Michelle Alexander is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University and holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Formerly the director of the ACLU’s Racial Justice Project in Northern California, Alexander served as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun. Cornel West is the Class of 1943 University Professor, emeritus, at Princeton University and is currently Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary.
Explosive debut
alarming, provocative and convincing.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Michelle Alexander’s brave and bold new book paints a haunting
picture in which dreary felon garb, post-prison joblessness, and
loss of voting rights now do the stigmatizing work once done by
colored-only water fountains and legally segregated schools. With
dazzling candor, Alexander argues that we all pay the cost of the
new Jim Crow.
Lani Guinier, professor at Harvard Law School and author of Lift
Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of
Social Justice and The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting
Power, Transforming Democracy
For every century there is a crisis in our democracy, the response
to which defines how future generations view those who were alive
at the time. In the 18th century it was the transatlantic slave
trade, in the 19th century it was slavery, in the 20th century it
was Jim Crow. Today it is mass incarceration. Alexander's book
offers a timely and original framework for understanding mass
incarceration, its roots to Jim Crow, our modern caste system, and
what must be done to eliminate it. This book is a call to
action.”
Benjamin Todd Jealous, President and CEO, NAACP
With imprisonment now the principal instrument of our social
policy directed toward poorly educated black men, Michelle
Alexander argues convincingly that the huge racial disparity of
punishment in America is not the mere result of neutral state
action. She sees the rise of mass incarceration as opening up a new
front in the historic struggle for racial justice. And, she’s
right. If you care about justice in America, you need to read this
book!”
Glenn C. Loury, economist at Brown University and author of The
Anatomy of Racial Inequality and Race, Incarceration and American
Values
After reading The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander's stunning work
of scholarship, one gains the terrible realization that, for people
of color, the American criminal justice system resembles the Soviet
Union's gulag---the latter punished ideas, the former punishes a
condition.”
David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer-prize winning historian at NYU and
author of W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American
Century, 1919-1963
"We need to pay attention to Michelle Alexander's contention that
mass imprisonment in the U.S. constitutes a racial caste system.
Her analysis reflects the passion of an advocate and the intellect
of a scholar."
Marc Mauer, Executive Director, The Sentencing Project, author of
Race to Incarcerate
A powerful analysis of why and how mass incarceration is happening
in America, The New Jim Crow should be required reading for anyone
working for real change in the criminal justice system.”
Ronald E. Hampton, Executive Director, National Black Police
Association
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