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S5E07: The Evolution of Crime and Punishment, with Professor of Law James Forman Jr.
22 Plays10 months ago
Dean Bond is joined by J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School who shares his story of growing up with an activist father to clerking for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to the work that inspired his book Locking Up Our Own.
The Power of Attorney is produced by Rutgers Law School. With two locations minutes from Philadelphia and New York City, Rutgers Law offers the prestige and reputation of a large, nationally known university combined with a personal, small campus experience. Learn more by visiting law.rutgers.edu.
Production Manager: Shanida Carter
Series Producer & Editor: Nate Nakao
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rutgerslaw/messageRecommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome to The Power of Attorney, a podcast from Rutgers Law School. I'm your host and dean of the law school, Joanna Bond. It gives me great pleasure today to welcome James Forman Jr.,
Family Background and Civil Rights Legacy
00:00:25
Speaker
the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Thanks so much for joining us today, James. Joanna, I'm so glad to be able to do it.
00:00:34
Speaker
Well, we start every podcast with a general question about your origin story. And yours is remarkable. Your father was a prominent leader in the American Civil Rights Movement. He was executive secretary of the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee, where he met your mother, who is a descendant of British nobility and a distant relative of Winston Churchill. So I have to ask you, what was it like growing up in that prestigious family?
Childhood in Communal Living
00:01:04
Speaker
Well, you know how it is as a kid, your family seems super normal to you and the things that actually interest other people about your family or the things that maybe seem unusual or distinctive to other people about your family, they're not the things that you think of as unusual. So everything you just mentioned,
00:01:29
Speaker
i wouldn't say was really top of mind on my consciousness what i thought more about as a kid
00:01:36
Speaker
is the fact that when I was in elementary school, we lived in kind of a communal living situation. It was the 1970s, and it was very much that vibe. And my parents had split up. My mom didn't have a lot of money. So we lived in an apartment with three families total. And so there were four kids, four adults, and everything was done collectively. Those are the kinds of things I think I thought about as a kid,
00:02:06
Speaker
Well here's what's strange and distinctive about my childhood but certainly. Particularly in terms of my parents civil rights organizing that well that influence even the very decision to live in a collective living situation but also it was it was a part of my consciousness it was.
00:02:28
Speaker
in terms of the people who came over, in terms of the conversations that we would have at the dinner table, I very much was raised to think of myself as somebody who came out of a tradition of struggle and a tradition of protest and a tradition of change. And so I think in that sense, that was really bred into me from the very, very beginning.
00:02:56
Speaker
That's fantastic. I can only imagine how fascinating those dinner table conversations must have been.
Education and Worldview Shaping
00:03:03
Speaker
That's wonderful. So talk a little bit about your public education in New York City and then Atlanta and how it influenced your life's work. Yeah, for sure.
00:03:17
Speaker
So when I was young, we lived in New York City. And then how we ended up in Atlanta is, I think, kind of part of this story about how my parents looked at the world. So like I said, my parents had split up when I was seven. That work is very stressful. And
00:03:36
Speaker
You know, as you know, on top of all of the stress of doing that kind of difficult work, there was incredible government effort through the FBI and COINTELPRO to disrupt the civil rights movement, to disrupt families.
00:03:51
Speaker
to actually make it hard for people to be a family, because if they disrupted the family, then that was going to disrupt the organizing. So we were subject, my parents were subject, and we were subject as a family to all kinds of sort of lies and destabilization efforts, as were other civil rights activists. And it's, I think, part of the movement that, even though people know it academically, I don't think it's gotten enough public attention.
00:04:19
Speaker
So they broke up. And we were living in New York and my mom's white, my dad's black. So and we were raised as black children.
00:04:28
Speaker
with parents of different races. And my mom's world in New York was pretty white. If you thought about her friend group, and then I got admitted to a selective admissions high school in New York called Hunter College High School, which goes from seventh to 12th grade. And it's on the Upper East Side of New York, so I took the subway up there. And it was even whiter than the rest of my life had been. I think my mom looked around, and she didn't like the idea
00:04:58
Speaker
that she was raising she was a white woman raising black boys in a mostly white environment and so she thought about her options and she and my dad met in Atlanta right and they they spent a number of years that's where the snake headquarters were and when she thought about it as she would tell us later on looking back.
00:05:19
Speaker
She realized in Atlanta, she thought was a great place for us to grow up if you if we were raised in Atlanta, we would sort of almost by definition be kind of embedded in a black community in a majority black city, the way she talked about I remember her saying, you know, when you open the newspaper,
00:05:36
Speaker
every morning i wanted you all to see a black mayor black city council black business people running the city that was the atlanta that that she remembered and also that the civil rights movement a lot of ways help to create.
00:05:50
Speaker
right through their their their activism. And now she wanted us to grow up in that. So we moved to Atlanta, my mom was always a big believer in whatever city we lived in in the public school system and having her kids attend public school. So I guess I would say in terms of how it influenced me, which was the other part of your question. I guess I feel like it
Influence of Mother's Open-Mindedness
00:06:15
Speaker
you know, there was that slogan in the 70s about how like the personal is political and, and I think it, my mom's choices and my mom's decisions really kind of helped to educate me that when you do work in the world, when you try to fight for justice, when you're working for change, that all your decisions matter.
