Dreyfous Lecture to look at ending mass incarceration
This year’s George Abel and Mathilde Schwab Dreyfous Lecture on Civil Liberties and Human Rights will focus on ending mass incarceration and will be held Tuesday, Oct. 24 at Tulane Law School.
Professor James Forman Jr., the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School, will deliver the lecture entitled “5 Ways to End Mass Incarceration” at 5 p.m. at the John Giffen Weinmann Hall in Room 110. A reception will follow in the Marian Mayer Berkett Multipurpose Room.
Forman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and will also be signing his recently published book, "Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change," after the lecture. There will be copies available for sale.
Forman attended public schools in Detroit and New York City before graduating from the Atlanta Public Schools. After attending Brown University and Yale Law School, he joined the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., where for six years he represented both juveniles and adults charged with crimes.
During his time as a public defender, he became frustrated with the lack of education and job training opportunities for his clients. In 1997, along with David Domenici, he started the Maya Angelou School, an alternative school for school dropouts and youth who had been arrested. In the decades since its founding, Maya Angelou School has expanded to run multiple schools inside D.C.’s youth and adult prisons—its success was chronicled in the 2023 short documentary film "Welcome to School."
Forman’s scholarship focuses on schools, police, and prisons. He is particularly interested in the race and class dimensions of those institutions. Professor Forman’s first book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, was on many top 10 lists, including The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2017, and was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. His second book, Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change, was published in 2024 by Farrar Straus & Giroux. Co-edited by Forman, Premal Dharia and Mario Hawilo, the anthology focuses on how to undo the damage and depredations of the carceral state.
In September 2020, Forman convened 12 Yale Law students and 20 first-generation New Haveners for a novel experiment in legal education: a law-student run pipeline program helping people from under-represented groups achieve their dreams of becoming lawyers. To date, more than 18 program participants have been admitted to law school, including to UConn, Quinnipiac, Yale, Villanova, American University, Berkeley, Georgetown, and Western New England. In January 2022, Forman helped launch the Yale Law and Racial Justice Center, which brings together New Haveners, Yale students, staff, and faculty, local government officials, and local and national experts to imagine and implement projects advancing racial justice.
Professor Forman has received honorary degrees from Macalester College and Niagara University. He is a Trustee of the Council on Criminal Justice and a member of the American Law Institute. In 2023, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
The George Abel and Mathilde Schwab Dreyfous Lecture on Civil Liberties and Human Rights was established in 1965 to honor George Abel Dreyfous, the founder of the Louisiana Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union and a Southern pioneer and leader in the field of civil liberties. In 2003, the title of the lecture series was changed to honor both Mr. Dreyfous and his wife, Mathilde Schwab Dreyfous, a tireless community volunteer and activist who worked closely with her husband towards an end to segregation and discrimination against African-Americans.
