Will I love The New Jim Crow?

This is the book that forced me to rethink how deeply race and criminal punishment are intertwined in America.

I had already spent years representing innocent people when I first read it, but Michelle Alexander still managed to make me uncomfortable in the best possible way. I remember constantly putting the book down just to process what I had read. What I admire most is that it doesn’t rely on outrage alone. It connects history, politics, policing, and incarceration in a way that made me see patterns I had previously viewed as isolated failures.

Few books have changed national conversations… show more.

The fact that African-American men are funneled through the justice system at rates that dwarf every other demographic does not reflect a flaw in the system. Rather, it is the system, functioning as designed. With that revolutionary thesis, Michelle Alexander upended everything I thought I understood about race and crime. 

In this ground-breaking volume, she dared me to see what was right before my eyes all the time: not simply that criminal justice in this country is deeply unfair but rather that it functions as a way of re-imposing upon black men a defacto Jim Crow sixty years after the… show more.

I knew Michelle when she was teaching at Stanford University before she wrote this book, but I didn’t know then how much of the work she’d done. Her book is so profound that when I first read it, I was in Vegas on vacation, and I couldn’t get out of the room because I was so deep into reading her book. I couldn’t get to the great food or the penny slots because she was putting together all the pieces I had read about or heard discussed in different places, and she built a picture of the system of oppression… show more.

First released in 2010, Alexander’s seminal book on racial justice still impacts new generations of social activists. Her startling revelations—like the fact that there are more Black men and women under correctional control (either in jail or prison or under supervision by parole or probation departments) than were enslaved in the 1800s—are difficult to reckon with but important to consider.

The book was written after the election of America’s first Black president, Barack Obama when the idea of “colorblindness” was gaining popularity. However, as Alexander points out, the elevation of a single individual did not wipe out the extreme racial… show more.

I found Michelle Alexander’s book a potent reminder that the past is never really past, and that older practices of racial subjugation and use of the criminal law against minorities can be repurposed in later eras to serve the same or related ends.

The book raises the question of whether Jim Crow has really ended in all institutions in American society.

Michelle Alexander doesn’t need another recommendation for her book, but we’ll do it anyway because it’s that good!

We love books that amp us up and make us feel smarter after we’ve read the last page. Like the wool has been uncovered from our eyes, we would argue it may be one of the best books about civil rights, but since we haven’t read them all yet, we’ll lean on how well-written, alarming, and inspiring it is.

Even though we thought we knew a little about a lot of things, this book showed us how much more there is to… show more.

I thought I knew a decent amount about mass incarceration, but this book showed me just how much I didn’t know. It also deepened my commitment to fighting for anti-racist laws and enhanced my longstanding interest in defending the rights of incarcerated people. The New Jim Crow inspired me to read and write more about criminal justice issues and awakened my interest in prison abolition and restorative justice. I especially admire, and have sought to emulate, Alexander’s passion; it’s always impressive when an author’s justifiable anger spurs her to write a more extensive and rigorous book than someone who cared… show more.

This is the most popular introduction to mass incarceration. Alexander views mass incarceration through the lens of racial justice, focusing on how locking up millions of people, a disproportionate number of whom are Black, amounts to a new system of racial segregation. The New Jim Crow has been a catalyst for understanding and activism for thousands of people across the country and has spent several years on the New York Times bestseller list. 

Michelle Alexander launched her book with the ringing endorsement of a mutual friend of us both, Eva Paterson, the Executive Director of the Equal Justice Society. Both of them are civil rights lawyers whom I greatly admire for their extraordinary accomplishments. Alexander’s bestseller has been hugely influential in opening eyes to the deplorable racial disparity in incarceration rates in the United States and in galvanizing ongoing efforts to effect meaningful reforms.

The New Jim Crow is essentially a beginner's guide to the Criminal Industrial Complex. The first time I read it I was still in prison. And let me tell you, it was an infuriating experience. I was sitting in a cell being told everything that had led me, on a societal level, to exactly where I was in that moment. It showed me, in plain terms, everything that would be stacked against me if I ever got released. But it also gave me a certain freedom to understand how to escape the criminal justice system’s traps when I got out.… show more.