Mass Incarceration: "The New Jim Crow"

In her new book "The New Jim Crow", Michelle Alexander argues vigorously and persuasively that "[w]e have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." Jim Crow and legal racial segregation has been replaced by mass incarceration as "a system of social control". She reviews American racial history from the colonies to the Clinton administration, delineating its transformation into the "war on drugs.

She offers an acute analysis of the effect of this mass incarceration upon former inmates "who will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives, denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits." Most provocatively, she reveals how both the move toward colorblindness and affirmative action may blur our vision of injustice: "most Americans know and don't know the truth about mass incarceration"—but her carefully researched, deeply engaging, and thoroughly readable book should change that.

Michelle currently holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University. Michelle served for several years as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, and subsequently directed the Civil Rights Clinics at Stanford Law School, where she was an associate professor. She is a former law clerk of Justice Harry Blackmun of the U. S. Supreme Court.

Posted in: Culture,mass incarceration,Michelle Alexander,Politics,racial caste in America,racial inequality,racial justice,The Emerald Quill,The New Jim Crow