Pulitzer-winning justice book to be published in UK

Little, Brown imprint Abacus will publish legal academic James Forman Jr’s Pulitzer-winning exploration of US justice.

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and examines America’s criminal justice system, emphasising its disproportionate impact on people of colour.

David Bamford, editor for Virago Press, Abacus, Fleet, Blackfriars and Little, Brown, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein, on behalf of McCormick Literary in New York. It will be published by Abacus in e-book next month and paperback on 4th October.

The former public defender analyses the war on crime that began in the 1970s and explores the “devastating consequences of tough-on-crime policy that undermined many of the gains of the civil rights movement”. Forman tells “riveting stories of politicians, community activists, police officers, defendants and crime victims”, writing “with compassion about individuals trapped in terrible dilemmas” – from the men and women he represented in court to officials struggling to respond to a public safety emergency.

A professor of law at Yale Law School, Forman has written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, numerous law reviews and other publications. A former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, he spent six years as a public defender in Washington, DC, where he co-founded the Maya Angelou Public Charter School.