Blueprints for Ending Mass Incarceration

“Mass incarceration was built bit by bit, law by law, choice by choice, over generations, across our fifty states, Washington, D.C., the territories, and over three thousand counties. It will have to be dismantled the same way,” write James Forman Jr. ’92, Premal Dharia, and Maria Hawilo in the introduction to their new book, Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change (FSG, 2024).

That the U.S.’ system of mass incarceration requires dismantling is the undisputed premise of this new reader, which comprises essays, interviews, campaign notes, and other materials from contributors with experience across the spectrum of the carceral system. 

Forman is the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School; Dharia is the executive director of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration at Harvard Law School; and Hawilo is a distinguished professor in residence at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. All three of the collection’s editors are former public defenders.

“Back when we started as public defenders, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the thing most people said about prisons was that we needed more of them,” they write in their introduction. “Much has changed since then… But the daily reality of our criminal system has not changed as much as the conversation surrounding it. America still incarcerates more people than any other country in the world.”

Three questions drive Dismantling Mass Incarceration: How can we make our approaches to crime and safety more humane? How can agencies become more just? And how can ordinary people help in this effort? To help answer these questions, Forman, Dharia, and Hawilo draw together many voices expressing the problem and proposing solutions. 

The book is divided into sections meant to trace a common path to incarceration: “Police,” “Prosecutors,” “Public defenders,” “Judges,” “Prisons,” and “Aftermath.” Each section includes an introduction by the authors followed by contributions by experts in the field, including organizers, legal scholars, and people involved in the carceral system, from judges to formerly incarcerated people. Contributors include political activist Angela Y. Davis, writer and poet Clint Smith, and lawyer Larry Krasner. 

Several Yale Law School voices are included. There’s a Twitter thread rejecting the word “cage” for “prison cell” by Freedom Reads Director Dwayne Betts ’16, an excerpt from Lecturer in Law Emily Bazelon ’00’s Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration (Random House, 2019), and an essay on crisis response co-written by Professor of Law Monica C. Bell ’09. 

“On any path to change, we believe, incremental steps are necessary,” the authors write in their conclusion, noting a few examples outlined in the book: “efforts to reduce the police footprint in traffic stops, create alternate first responders for mental health calls, change sentencing practices to shrink the number of people entering prison, and pass second-look sentencing laws that allow judges to release people who have spent many years behind bars.”

A combination of short-term strategies and long-term vision will be necessary to create durable change, they argue. But there’s reason to hope: “The ground is shifting,” they write. “Those who resist the rising demand for change fear its efficacy. In response, we must continue to organize, intervene, disrupt, pressure, and strategize.”

James Forman Jr. is the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law and faculty director of the Yale Law and Racial Justice Center. His teaching focuses on schools, prisons, and police. His book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (FSG, 2017) won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018. At Yale Law School, he founded the Access to Law School program, a law-student run pipeline program that helps New Haveners achieve their dreams of becoming lawyers. He also teaches a joint seminar for Yale Law students and incarcerated men and women called Inside Out: Issues in Criminal Justice.