When Yale law professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Forman Jr. got to law school, he knew he wanted to be a civil rights lawyer, but he wasn’t aware that pursuit would take him down the criminal justice reform career track.

At the time, premier civil rights organizations in the 1990s like the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund had subject matter areas in employment, school desegregation, housing, voting rights and the death penalty, but no overall focus on criminal justice, Forman said. During an internship at the Legal Defense Fund in his first summer at Yale Law, Forman began to realize some of the injustices being highlighted in death penalty cases were true more broadly across the criminal justice system. With that knowledge, he pursued post-law school work as a public defender.