Podcast: For Professor James Forman Jr., Taking Action Starts Close to Home
Professor James Forman Jr. ’92 joined Dean Heather K. Gerken to discuss his critically acclaimed first book, which examines how policies endorsed by Black leaders in many U.S. cities sent Black people to prison. But Locking Up Our Own is just the starting point of the conversation on Inside Yale Law School. He shares what he’s been working on since, including a new book that offers solutions to the problem described in his earlier one.
Forman also discusses the Access to Law School Program, which he launched with students to help people from under-represented backgrounds become lawyers — especially in New Haven. The law-student-run pipeline program is part of the Yale Law and Racial Justice Center, which emphasizes working with community partners.
About James Forman Jr. ’92
Forman is the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law. After graduating from Yale Law School, he joined the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., where he represented both juveniles and adults charged with crimes. His frustration with the lack of education and job training opportunities for his clients led him to co-found an alternative school for school dropouts and youth who have been arrested. It has since expanded to run five schools.
Forman’s scholarship focuses on schools, police, and prisons, particularly the race and class dimensions of those institutions. His first book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. His second book, a collaboration titled Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change, was published this year.
A nagging question about the criminal justice system (1:39)
Forman tells Gerken how his time as a public defender in Washington, D.C., led him to write Locking Up Our Own. The book tells the story of how many Black leaders in U.S. cities supported the war on crime that began in the 1970s. It asks why so many officials embraced tough-on-crime policies even when those measures had devastating effects on their communities.
“This harsh system that I’m fighting every day I see is being run in many ways by other African American actors … And the city, Washington, was doing with its system the same thing in many ways that the rest of the country was doing. And that was a shocking — I don’t know, but it was disturbing to me. And I wanted to try to figure out what was going on.”
Related:
Power and Punishment: Two New Books About Race and Crime (The New York Times)
Professor Forman Publishes New Book, Locking Up Our Own
Why his new book is about taking action (12:42)
Forman shares why his latest book, Dismantling Mass Incarceration, answers a question that people asked after reading his first: “What can I do?”
“We always tell our students, you cannot do everything, but you can do one thing. And then you can do a second thing, and then you can do a third thing. And if you do all of that, you will look back at your life and think, I’ve really made — I’ve had an impact. So that's the message that we're hoping that the book will deliver.”
Related:
How to Dismantle the Mass Incarceration System (Yale News)
Advocates Offer Blueprints For Ending Mass Incarceration
Offering more than encouragement to aspiring lawyers (17:12)
Forman discusses the inspiration for the Access to Law School Program. He explains how students in a class he taught in a prison would ask if they could go to law school after having served time. He told them it was possible, but he realized they needed something more.
“Telling people you can do it is a good first step, but you also need to give them the scaffolding, the pathway. And so Access to Law School is that scaffolding. It's not limited to students that have been incarcerated, although we do recruit heavily from among that community. But it's open to anyone from the New Haven area who is first generation or low income or from some group that's underrepresented in law.”
Why working locally matters (19:40)
Forman explains why Access to Law School focuses on having participants from the New Haven area.
“Our fellows five years from now, when they’re in the courthouse, they’re not going to be the only one. They’re not going to be the only lawyer of color. They’re not going to be the only lawyer from New Haven … So we really think we’re kind of building up a kind of intellectual and cultural and legal capital in this town that — my hope is that 10 years from now, 15 years from now, 20 years from now, the courthouse looks and feels different because of a program like ours.”
Related:
In his inaugural lecture as the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law, Forman presented Access to Law School as an example of the creative thinking needed to open doors to careers in law.
James Forman Jr. ’92: Expanding Access to the Legal Profession (video)
Creating Community on the Path to Law School (2022 feature)
Lighting Up the Path to Law School (2020 feature)
What we owe our neighbors behind bars (22:46)
Forman shares the idea behind the second project of the Law and Racial Justice Center, New Haven Neighbors for Justice. The project starts with a premise, borrowed from the D.C. group Neighbors for Justice, about the people locked up in a nearby jail.
“The Whalley Avenue jail is less than a mile from where we are sitting right now to have this conversation. It’s 7/10 of a mile from Yale’s campus, and there are anywhere between 600 to 700 men incarcerated there every night. And the question that New Haven Neighbors for Justice wants to ask … is what would it feel like and be like and look like if we thought of those men as our neighbors?”
Related:
For new Yale center, the fight for racial justice begins locally (Yale News)