00:06:35
Speaker
I also liked her openness, her willingness to admit that there were things she didn't know. She's a white woman raising black children and there's things that she may never be able to provide for us, but she was going to look to a broader community to help provide some of those things. I think it's probably had an impact on me in ways that
00:06:59
Speaker
I'm almost not even conscious of but are just like kind of in the fiber of who you are and how you act in the world. That's an incredible story. I want to ask one follow-up going back to what you mentioned about the FBI's sort of intentional intervention, malicious intervention into family life.
Awareness of FBI Surveillance
00:07:19
Speaker
Were you aware of that as a kid or is that something that you sort of learned about later and realized the extent of later?
00:07:27
Speaker
I was aware a little bit, but really mostly later. I would ask my parents, especially when we were younger and in Detroit before we even moved to New York,
00:07:45
Speaker
there would be like two guys sitting in a car in front of our building and it was weird because it was like a black neighborhood and there were these two white guys and I was like, who are they? And they were like, well, those are FBI agents.
00:08:01
Speaker
And they had a lot of locks on the door. And they were very strict with us about when you come home, you have to come home at this time, you go in the house, you lock all the doors. There were clicks on the phone line that they attributed to the phone being tapped. And as a kid,
00:08:25
Speaker
They shared some of those things with us, but then it was as I got older and my dad fought very hard to get through the Freedom of Information Act. He got almost all of his records from the government and from the FBI. And so then when I was in high school and I went to my dad's apartment in DC,
00:08:44
Speaker
And he had a small apartment, and about a quarter of it was a room that would have been a sun room for most people, but for him was his FBI files. Wow. And it was boxes and boxes. I mean, I would guess, you know, 80 to 100 boxes. And as I got older, you know, I would sometimes I would flip through them. And I remember looking through
00:09:07
Speaker
There are a lot of redactions, as you probably know how those files go. But there was plenty in them. And I remember this one report where they were talking about, well, James is enrolled at a new school, and his homeroom teacher's name is Such and Such. And I remember looking at it and thinking, this is bananas. Why are they tracking where I go to school and who my homeroom teacher is? Wow.
00:09:34
Speaker
Wow. That is just incredible to think about the ways that shapes a kid. It's a hard thing to process, I'm sure.
Motivation for Law School and Civil Rights Work
00:09:44
Speaker
This may be related, but can you tell us a little bit about why you decided to go to law school? Yeah. It's funny because you probably talk to people all the time now about
00:09:57
Speaker
Should you go to law school? I'm thinking of going to law school. People reach out and, you know, as dean, you probably get more of those than I do, but I get plenty. And I often reflect in those conversations and I'll sometimes say, like, go to law school with a more clear rationale for going to law school than I did.
00:10:21
Speaker
I, all I really knew was that I wanted to do civil rights work. And it seemed to me like law maybe was a way of doing that. I, you know, neither of my parents were lawyers. So it's not like I saw it through them. I certainly heard stories from them about
00:10:42
Speaker
the role that lawyers played in supporting the movement. But it was, to be honest, the way they talked about it, it was very secondary. Lawyers were not the heroes in the stories that we grew up with. Organizers were the heroes and activists were the heroes and people that were going on the ground into communities in Mississippi and Alabama and helping people figure out how to advocate and fight for their rights. Those were the heroes. So it wasn't lawyers
00:11:10
Speaker
But maybe it was that it was the 80s and 90s and I didn't see the kind of activism that they had been part of. I'm not saying it wasn't there because there's always been people doing community organizing, but I wasn't aware of it. But I, in a way, defaulted to law school as
00:11:33
Speaker
a kind of way of trying to make a difference in the world and fight for civil rights. And so that's why I did it. But I'd be lying if I told you that it was a clearer conception. I didn't at all have an idea of, oh, I want to do housing work. I want to do voting rights work. I want to be a death penalty lawyer. I want to be a public defender.
00:11:57
Speaker
None of those thoughts were in my mind as I applied to law school. I would not have been able to be more specific than civil rights work. And if you had asked me for an example, I would have given you Thurgood Marshall, not because I like had an ego of thinking that I was Thurgood Marshall, but because I didn't know any other civil rights lawyer. Right, right. No, that makes complete sense given your parents' history as organizers and the focus on social movements. That makes a ton of sense.
00:12:27
Speaker
Let me ask you this, what do you think is the most important thing you learned in law school? Oh, wow. That's a really good question. This might seem like a strange answer and maybe not the most like kind of resounding one, but what comes to mind for me in response to that question is the idea about how much
00:12:55
Speaker
attention to detail matters. And I guess what I mean by that is I feel like when I went to law school, and I see this in a lot of my students now as well. I was reasonably able to articulate like big vision or grand themes or the ways that I wanted to change the world. You know, I could do that I think fair, you know, well enough.
