James Forman Jr.
Yale Law School professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Forman Jr. began his guest lecture at the LSU Law Center today by asking those in attendance to please stand if they or someone close to them has ever been incarcerated.
Aside from a handful of the roughly 100 people in the McKernan Auditorium, everyone rose to their feet.
Forman then asked those still seated to please stand if they “believe in second chances.” They all stood.
“Now I want you to look around at the collective experience and power we have in this room,” said Forman, whose book, “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America,” won the 2018 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Forman’s guest lecture today shared the same title as his book, and during it he discussed some of the factors that he believes have contributed to our nation’s mass incarceration problem. Among them, he said, was the primary response to rising crime and violence rates seen in the 1960s and 1980s: increased police, prosecutors and prisons.
While federal policies and laws have certainly contributed to the mass incarceration problem, Forman noted that many “small, tiny decisions” by thousands of local governmental bodies over more than 50 years—largely out of the public eye—have played an even larger role.
“One of the key arguments in my book … is that these tiny decisions are the individual bricks that have built the prison nation that we have become,” he said.
“Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America,” by James Forman Jr. was awarded a 2018 Pulitzer Prize
After laying out how American came to be the nation with the world’s highest incarceration rate, Forman turned to ideas for addressing the problem. Noting roughly 1 million people are released from prison every year, he called for more businesses to implement fair chance hiring policies for those who have been incarcerated and urged faith-based institutions to provide more re-entry support services. He also encouraged the LSU Law students in attendance to participate in a Law Clinic such as the parole assistance and re-entry clinic.
Forman concluded his lecture by asking those in attendance not to let the enormity of the problem lead them to believe there’s nothing any individual can do about it. Because mass incarceration touches so many aspects of our society, he said, “that means there’s something each of us can do.”
“I don’t know what ideas for change there are in this room. I don’t know who in this audience is going to make that change,” he said. “I don’t know who you are, but I know you’re in this room.”
Today’s lecture was sponsored by the Eric Voegelin Institute, and co-sponsored by the Pugh Institute for Justice and the Black Law Students Association.
