The New Jim Crow

Everyone interested in social justice should read this.

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.

Repetitive at times but important content

This book is powerful and will shake up your perspective on racial justice, colorblindness, affirmative action, and the age of Obama. Hands down this is one of the best books on the subject of justice and the War on Drugs that I've read in a long time (Chasing the Scream, focusing on the War on Drugs and Just Mercy, focusing on the death penalty and incarceration, are other must reads).

Well-written with thorough research and compelling arguments. A must-read in my book.

Extremely well argued, the author paints a bleak (yet somewhat unsurprising) picture of the American justice system. I especially enjoyed her rationalization of ghetto culture and the potentially deleterious effects that affirmative action may have on African Americans in general. Her background as a lawyer is easily detectable in the rigor of the text. My single gripe is the infrequent appearance of typos. One of the best books I've read in the past several months. A must-read for anyone interested in race or justice.

I thought I was pretty aware of what this book was about, but there is so much in here! She paints a complete picture while acknowledging the limits of her work. I like the 10th anniversary update. And it ended on a hopeful note. I will be reading this again because I know there were things I missed.

4.5 stars. This book should be required reading for every single person in the USA.

This is an incredibly important book. It will open your eyes to the severity of the problem of mass incarceration, even if you thought you already knew something about. The book is filled with data to support its argument and makes a compelling case. There are some parts of the argument that I don't quite accept, yet, such as that affirmative action actually does more harm to justice reform than it does good for society. Alexander seems to be saying that affirmative action merely hides racial inequality and delays the upheaval that we need in order to really address the problem. I'm not convinced, but I'm willing to listen. Required reading for every American.

(Having said this, the book is highly repetitive and maybe should have been an essay instead of a book, but might not have made the splash it has.)

This is a sustained, book length argument that mass incarceration amounts to a new racial caste system comparable to Jim Crow, and that it has created an underclass of people, mostly black men, who are locked out of mainstream life for ever. Michelle Alexander writes about the history and workings of the War on Drugs, showing how police departments were given incentives to buy into it, how the courts made it difficult to bring accusations of racial bias on one hand and officers of the law were given extraordinary leeway to pursue charges on the other hand, leading to a system that targets poor blacks over other drug users. Given that someone with drug charges on their record can't receive public assistance, live in public housing, vote, or often convince anyone to give him/her a job, people end up forced out of society and often end up back in prison.

The book is thorough, well written, well documented (50 pages of notes). The closing chapter is especially powerful, where Alexander addresses such questions as whether affirmative action helps or harms, whether the election of Barack Obama, or the success of other prominent black citizens, means that racism is fading in the US, and what is needed to ensure that another racial caste system doesn't take the place of mass incarceration.

Fundamentally Flawed, But With Some Good Points And Multitudinous Evidence. Overall, Alexander's work has some good points - mostly when it concerns examining the United States' mass incarceration system as a whole. Its fundamental fatal flaw however its its central tenet- that this mass incarceration system is a system of racial, rather than class, control. But at least Alexander documents her case well, even when only citing evidence from a particular strain of thought that happens to agree with her own. Worth reading - highly recommended even - for the examination of the mass incarceration system and its effects as a whole , but severely hampered in its attempts to portray the system as “just another way to keep the black man down”. In that central tenet, it does its greatest disservice to showing the full monstrosity that is the US mass incarceration system.

This is very informative and eye opening; and an important book in our world. Even though it‘s a bit repetitive, I‘d recommend the 10th anniversary edition.

This should be required reading.

Honestly, this is just a must-read. It's SUCH an important and all-consuming topic that the ~mainstream media~ is just not reporting accurately. And Michelle Alexander is a GENIUS, honestly, her argument is so so clear and concise. It's well-documented and well-researched but easy to read/understand (if still difficult to think about).

Extremely well written, comprehensive and eye-opening look at mass incarceration in America. Alexander provides such a thorough argument, and details the limitations of it so well. It didn't feel repetitive or overargued, and was just the right length for a book like this. The specific examples were poignant and underscored the point of the book well.

I was entirely prepared to give this book five stars but she totally lost me with the pitch to give up (??) affirmative action near the end. I never really got the crux of her argument there so it's possible I just entirely misunderstood it, but it felt way off base, especially on the heels of a section about how “color-blind” policies will never solve these problems.

Nah, I'm giving it five stars anyway.

Regardless of that concern this is a very, very important book and I would recommend literally everybody read it. It's even got a little dig at Joe Biden, who currently appears to be preparing to ride Obama's popularity to a Democratic nomination, when in fact he's been a big part of the problem for years and years.

She comes at the issue with a level head and does a very good job addressing a lot of counterarguments and proposed half-measures. In that evenhanded approach, she does have a bit where she concedes that society has mostly moved past overt racism, which already feels incredibly naïve in the era of Trump. But you can see where it came from.

Read this book. Even if you feel like you know, you probably don't know just the extent of the systemic injustice at play in the modern justice system and governmental structure. I thought I knew. I did know some things. But man. Read this.

The older I get, the more I find myself reading the acknowledgments at the end of books. At the end of The New Jim Crow, Alexander thanks her husband for reviewing her work, which is not exceptional in and of itself, but she notes that as a federal prosecutor, he disagrees with her assessment of the criminal justice system (she is a public defender). I find this very interesting, but also can see why they would differ on their opinions based on the ways they approach the law.

I wasn't alive yet for the start of the War on Drugs in the late '70s, but I remember the rhetoric as my parents described it: crack was everywhere, all the babies were addicted to crack, when I was born they were very worried that I was not going to be able to grow up and get married because everyone but me would be addicted to crack. It was not sound logic. And yet I can absolutely see how this was made into a nationwide panic that “required” heavy-handed solutions, and how we got to the place we are.

I just didn't realize the extent of how many people are swept into the prison system on massive charges for even first-time offenses of way less insidious drugs than crack, and how frequently people were convinced to plead guilty even if they were innocent, and how those systems resulted in millions of people who were unable to participate in society forever-after due to all the ways we as a country legally discriminate against felons (housing discrimination, welfare discrimination, employment discrimination, etc.).

And then you add the layer of what it means to be “criminal” on top of that, what “those people” look like, who and what neighborhoods get targeted by police for suspected drug use, and WOOF. It's so much. So so much.

Well-researched (EXTENSIVE notes at the end) and fascinating and horrifying, even if it did take me the better part of a month to read. The downside is that the “solution” to the problem of mass incarceration is the overhaul of like 17 systems to eliminate overt and covert racism and rethink how we talk about poverty (for black and white people), and figure out how to get people drug treatment when needed instead of criminalizing people. That even systems designed to be thought of as good (like the now-defunct affirmative action) were not designed to lift up ALL people so much as an exceptional few (rising tide lifting all boats rhetoric giving way in which most boats drown while a few are raised up).

It's giving me a lot to think about. Would recommend.

Buddy read with Jeananne, and I believe we're going to do Caste by Isabel Wilkerson next, which should segue perfectly from this.