James Forman Jr. was driving when I reached him by phone last week.
The Yale Law professor, former Washington D.C. public defender and son of a civil rights leader bearing the same name was about half an hour away from Danbury, Connecticut. There’s a federal prison there, and every week Forman makes the trip, teaching a course on the criminal justice system.
The class has 24 students. Half are from Yale. The other half are incarcerated women at the facility.
Forman’s destination was fitting, as the author of the 2018 Pulitzer winner in general nonfiction, “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America,” was deep into his explanation of what ordinary people can do to end mass incarceration and the disproportionate affect it has on communities of color. The class is one way Forman is striving to do that work.
On Thursday, April 18 it’s the same message Forman says he’ll bring to Tacoma’s Rialto Theater, as part of Philanthropy Northwest’s Racial Equity series.
That also is fitting. Across the country, African Americans are incarcerated at a significantly higher rate than other racial and ethnic groups. That has remained consistent for decades.
The same is true in Pierce County. In 2015, according to the most-recent incarceration trends assembled by the Vera Institute of Justice, there were 659 African Americans incarcerated per 100,000 residents age 15 to 64. For whites, the number was 151 per 100,000 residents age 15 to 64.
Decreasing the sheer number of Americans behind bar, as well as erasing the racial disparity in our prison population, will require a societal mindset shift.
Even more, it will require individual players taking individual actions, Forman said.
To read the rest of this article by Matt Driscoll in The Tacoma News Tribune, click here.
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