James Forman, Jr.
Appearances
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons’
I could see that these judges were telling themselves a story, which was that a relatively short amount of time behind bars would be a wake-up call. In their mind, they were helping these kids. And even though I was sure they were wrong, I didn't really have the evidence to prove it. But then this astonishing pattern started to emerge.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons’
I remember getting an email two years ago from a nonprofit called The Sentencing Project, which publishes data on youth incarceration. And the graph I saw in their email was so stunning that I printed it out. And literally, I wrote on the top, there's a story here right about this.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons’
This graph showed that we're locking up fewer young people than we did even in the 1970s, when the era that we call mass incarceration really began. And what's so wild is that from 2000 to 2020, the number of young people behind bars dropped by 77%. Picture a room, there's a hundred people in the room, And then imagine that we take 77 of them out. So there's just 23 people left.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons’
That's the decline. And it's a massive change on its own. But if you say to someone, wow, we stopped blocking up so many young people, their first reaction might be, well, didn't crime go up? And the reality is that crime actually declined during this period just as rapidly as the incarceration rate. So I called up my editor at the magazine and I said, how is this possible?
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons’
And how is it possible that everyone is not talking about it? I went on a quest to find the answers. And you'll hear about them in this week's Sunday Read. It's an article I wrote for the magazine. And what really stood out to me is this. We know that even a month or two behind bars has terrible consequences for teenagers.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons’
I mean, the first juvenile prison that I ever went to as a public defender, it brought me to tears. It was so isolated and barren and desolate. I mean, it's hard to fathom what it's like to be 14 or 15 and locked up in a cell. To day after day be robbed of your human potential.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons’
Incarceration makes it less likely that a kid will ever graduate from high school and more likely that they'll be arrested as an adult. And what we've seen over the past 20 years is this radical experiment of not locking up kids for offenses, especially drug offenses, where prison was once routine.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons’
Just putting them directly in an alternative to incarceration, such as counseling or an education or job training program. We now have a slew of research backed options that are working. And crime is dropping. In fact, locking up fewer young people might even be part of why youth crime has declined. So here's my article, read by Prentice Onayemi. Our audio producer today is Adrian Hurst.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons’
But what if there was a disruption in that narrative? What if the story changed? My name is James Forman, Jr. I'm a law professor at Yale University and a contributor to the New York Times Magazine. I became a public defender in the middle of this hyper-punitive era. For six years, I represented young people in the juvenile and adult court systems.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons’
The original music you'll hear was written and performed by Aaron Esposito.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons’
An American story that we all know and that I've lived for a lot of my life is the story of rising incarceration. The United States prides itself on being a nation of freedom and liberty. And yet, we have the biggest prison system in the history of the world. And for many decades, that system was just growing and growing, including when it came to young people.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons’
This was Washington DC in the 1990s, when people were talking about locking up more of everybody. More young people were being charged as adults and even being sent to death row. The mantra of the day was, if you're old enough to do the crime, you're old enough to do the time. As a defense lawyer, I was in the courtroom every day arguing for alternatives to prison for my clients.
The Daily
The Sunday Read: ‘What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons’
I would point to job training programs and mentoring programs, afterschool tutoring and mental health treatment. And the judge sitting across from me would often say things like, well, counselor, I understand that your client has had a challenging life, but part of what I have to do is send your client a message. So I'm gonna give him a month or two months behind bars.