00:13:24
Speaker
But I didn't understand how the level of detail and accuracy and precision and follow up in this that you needed for any little piece of that. And when I say I'm not just talking about legal pleadings, right, which, of course, where you have to be detailed and you have to be accurate. But I just mean work in the world, like, like everything that you try to do,
00:13:52
Speaker
If you're a community activist, you name the project, the importance of paying attention to the small little details, of being right, of getting the facts right, of asking a follow-up question if you don't understand, not guessing, not hedging, not being in the ballpark, being exactly right about what a person said to you about what happened or what time a thing is due,
00:14:22
Speaker
is and then following up and then checking in like it's almost like I guess you could say sort of like habits of highly effective people I'm not really sure the right and like the right way to talk about this but I do feel like I learned that in law school I learned that through
00:14:41
Speaker
the way, you know, through all aspects, through, you know, the case method, right, and just being asked questions, even as a first semester student, and really actually needing to know what's in the footnote. And, and, and what does the statute say? Like, what does it actually say, right? We just skim over these laws. And so I feel like I've taken that, and I've used that in law, but I've also used it in the world, I've used it in the in the rest of my work.
00:15:11
Speaker
That's fantastic. And are you actively trying to develop that level of precision in your students? I am. I am. And it's hard, right? Because
00:15:27
Speaker
It's a little bit easier sometimes to think big picture and even as a teacher, right? I have to resist because there are times that I just want to jump and talk about like this super interesting question and I have to remind myself, yeah, we will get there, but I really actually need to make sure that my student understands that, you know, again, I teach criminal law, so
00:15:56
Speaker
We can talk about whether we think this law is a good idea or is good policy, but we also actually need to look at the statute and try to figure out, well, is there a mens rea element in the statute? And if not, what does it mean that the legislature didn't include it? And so, yeah, I try to force myself to force my students to be precise in those ways. That's fantastic.
Clerking for Justice O'Connor
00:16:26
Speaker
So I know you went on to clerk for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who passed away recently. What was it like working with her? And did she influence your work? And if so, how? Given that she leaned more conservative. Yeah. So I found clerking hard. And I'm less of a rah-rah
00:16:56
Speaker
clerk than I think a lot of my colleagues and by colleagues I mean law professors and not just my colleagues at Yale. I think I found it hard and this is true for both of the judges that I worked for including a judge on the Ninth Circuit Bill Norris with whom I was sort of much more aligned kind of philosophically if you will. I just found it hard to be
00:17:24
Speaker
somebody's assistant in that way like I wanted to not that I thought I was competent to decide the cases but I wanted to whatever the work was I wanted to be the one doing the work not helping the other person do the work which is why I liked being a public defender and you know which we'll probably talk about more than I liked being a law clerk but the other
00:17:49
Speaker
But for Justice O'Connor in particular, yes, the issue you raised was a big one for me, which is that as a law clerk,
00:17:58
Speaker
you get these cases. And I'm not, I'm not the kind of person who's good at really thinking about topics that aren't interesting to me, which is a bit of a flaw, I would say. I mean, I had co clerks, and friends who are like, great generalists, like you give them the topic, and they can like, devote all of their brainpower to it. I was the kind of person that would just like, eyes glaze over for, you know, bankruptcy and a risk and a bunch of other things.
00:18:26
Speaker
So I picked cases that I was interested in, civil rights cases, criminal defense cases, but then here was the problem. I was working on things I cared a lot about for trying to persuade a judge to see the case in this way, but also to be clear, presenting it to her through the lens of her precedent, which was already established. So it's not like a blank slate, right? So it's like, well, you said this and you said this,
00:18:56
Speaker
And your first obligation to a clerk is to help the judge understand what are the ways in which they should decide this case consistent with some of the things that they've said in the past and then you try to find the room to kind of push within the boundaries that seem fair and moral.
00:19:14
Speaker
And I was like, always losing. You know, that's challenging. Absolutely. I hated it. I hated it. I hated it. And so clerking was was was. Here's the thing about clerking. It.
00:19:31
Speaker
gave me so many opportunities over the course of my career. And so I will go to my grave grateful to Justice O'Connor for looking out at the batch of 10,000 qualified people and selecting my resume. She did so much for me by that choice. And however, the experience itself
00:20:00
Speaker
was less than great for me. Sure. I can understand just given what you've said. Absolutely.
Public Defender Career Choice
00:20:08
Speaker
Also, I believe you've mentioned this in the past that she had suggestions for you regarding a career path and you ended up a public defender. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and why you ended up where you ended up?
00:20:22
Speaker
Yeah, I'm smiling now because I'm, you know, I'm thinking about her right now since, you know, she recently passed, and she's being honored with memorial services, you know, this week. And so I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm bringing myself back to the moment when I was sitting in her chambers towards the end of my clerkship and talking about, you know, career possibilities, and she
00:20:49
Speaker
talk to me. She really had two suggestions. And the thing about Justice O'Connor is she was like, you know, some people who are spent a lot of time trying to figure out you and like, what you're all about, and then they try to make their suggestions in line with their sets.
