JC Member Spotlight: James Forman, Jr.

Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change

James Forman Jr. is the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He has worked as a law clerk for Judge William Norris of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court, and served as a Public Defender in Washington, D.C., where for six years he represented both juveniles and adults charged with crimes. He is the author of the Pulitzer prize-winning Locking Up Our Own, in which he seeks to understand the war on crime that began in the 1970s and why it was supported by many African American leaders in the nation’s urban centers.

We spoke to Professor Forman about his upcoming book Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change, edited in partnership with Premal Dharia (Harvard Law School) and Maria Hawilo (Loyola University Law School).  Available this July, this collection of writings on ending mass incarceration features advocates, experts, and formerly incarcerated people.

Q.     How did this book come to be?

After my book Locking Up Our Own came up out came out in 2017, I spent several years speaking at universities, bookstores, libraries, and community centers about the book and the criminal legal system. Wherever I went, I was asked the same question: “What can we do to fix the problems you spoke about?”

I realized that I needed to have a book to recommend to these audiences to help them think about this question of what to do and how to make a difference. So, I started talking with my co-authors Maria and Premal.

“We recognized that there’s been a lot written about the criminal legal system and most of it is about the problem and how we got here. But we said, ‘What if we could identify the small percentage of interesting, compelling writing about how to respond—how to make the system less harmful, less punitive, less harsh, more restorative?’  ”

We set out on a process of reading thousands and thousands of articles. We tried to find readings that were truly about interventions, about changes, about solutions. My goal was to develop the book that I wished I had in my hands in 2017.  

Q. The word “dismantling” conveys a process of taking down a structure. Is there a good place to start the process of disassembling mass incarceration?

I can’t say there is one good place to start. The book includes a menu of options and ways of thinking about the different institutions involved in mass incarceration and how to change them, but it also invites disagreement and debate about what is the best or most effective and what should happen first.

We think of this as a book that will benefit a high school teacher, college or law school professor who's teaching a class about our criminal justice system, or about mass incarceration, and who's struggling to identify how to change the system.

We structured it in such a way that examines each component of the system affecting mass incarceration—police, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, prisons, and reentry. We did that intentionally because mass incarceration is not a single construction—it is multiple structures.  For someone trying to figure out where to start, I’d recommend finding other people who are interested in the topic and in doing something in their community and then reading the book together.

Change must start locally, and you don't need a lot of people. But you do need more than yourself. Have a conversation about what you might want to work on, together explore what you agreed and disagreed with, and take action from there.

Q. Why do you think the moment is right for a book that examines how to dismantle mass incarceration?

When I went to law school, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund was the leading civil rights organization in the country. It’s where a lot of us aspired to be civil rights workers. They had five subject matter areas on their agenda: voting, housing, education, employment, and the death penalty. The criminal justice system was not understood as a site of racial injustice or the leading civil rights organization in the country would have put it on its docket as a target. Instead, its focus was the death penalty, which has long been a way into thinking about the broader criminal justice system.

Bryan Stevenson (Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative) came to Yale when I was a law student and gave a talk about the case that was the subject of his book (Just Mercy). I was moved when I heard him speaking, but at the time I didn’t make the connection between the death penalty and the rest of the criminal justice system. It wasn't until I became a law clerk a few years later that I saw all these cases with inadequate defense lawyers, no experts having been called by the defense, and countless poor and working-class defendants—many of whom had been locked up on bail for years before trial— as well as uncaring judges and biased juries. I saw all the things that Bryan was talking about in the death penalty context, and I was like, “Oh, yeah, that's everywhere in our criminal system.”

So, I became a public defender. But at that time, there were no marches in the streets. There were not hundreds of law students coming to Yale Law School, as they are today, because they've read The New Jim Crow (by Michelle Alexander), Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Bryan Stevenson, and are ready to abolish the system. There was none of that in the conversation at Yale or any other law school. Even the term “mass incarceration” didn't exist when I was a law student. That term was created in 2000.

“We’ve had decades upon decades of building up this system. It’s only relatively recently that we have generations of people that have been raised up with a level of consciousness about the unfairness and injustice of the system.”

We have seen a society-wide change that has been led by writers and activists.

It’s hard to put into words how different today is from the years that generated mass incarceration. It’s that energy. It's that impulse. It's that activism that is still going on all around the country and finding its way into policy. It is leading to laws to reduce the impact of the war on drugs, to restore the right to vote to people who have been incarcerated, to make it easier to hire people who have a criminal record, to reduce juvenile incarceration rates, to reduce the number of death sentences and to bring in first responders in place of police officers to help people that are experiencing a mental health crisis.

“You show me a community today and I will be able to show you a group of people that are working to make the criminal legal system in that community somehow less painful, less harsh, less brutal. This is the moment we are in.”

Q. Can you speak to the importance of imagination when it comes to change and dismantling mass incarceration?

I think it is especially difficult to imagine a new world when we're talking about something like the criminal justice system because it literally has structures. Just imagine the prison. It is designed to keep people in and to keep people out; designed so that you and I don’t see what's happening behind those walls. That lack of access and lack of transparency makes it hard to imagine something different because we don't even really have a real clear grip on what it is.

Think about our criminal justice system, with its prisons and its courthouses and its other structures. For example, the New Haven police station, buildings that are built in such a way to suggest they will be here forever.  They are impenetrable, impermeable, indestructible. So, everything about this system tells us that it this is how it is, and you just better learn to live with it.

The challenge for those of us that want to create something different is both to resist and overcome all the obstacles is that I just described to try to imagine. Try to envision.

That is what I admire about abolitionist thinking—a constant push to say, “What if it was different? What if we didn't have any prisons?  What if we didn't have any police officers? What would be the things we would have to build as a society to make that kind of world possible?”

As somebody who started an alternative school for kids in the juvenile justice system and has been part of neighborhood nonprofits for most of my life, whenever there's rising crime and people talk about saturation policing, I think: “What if we imagine saturation jobs? What if we imagine saturation social workers? What if a 17 or 18-year-old in Newhallville couldn't walk down the block without encountering somebody whose job it was to help you succeed?”

I think that is one role this book can play by including arguments and perspectives that push the boundaries and challenge our imaginations that we can do this thing. That's very hard for any of us individually, which is why a book like this can light up corners of the room that otherwise would be obscured and in so doing, help us imagine some new possibilities. And then, of course, the next challenge is acting to build that out. You've got to imagine it. And then you've got to act to bring it into reality.