISBN: 9780374189976Publication Date: 2017Today, Americans are debating our criminal justice system with new urgency. Mass incarceration and aggressive police tactics-and their impact on people of color-are feeding outrage and a consensus that something must be done.But what if we only know half the story? In Locking Up Our Own, the Yale legal scholar and former public defender James Forman Jr. weighs the tragic role that some African Americans themselves played in escalating the war on crime. As Forman shows, the first substantial cohort of black mayors, judges, and police chiefs took office around the country amid a surge in crime. Many came to believe that tough measures-such as stringent drug and gun laws and "pretext traffic stops" in poor African American neighborhoods-were needed to secure a stable future for black communities. Some politicians and activists saw criminals as a "cancer" that had to be cut away from the rest of black America. Others supported harsh measures more reluctantly, believing they had no other choice in the face of a public safety emergency.Drawing on his experience as a public defender and focusing on Washington, D.C., Forman writes with compassion for individuals trapped in terrible dilemmas-from the young men and women he defended to officials struggling to cope with an impossible situation. The result is an original view of our justice system as well as a moving portrait of the human beings caught in its coils.
Starting Up: critical lessons from 10 new schools by Call Number: General Stacks LC5131 .S67 2012ISBN: 9780807753071Publication Date: 2012Maya Angelou Public Charter School : a circle of trust-the story of the see forever school / James Forman, Jr., & David Domenici
Justice for Kids by Call Number: General Stacks KF9779 .J87 2011ISBN: 9780814721377Publication Date: 2011What it takes to transform a school inside a juvenile justice facility : the story of the Maya Angelou Academy / David Domenici and James Forman, Jr.
Invisible Punishment by Call Number: ebookISBN: 9781595587367Publication Date: 2011Children, Cops, and Citizenship: Why Conservatives Should Oppose Racial Profiling
Audio
Locking Up Our Own: James Forman Jr. in Conversation with Khalil Gibran Muhammad. 2017. Open Society Foundation
Talking About Race—Rethinking Crime and Punishment in Black America: A Conversation with James Forman Jr. 2017. Open Society Foundation
How Black Leaders Unwittingly Contributed To The Era Of Mass Incarceration. (2017, July 17). NPR.org.
Academic Articles
(2002) A Little Rebellion Now and Then Is a Good Thing (Book Review). Michigan Law Review, 100(6), 1408–1420.
(2004) Community Policing and Youth as Assets. The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (1973-), 95(1), 1–48. Juries and Race in the Nineteenth Century. The Yale Law Journal, 113(4), 895–938.
(2010) Why care about mass incarceration? (Book Review). Michigan Law Review, 108(6), 993–1010.
(1991). Driving Dixie down: Removing the Confederate Flag from Southern state capitols. The Yale Law Journal, 101(2), 505.
(2005a). From Martin Luther King to Bill Cosby: race and class in the twenty-first century.(Martin Luther King, Jr. Lecture). Villanova Law Review, 50(2), 213–225.
(2005b). The secret history of school choice: how progressives got there first.(Essays: Fifty Years After Bolling v. Sharpe). Georgetown Law Journal, 93(4), 1287–1319.
(2007a). Do charter schools threaten public education? Emerging evidence from fifteen years of quasi-market for schooling. University of Illinois Law Review, 2007(3), 839–880.
(2007b). The rise and fall of school vouchers: a story of religion, race and politics. UCLA Law Review, 54(3), 547–604.
(2012). Racial critiques of mass incarceration: beyond the new Jim Crow. New York University Law Review, 87(1), 21–69.
(2009). Exporting Harshness: How the War on Crime Helped Make the War on Terror Possible. New York University Review of Law and Social Change, 33, 331–561.
Other Publications
Evenchik, A., & Forman, Jr., J. (2017, October 20). A Memoir’s Humble Tale of Teaching: Michelle Kuo’s Reading with Patrick avoids the educator-as-savior cliché and opts for a subtler portrait of her relationship with a troubled student. The Atlantic.
(2002). Foreword: Separate but Equal: The Status of America’s Public Schools Symposium. Yale Law School: Legal Scholarship Repository.
(2007). Why Prison Instead of Preschool? Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 161(8), 809–810.
(2008a). Education for Liberation. Yale Law School: Legal Scholarship Repository, 2, 75.
(2008b). Out of Jail and into Jobs. Education Next, 8(4), 44–51.
(2009). No Ordinary Success: The Boundaries of School Reform. Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works.
(2001). Arrested Development. (Cover story). New Republic, 225(11), 24–27.
(2012, June 7). Harm’s Way [Text]. Retrieved August 14, 2018,
(2014, June 1). OPINION: What Maya Angelou taught our students. Al Jazeera America.
(2014, October). The Society of Fugitives: How does aggressive police surveillance transform an urban neighborhood? A sociologist reports from the inside. The Atlantic.
(2015, July 22). Between the World and Me: 10,000 Years From Tomorrow: The permanence of racial injustice makes the struggle for the future necessary today. The Atlantic.
(2017, September 3). Making Sense of the Violence in Charlottesville: Was the white-nationalist march better understood as a departure from America’s traditional values, or viewed in the context of its history? The Atlantic.
(2012, April 19). Opinion | Better Ways to Police Than Stop-and-Frisk. The New York Times.