00:21:06
Speaker
She was not like that. No, she was like, I'm adjusted. I've got the experience. Let me tell you what you need to do. And she said I should be a prosecutor because prosecutors have a lot of power. And if I wanted to make the criminal system more fair, I could have a bigger impact as a prosecutor and also
00:21:30
Speaker
if I was a prosecutor, then it would be more likely that I become a judge, and there I could have more impact, etc. Or I should become a civil rights attorney. One of the things I was looking at at the time was the Department of Justice Honors Program for New Attorneys, including the Civil Rights Division. And she thought that both of those would be
00:21:54
Speaker
good pathways. She did not think that being a public defender was the way to go. Because, again, she's just very blunt. She's like, you don't have any power. And so you're just going to be, you know, frustrated. And you're just gonna lose. So was that accurate? Of course, then I became a public defender. She there's clearly right some
00:22:24
Speaker
a lot of truth to what she was saying. There is no question that in our criminal system, prosecutors have mountains more power than public defenders do. If by power, you mean power to sort of decide the sentence that this individual is going to get for this thing that they are charged with doing. So she was right.
00:22:49
Speaker
But I think what she didn't understand, what I would come to see as a public defender, is that even within the position of the person with less structural and institutional power in a really rotten system,
00:23:12
Speaker
you can make a big difference. So you have a kind of power. It's a different kind of power than Justice O'Connor was talking about. But there is something, I think, deeply powerful about standing next to somebody
00:23:30
Speaker
who has been denied every resource over the course of their life, who has always had institutions fail them, who has always had people that were supposed to be the people that were fighting for them, not fight for them, who had the teacher who wrote them off, who had the police officer who second guessed them, who had the caseworker that was too quick to remove them from their family.
00:24:01
Speaker
There's something powerful about being an employee of the government, being somebody provided by the state, and standing next to that person literally in court, but also standing next to them figuratively, metaphorically, through the course of their representation, visiting them at the jail, getting to know their family.
00:24:24
Speaker
and do all of that representation, doing it with a commitment that that person deserves every fiber of energy that you have, every quantum of
00:24:40
Speaker
intellectual strength that you have all of the love and support and dedication and determination you are going to give to them to fight for them so that they can try to get what they want out of this system and there's something powerful about that even when you lose in the
00:25:01
Speaker
you know, again, the Justice O'Connor measure of, you know, how many years did you get? And that was a power that I tried to tap into as a public defender. That is unbelievably powerful. I mean, just hearing you talk about it makes me want to go out and be a public defender. So I really, I do think that there is power in that. But as you said, not in the same way, not in the prosecutorial sense of power.
Shift in Justice System Discourse
00:25:26
Speaker
You talked about some of your experiences as a public defender in your book, Locking Up Our Own. The book won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 and several other honors. Has anything changed since you wrote the book? And what are we still doing wrong as a society with respect to the criminal justice system? Big question, I know. Yeah, right. Well, I would say a lot.
00:25:55
Speaker
has changed and a lot hasn't. So in terms of what's changed, let's start there. I think the first thing at a nationwide level, there has been a major shift in the dominant rhetoric around how we think about our justice system. When I was graduating from law school,
00:26:23
Speaker
The Department of Justice, the same year that I graduated from law school, the Department of Justice issued a white paper, The Case for More Incarceration. This was a government, the leading government agency in this topic, arguing we needed to lock up more people in this country. Wow. And that wasn't, they weren't alone. They weren't unusual. The 1990s was
00:26:50
Speaker
a decade where in the 80s and in many ways as well, where there was basically a national fervor for more police, more prisons, more prosecution, harsher conditions, try more juveniles as adults, lock people up for longer, kill as many people as possible. The most death sentences that were ever imposed in this country was imposed in 1995.
00:27:18
Speaker
And that has changed in the sense that you don't see or hear kind of national figures or for the most part state figures running on those campaigns in the same way anymore. It's a much more kind of nuance, right? Even people who are, you know, quote, unquote, tough on crime. And I reject that label, which, you know, we can talk about later if we end up having time or another conversation.
00:27:48
Speaker
people who are arguing for a more punitive for a harsher system, they do so in a less full throated way than was true in the 1990s. It's more like, well, you know, in general, we might have too many people locked up, but we need but we still need to be hard on this kind of person.
00:28:06
Speaker
Right? Nobody, there was no caveat. 20 years ago, 25 years ago, there just wasn't a national understanding that we had too many people locked up. Again, the opposite. People thought we needed more. And so that's a rhetorical shift. And that's, again, that didn't happen on its own. It happened because
00:28:24
Speaker
You know writers and you know people like tana haci coats and michelle alexander and brian stevenson and who i'm just picking the people who are the best sellers right but but many others as well kind of made the argument that our system is too big and it's too punitive and it's too harsh and then on the ground right activists um were were pushing in the same way together all of those voices change the conversation so that's changed the other thing that's changed.
00:28:49
Speaker
is, you know, my book is, it's about America as a whole, but it's also about the black community in particular, right? And it's grounded and it's really the story of what happened over the past 50 years through the eyes of black elected officials and black police officers and black judges and black prosecutors and black activists and black community members. And I would say what I just told you about the national understanding shift
00:29:18
Speaker
is true in the Black community, but even more so. So Black Americans, who again, this is part of my book, supported many of these policies in the 1990s, have really been the first to turn around and say, wait a minute, wait a minute. This system, which was built up in our names in some cases, and which sometimes we supported,
00:29:45
Speaker
is causing great, great, great damage and needs to be deconstructed, needs to be rebuilt, needs to be modified. Again, there's a spectrum right from reform to abolition to everywhere in between.
