Join a conversation with Edisa Weeks, Artist-Choreographer-Scholar-in-Residence at The New School; William Evans, The Director of the Institute for Transformative Mentoring at the New School; and James Forman Jr. Professor of Law at Yale University and former Public Defender in Washington DC.
The anthology Dismantling Mass Incarceration asks: what will it take to make our approaches to crime, harm and safety more humane? What can people who work within the system do to make their agencies more just? And most of all, what can ordinary people do to imagine and build structures that will truly make us all safer?
MAKING LIBERTY discusses what can be done to build a caring and liberatory culture, society and nation; and what is needed to enact change.
Be a part of the conversation, visioning, and change making.
MAKING LIBERTY includes the gifting of 30 copies of the following books to the New School community:
Liberty \ For All an artisanal accordion booklet by Edisa Weeks (2025)
One side has reflections from Roots Party gatherings about what liberty represents and the other side contains images from 3 RITES Liberty performances, which exam the origins of our biases and bigotry and the foundation of Liberty in America.
Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change by Premal Dharia, James Forman Jr. and Maria Hawilo (2024)
Locking Up our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman Jr. (2017), winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Lillian Smith Book Award
Choreographer, educator, and director of DELIRIOUS Dances. Weeks creates multimedia interactive work, which explores issues in society such as how the media is used to manufacture consent; examining what is the promise of America; and why life, liberty and happiness were included as unalienable rights in the United States Declaration of Independence.
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Evans is the Director of the Institute for Transformative Mentoring at The New School, which is a dynamic training program focused on the development of credible messengers (formerly incarcerated men and women) working in the social services fields throughout New York City. These mentors help young people navigate community violence and avoid the criminal justice system. As a restorative justice practitioner Evans focus is to heal, develop, and lead systems impacted individuals on a journey to rebuild community, decrease violence, and reduce incarceration.
Evans is the founder of Neighborhood Benches, an organization increasing the presence of local neighborhood leadership to focus on decreasing youth violence and incarceration. Prior to Neighborhood Benches, Evans provided re-entry and counseling support through both ICAN on Rikers Island and ATI for returning citizens at the Fortune Society. During the development of Neighborhood Benches, Evans joined Public Allies and worked with the United Federation of Teachers’ United Community Schools as the Program & Grants Assistant. As a leader for Neighborhood Benches, he believes that by returning to his community to recruit individuals and help them understand the need for change, those individuals could have a great impact in implementing solutions and inspiring others.
Evans served on the advisory boards of Public Allies NY and PS x18 in the Bronx; and is currently a Board Member at New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, and a member of the Restorative Roots Collaborative. William and the RRC members are researching the impacts of historical trauma on restorative justice practices, especially the ways in which these traumas enhance and impede their work with participants. Evans is a graduate of ITM and a 2019 Echoing Green Fellow. He received his master’s degree in nonprofit management from Fordham University and has started his doctoral journey.
Evans is the Director of the Institute for Transformative Mentoring at The New School, which is a dynamic training program focused on the development of credible messengers (formerly incarcerated men and women) working in the social services fields throughout New York City. These mentors help young people navigate community violence and avoid the criminal justice system. As a restorative justice practitioner Evans focus is to heal, develop, and lead systems impacted individuals on a journey to rebuild community, decrease violence, and reduce incarceration.
Evans is the founder of Neighborhood Benches, an organization increasing the presence of local neighborhood leadership to focus on decreasing youth violence and incarceration. Prior to Neighborhood Benches, Evans provided re-entry and counseling support through both ICAN on Rikers Island and ATI for returning citizens at the Fortune Society. During the development of Neighborhood Benches, Evans joined Public Allies and worked with the United Federation of Teachers’ United Community Schools as the Program & Grants Assistant. As a leader for Neighborhood Benches, he believes that by returning to his community to recruit individuals and help them understand the need for change, those individuals could have a great impact in implementing solutions and inspiring others.
Evans served on the advisory boards of Public Allies NY and PS x18 in the Bronx; and is currently a Board Member at New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, and a member of the Restorative Roots Collaborative. William and the RRC members are researching the impacts of historical trauma on restorative justice practices, especially the ways in which these traumas enhance and impede their work with participants. Evans is a graduate of ITM and a 2019 Echoing Green Fellow. He received his master’s degree in nonprofit management from Fordham University and has started his doctoral journey.
James Forman Jr. is the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He 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, Professor Forman 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.” The Maya Angelou leadership team dreams of a world in which no person is behind bars; in the meantime, they believe that everyone — including those incarcerated — deserve a high-quality education.
Professor 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, over 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.
