“ 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.” — l ani guinier, professor at Harvard Law School and author of 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 eighteenth century it was the transatlantic slave trade, in the nineteenth century it was slavery, in the twentieth 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, professor of economics at Brown University and author of Race, Incarceration, and American Values “ After readingThe 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 the 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 United States constitutes a racial caste system. Her analysis reflects the passion of an advocate and the intellect of a scholar.” — marc mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project and the author of Race to Incarcerate
The New Jim Crow
A longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, michelle alexander won a 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship and now 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. Alexander 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. Alexander is a former law clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court and has appeared as a commentator on CNN, MSNBC, and NPR. The New Jim Crow is her first book.
michelle alexander
advance praise for the new jim crow
criminal justice/law
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
THE NEW PRESS
www.thenewpress.com
Jacket photograph courtesy istock Author photograph by the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law Jacket design by Pollen, New York THE NEW PRESS
michelle alexander
$ 2 7. 9 5 U. S.
“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
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 labeled felons for life. Jim Crow laws were wiped off the books decades ago, but today an astounding percentage of the African American community is warehoused in prisons or trapped in a permanent, second-class status—much like their grandparents before them, who lived under an explicit system of control. In this stunning and incisive critique, civil rights lawyer-turned-legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control. In the current era, it is no longer permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. The old forms of discrimination—discrimination in employment, housing, education, and public benefits, denial of the right to vote, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal once you’re labeled a felon. Alexander 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.