00:29:59
Speaker
But there's really, I think, a pretty strong consensus, which you actually see through some of the policies that have been enacted in Washington, D.C. over the last five or eight years. The same city I write about has really, again, not completely at all, but is really kind of reverse course and made some quite progressive innovations in its system over the last few years. So that's what's changed.
00:30:27
Speaker
What really hasn't changed in a lot of ways is once you get below that sort of rhetorical understanding, and you get more granular, and you say you walk into a criminal court, right, in Little Rock, in Jackson, in Detroit, in Boulder, Colorado, in New Haven, Connecticut,
00:30:52
Speaker
And you look at what's happening. You look at the sentences that are being given out. You look at the power relationship between the prosecutor and the defense attorney. You look at the language and the rhetoric that's being used to talk about people, the person who's there charged with the crime. You look at the conditions in the jail cell and the conditions in the prison.
00:31:17
Speaker
At a much more granular level, you have a lot of people being processed through a system that was built in the decades that we just talked about and built in the decades that I wrote about. And it's now just still operating. It's just on autopilot. It's just processing bodies. It's processing people. It's locking people up. And so the challenge, I think, is to move some of the
00:31:46
Speaker
big picture conversation into day-to-day on the ground at 10.15 a.m. in this courtroom in Ithaca, New York, right? What kind of sentence is this person getting for this kind of offense and how are they being treated in the process? That's the challenge, I think, of the current moment.
00:32:10
Speaker
And at the end of the day, do you feel optimistic that we'll be able to do that, to move that conversation into the day-to-day, into the courtroom in Ithaca?
Hope and Inspiration from Activism
00:32:23
Speaker
So I'm one of those people who is always hopeful. And I think I got this from my parents. My dad in particular, my dad was the most hopeful person.
00:32:42
Speaker
I mean, when I think about what he went through in his life and the ways that he was physically battered and the ways that he was emotionally harmed and how much he gave up. And then I remember how when he would come down, he loved to come down and visit
00:33:09
Speaker
me at the public defender's office. He loved to go visit court and sometimes I would just come back from court in the middle of the day, lunchtime, and maybe he had gone over to the public library and now he was sitting outside my office. That's great.
00:33:25
Speaker
whenever I was down, which was a lot, he would always, always have something kind of hopeful and optimistic. And he would always have a word for me about how, you know, when you go back this afternoon, it's going to be better. I think you're going to, I think you're going to turn it around this afternoon. You know, he had that mentality. And
00:33:52
Speaker
And it applied at every level. He thought Reagan was going to lose when Reagan won like 49 states. I love that optimism. That's fantastic. We're going to do it. We're going to do it. He was talking to me by the neighborhood. You just got to go vote.
00:34:14
Speaker
That's how he was. And I just, you know, I think I just absorbed it. Because I don't have an argument for hope. Like, it's like, it's just a thing. You just it's just a belief. It's just a way you're constructed. And so yeah, yeah, I'm I'm I'm I am hopeful. Look at some of the things I mean, look, we were just talking about the death penalty.
00:34:43
Speaker
I mean, when I was in law school, I remember Bryan Stevenson came and he talked about the same case that he would litigate for years that would become the case that he would write about in Just Mercy. And at the time that he came to law school, to my law school to talk about that issue, which really exposed me to the issue, there were, I want 320 people sentenced to death that year.
00:35:10
Speaker
And it would then, the top number would become 350 a few years later. Well, last year, 20 people were sentenced to death in this country. Now, our system is awful in all kinds of ways, right? But that happens because people smartly with passion fought against the death penalty with creativity,
00:35:38
Speaker
And if you had told, I know this because I've asked Brian and Steve Wright and other people this question. If I asked you in 1995, 30 years later, would the number of people sentenced to death have dropped from 350 to 20? Would you have believed me and they all just will laugh? Of course not. No chance.
00:36:03
Speaker
And so I don't want it to be a blind hope. I don't want it to be like a silly frivolous hope, but I want it to be a hope that's grounded in the history of activism in the face of discrimination and oppression. It activism in the face of slavery, activism in the face of lynching, activism in the face of Jim Crow, activism in the face of the death penalty, all of those things
00:36:30
Speaker
give me reason to believe that activism in the face of mass incarceration will eventually win the day. Well, that is certainly a reason to be hopeful. And the death penalty numbers and the changes that we've seen in our lifetime are a reason to be hopeful for sure. Can you
Empowering Underserved Youth
00:36:50
Speaker
tell me? Joanna, can I just say one thing about that? Oh, absolutely. And I think it's hard, right, because those of us that care about these issues
00:36:59
Speaker
There's a way, you know, you don't want to be like celebratory, like you don't want because you know how much awfulness there is, right? You know, a lot of those people that are don't have the death penalty have life sentences, right? You know, that there's a lot of people that are in really inhumane conditions. And so there's a way in which it's almost like if we talk to people about
00:37:24
Speaker
what has been one that either the urgency will diminish because they're like, well, why am I still here? Like, let me go, let me go to this other conference on the environment or something else, right? And also that it's like callous, like that somehow you're not, you know, being true to the people that are still suffering. And so I want to acknowledge that and I want to
00:37:49
Speaker
be clear that I don't want to do that, but I do want people to recognize the impact that their work can have on real lives today. Right. Right. Absolutely. That's inspiring. Can you tell me a little bit more about the Maya Angelou Public Charter School in DC? And if you can describe the school and what led you to start it?
