The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Ratings107
Average rating4.5
A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller--"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education--with a new preface by the author Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.
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Phenomenal and a foundational work for the current era of activism around criminal justice reform and racial inequality. If some of the history or analysis here seems basic/obvious/whatever, it's because this book changed the conversation about these issues. I'm ashamed I hadn't read it until just now, especially since I'm a defense attorney and this is the environment that I work in every day. This book is crucial and so important to understanding where we are and how we got here. If possible, read the 10th anniversary edition, which has an updated foreword from the author about developments since the original publication.
The content in here is sooo good, but the writing style is so repetetive! I feel like I was reading the same thing over and over and over. This could have been a long essay in the Atlantic.
Two things: First off, I've already read “Just Mercy”, so perhaps I was more primed to believe the stuff in here, so the repetition was even more annoying. Also, I had to read this on my iPad for a book club because it's currently sold out everywhere, and I hate reading on the iPad so it's possible I was more annoyed than I should have been.
