James Forman

“How come we never use prison, the failure of prison, as a reason not to give more prison? There's never a moment where we say, 'OK, well, prison hasn't worked, so we're not going to try that again.'”

“You can get rid of the teacher certification requirements, and you're still not going to have a rush of incredibly high-quality people going into teaching as long as teachers are valued in the way they currently are. The way we value people is by how much we pay them.”

“I think I've always had that orientation to try to understand the humanity behind people with whom I disagree.”

“Mass incarceration will have to be dismantled the same way it was constructed: piecemeal, incrementally and, above all, locally.”

“There is a certain amount you can learn from reading, but you also need to see and experience things.”

“There can be racism in a system even if a particular episode of injustice is not a manifestation of that racism. Every single thing in the criminal justice system is not a manifestation of racism, but many things are.”

“What if we strove for compassion, for mercy, for forgiveness? And what if we did this for everybody, including people who have harmed others?”

“The fundamental problem for the teaching profession is how undervalued it is and how underpaid teachers are.”

“It's not easy. I make snap judgments, too, and I start to write people off. And then I start to remind myself of how I'm constantly asking judges not to write people off. And so then I try to resist it.”

“One consequence of racism and segregation is that many American whites know little or nothing about the daily lives of African Americans. Black America's least-understood communities are those poor, hyper-segregated places we once called ghettos. These neighborhoods are not far away, but they might as well be on the moon.”