00:38:17
Speaker
Sure. We can have a whole podcast. I know, I know. I'm sorry. Yes, it's a long and big question, I'm sure. But we'll save that for another podcast, though. We'll do a podcast 2.0. Absolutely. But I will answer your question, for sure. And yeah, so Maya Andrews started in the 1990s.
00:38:43
Speaker
And it grew out of the work that I was doing as a public defender in juvenile court. Because what I saw and what really all of us at PDS saw, we talked about was how what we were doing was so important because we were we were standing up for our clients in the way that we just talked about. And also, in many instances, we were keeping them from being locked up, we were keeping them from being incarcerated as kids.
00:39:14
Speaker
But what we weren't doing was changing their life trajectory in a positive way, we were stopping this worst thing from happening to them. But they were already in a bad situation. And, you know, the structure of being a public defender isn't really set up to like, help a person get into a better situation, it's set up to help help a person avoid getting into a worse situation.
00:39:38
Speaker
But I wanted to try to do something to help the clients that I was representing. So I started talking to them and their families about, well, what's the kind of thing that would make a difference in your life? What would you really like? And they said things that, again, probably will not surprise you. They talked about wanting to go to a good school. They wanted teachers who cared about them. They wanted small classes, teachers who would get to know them, who would
00:40:05
Speaker
be able to work with them if they were behind and push them to great heights. They wanted jobs. They wanted a chance to work. The thing about poverty that people who have never been poor just don't understand is how eager people who are poor are to have a job that pays even a small wage, and especially as a teenager,
00:40:33
Speaker
it gets money in your pocket that you give you a kind of freedom when you're walking down the street just to be able to make the simple choice of it's hot and that store is selling soda and I'm gonna go in and buy and I've got three dollars and I'm gonna buy one like that that that little tiny bit of power
00:40:52
Speaker
I don't think you understand what it's like to not feel that right what it's like to not have that unless you've just been walking and been hot and had no money to be able to buy something as simple as a soda so the young people would talk to us about that. So the school was really designed.
00:41:12
Speaker
with their voice in mind of the young people and the families that we interviewed. And we started with 20 kids, four teachers on a little row house. It was actually a former legal aid office in DC, about half a mile from the public defender's office. And all the kids had a job in a little catering restaurant that we ran. And that was in 1997. And now,
00:41:39
Speaker
25 years later, we're celebrating 25 years. We just finished celebrating 25 years of service. We've worked with over 10,000 young people. We have four different campuses across the city. So the city eventually asked us to run the school inside their juvenile prison because they saw what we were doing in the community.
00:42:03
Speaker
working with young people, many of whom had been incarcerated, and they saw how bad their school was inside the juvenile prison, and they asked us to take it over. So we now actually run three schools that are inside prisons in the DC area. And what I always tell people, this is a very important point to make, is that the staff at Maya Angelou
00:42:24
Speaker
you know, imagines and dreams of and wants to work in a world where there is no need for any of those schools because there are no, because those prisons don't exist, because there are not young people who are locked up. At the same time,
00:42:40
Speaker
The teachers and staff believe that every day that we do have a young person who is behind bars, we as a society have a moral obligation to provide them the very best education that can possibly be provided. And so that's the way in which we enter that work.
00:42:58
Speaker
And then we also, because we were getting a lot of 18, 19, 20, 21, 22-year-olds coming to us and saying, you know, I dropped out of school a couple of years ago, now I want to get back. And they were really too old to put into a high school. So we started a Young Adult Learning Center. So we now have those five campuses, the three inside prisons, the high school, the Young Adult Learning Center. And my, you know, for me, the best day of every year
00:43:27
Speaker
is not the Yale graduation, which I love, but is when I go back and I watch the Maya Angel graduates walking across the stage. That is amazing. That's such an incredible story. And I love that there's been that amount of expansion. I didn't realize that you all had also moved into juvenile detention facilities, but that
00:43:51
Speaker
is incredible work. And you started that when you were a young person, right? You had this early vision. Well, definitely younger than the old person I am now. Right? It's all relative. But right? That was 1997. So you were just starting out, so to speak. Yep. Yep. I had been a lawyer. I had been
00:44:14
Speaker
I graduated from law school for five years and I had been a lawyer for three years because I had spent the two years quarking. So yeah, I was young. That's amazing, really inspiring. I'm foolish and all of those things and who believed that it made sense to start a private school that was free
00:44:38
Speaker
and that had no accreditation, at least when we started, since has gotten it. Yeah, those are the kinds of things, because we just wanted to act with urgency. And that's like one of the things that is greatest about being young, right? Being in your 20s or being even younger is that this idea that it's gonna like get tackled in five years is like just not acceptable. Right, no, he has the patience at that age, right? Yeah, and that's great. And it's wonderful, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
00:45:07
Speaker
So at Yale Law School, I know that you teach a class in criminal law, but in addition to that class, you teach two classes, one called Access to Law School and another, the Inside Out Prison Exchange course. And I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about those last two classes.
