Book Review – The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
When Michelle Alexander took a job working on racial issues in the criminal justice system, she expected to find the same problems with racial bias that afflict all institutions of our society. Instead, she found a large scale, intentionally created, ostensibly race-neutral (“colorblind”) system of racialized social control reaching deep into the fabric of African-American life. What Alexander found shocked her. As I read her book, it shocked me. The New Jim Crow (The New Press, $19.95, 261 pages) should shock any reader…