The New Jim Crow: Race and Mass Incarceration

Just saw that this is out It looks worth the read. We don't talk enough about racism and the prison industrial complex here - you'd think the only racism we have in Arizona is Anglo against Latino ("citizen" v. "migrant" are the Southwest code words). We have huge racial disparities in AZ prisons, and pretty much anyone here who isn't Anglo is highly suspect for something criminal. 

It's time we get our racism out on the table and expose it to the daylight. It should come out in the House Committee on Sentencing - I don't rember that being mentioned at all when I was in the meeting. Maybe this is another book we should recommend to legislators...if anyone picks it up, let us know what you think.

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"The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness"

Jarvious Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole. —FROM THE NEW JIM CROW

As the United States celebrates the nation’s “triumph over race” with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or have been labeled felons for life.  Although Jim Crow laws have been wiped off the books, an astounding percentage of the African American community remains trapped in a subordinate status — much like their grandparents before them.

In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it.  Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness.  The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community — and all of us — to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.

A longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, Michelle Alexander was a 2005 Soros Justice Fellow. She holds a joint appointment at the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in Columbus, Ohio, where she lives. The New Jim Crow is her first book.

Pub Date: Fall 2009
Format: hardcover
Trim: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 304 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59558-103-7
The New Press