00:45:24
Speaker
Absolutely. So Inside Out is a national program and it was started by a woman named Lori Pompa out of Temple University over 25 years ago, around the same time I think that we were starting Maya Angelou. And the idea behind the program is that professors from their home universities will go into a prison
00:45:47
Speaker
And we'll teach a class that is within their area of expertise, but the class will be made up of half students who are incarcerated and half students from your home institution. And I say home institution because mostly this is college professors who do this. There are a few law professors and I'm one of them who do it.
00:46:08
Speaker
And so, in my case, I have law students from Yale, and the last time I taught it, which was right before COVID, also students from Quinnipiac. And together, they went up to Carl Robinson Prison in Enfield, Connecticut, and they
00:46:25
Speaker
made up half of a seminar, the other half was men who were incarcerated at Carl Robinson. And I should say I've also taught this class at the federal women's prison in Danbury, Connecticut. So, and we started the criminal legal system. It's more or less a sociology, a 13 week kind of sociology of the system. So we start with theories of punishment,
00:46:47
Speaker
And then we talk about every aspect of the system. We have a week on police, a week on prosecutors, a week on defense attorneys, a week on judges, a week on probation and parole, a week on prisons, a week on collateral consequences, all the things kind of from beginning to the end. And I mean, the class is like a miracle because
00:47:11
Speaker
You have people who are experts in different ways, right? The law students who have had the expertise of our legal education and the incarcerated students who have had the expertise of lived experience. And sometimes also, to be clear, some of the law students have had kinds of lived experience in the system. And so I love it. It's incredibly meaningful to me. And then to connect, because you asked about access to law school,
00:47:40
Speaker
My incarcerated students almost every semester, one or two of them comes up to me at various points in the semester and says, you know, could I be a lawyer one day? Right. Here they are in this setting studying law with law students.
00:47:57
Speaker
So it's natural for them to have this question.
Pipeline Program for Law School Access
00:48:00
Speaker
And I give them, when I first heard it, I gave them the technical answer. Yes, absolutely. There'll be a character in fitness, but I bet you can overcome it and I can help you. And then I started adding into that. I would give them readings by my friend and colleague, Dwayne Betts, who was incarcerated and went to a law school and is now a lawyer and a MacArthur fellow and all the things.
00:48:27
Speaker
That gave them hope, but I wasn't actually giving them the tools, but I wasn't helping make it possible. So, inspiration is good, but you need inspiration with tactics. And so, I sat down with some law students about four years ago, five years ago, and I said, what about if we tried to create a pipeline program to help people from the New Haven area?
00:48:54
Speaker
or Connecticut more broadly, but ideally focusing on New Haven, who have passion, who have energy, who have drive, who want to be lawyers, who want to make a difference in their community, but who as it stands, have no idea how to make that happen. Don't have networks, don't have money for an LSAT program, don't have lawyers in their families and people to help them edit or brainstorm their personal statements.
00:49:24
Speaker
And I'm having this conversation with law students, right? And I'm saying that one thing, the thing you, you're learning to be great at as to become lawyers, but the one thing you're already great at is getting into law school. Right. Right. Right. Like you have mastered, you have mastered that. And so you're as you're actually better situated to do this job.
00:49:50
Speaker
than even me or even some even right a lawyer who's more because it's been more years since we applied. Right. And so we so there were four students that initially said they would, you know, investigate this with me. And together we came up with a program which we launched in co launched during COVID, where we recruited in our first class, we had 20
00:50:16
Speaker
people from the New Haven area of all ages, everywhere from 20. We have seniors in college. You have to be a senior in college at least for this program because the idea is that you're gonna be applying to law school. So we have fellows ranging from age 20 to in our most recent class. I was just helping her with her application last night. We have a fellow who's 59 years old. She's a determined community activist. Everybody in the city knows her. You walk around the city with Babs and it's like you're walking around with the mayor.
00:50:45
Speaker
And she spends a lot of time, she's well known because she's well known for helping people. But her pitch is, well, so many of, so many times, the thing that people need help with involves the law.
00:51:01
Speaker
And so I would love to have my same commitment to community, my same activism, my same networks, my same passion, but also be able to help people as a lawyer. That's extraordinary. Yeah, it is. I mean, our fellows are extraordinary. Like all I have to do is tell their stories and
00:51:20
Speaker
your reaction will be, right, that's extraordinary because of who they are. Right. And so our program is really designed to support those people to help them study for the outset and help them with their personal statements and help them with their optional essays and help them figure out the financial aid forms, all the things that you would need to do to have a successful application
00:51:44
Speaker
And I think in this most recent class, you know, 19 out of our 20 fellows, our first generation professionals, four or five of them have been incarcerated or in the justice system.
00:51:56
Speaker
And if you look at our group as a whole, so we're now four years in, so we have eight of our fellows are second year law students right now. So they're halfway through, right? As we have this conversation, if you're listening to this podcast, y'all, you are halfway. Congratulate yourselves. Yes, absolutely. We have another group, we have another 10 that's in their first year.
00:52:19
Speaker
We have another 12 that's applying right now. Great. And we have 20 who are going to be starting in January, starting their journey with us. These are the ones I haven't even met yet. And the last thing I want to say about the program, and of course, if you have follow-up questions, they're most welcome. But so far in this conversation, I've been talking about the program as a program of individual mobility.
00:52:49
Speaker
right, helping each one of these people individually achieve their dreams. But because New Haven is small, right, New Haven is 100,000 people. And the communities that a lot of our fellows are from are some of the black communities, Latino communities that have historically suffered from redlining and disinvestment and over policing.
00:53:15
Speaker
They, as a group of people, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, in a few years, 100 lawyers.
00:53:25
Speaker
are coming out of these neighborhoods, not all of them, but many of them going back to these very same neighborhoods to provide legal services. We view it as a form of community empowerment. We view it as a response to the crisis of access to justice on the civil side or the underfunding of public defenders on the criminal side.
00:53:50
Speaker
Like you name the issue, the communities that our fellows are from need them. And so eventually, they're going to have an impact that's so much more powerful than their own, their own, their own change in their own individual life trajectory.
00:54:08
Speaker
This is truly an extraordinary program. And it's one that I think should serve as a model for other law schools in other cities. And I'm already thinking about how can we replicate that here in Newark or in Camden, where Rutgers has a campus too. So no, I think it's phenomenal. And I'd love to talk to you more about it. Absolutely.
Vision for Program Expansion
00:54:33
Speaker
I didn't mean to cut you off. Go ahead.
00:54:35
Speaker
No, no, I was gonna ask my final question for you, James, which is, is there anything that I have missed in your background, in your history that you'd like to talk about? Because we've covered so much territory and it's really, you are an extraordinary inspiration. I know to our students, to our prospective students, but I wanted to make sure that I hadn't missed anything important that you wanted to add.
00:54:59
Speaker
No, I don't think so. I would just say, just in response to the thing about Newark and Camden and expanding, it's always been my hope that eventually this program would serve as inspiration. I don't like the term model because everybody should do it consistent with what their local needs are and their local assets are. But
00:55:22
Speaker
I haven't talked that much about it publicly in part because I wanted to have proof of concept. I wanted to be able to tell you about people that have graduated law school. But all of our fellows who have entered law school are on track and on a good trajectory. So I think that that is going to happen. And I do think that in a year or two, for sure,
00:55:52
Speaker
I would be more you know sort of feel more prepared to talk about well you know here's what we do here's here's the results that we've achieved and here's how that might look in in Newark or Camden but i think you're right i think that it's.
00:56:09
Speaker
You know, as long as you're, especially for law schools that are in a city, it doesn't have to be, but it really helps just because of sort of the concentration of people. I think there's really no reason that this couldn't and shouldn't be widespread. And it's just to make one last pitch for it.
00:56:29
Speaker
We haven't talked about this so far, but it's very powerful to your current law students. Oh, absolutely. Because one of the things in the sort of obvious ways, but I'll just share one sort of less obvious way that it has shown up as being powerful for my students, which is that
00:56:48
Speaker
As you'll probably guess, the students that the law students that sign up for this are disproportionately themselves first generation or from an underrepresented racial group or kind of maybe participated in a pipeline program themselves and want to give back. And one of the things they talk about is how as law students, they suffer from a form of imposter syndrome, which is well documented.
00:57:15
Speaker
But this program actually helps them overcome that in an unusual way, which I had not thought about before we started, which is that they spend a lot of time counseling their fellows who they're coaching.
00:57:31
Speaker
about how to overcome their imposter syndrome and persuading their fellows that they can do it, that they belong, that the law school needs them, that their legal profession needs them, that their ideas are good and their ideas are powerful and their life histories are resonant.
00:57:50
Speaker
is the best way for the law students to persuade themselves of that very path. Of those things, absolutely. No, intuitively that makes sense, but you're right. I wouldn't have necessarily thought of that as an additional benefit to the students involved, but that is truly extraordinary.
00:58:09
Speaker
Well, thank you so much for sharing that concept with us, that program, but also all of the things that we talked about, your legal career, your life before law school. It's all very inspiring, James. So I really appreciate you sharing it with us. And I know it will be very meaningful to our listeners too. So thank you again for coming today and talking with me.
00:58:33
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me and keep up the great work that you're doing at Rutgers. Thank you. The Power of Attorney is a production of Rutgers Law School. With two locations just minutes from New York City and Philadelphia, Rutgers Law offers the prestige and reputation of a large, nationally known university with a personal, small campus experience. Learn more today by visiting us at law.rutgers.edu.