A review by chan_fry
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

4.0

There was a little weirdness in reading this 10 years too late — after countless journalists and activists have picked up on these themes and used the same language, all of which I’ve been exposed to by now. But the book is still powerful. If not exhaustive, it does cover plenty of ground and is full of easily-checkable citations.

The central idea is that mass incarceration is the current system of racial social control, replacing Jim Crow (which replaced slavery). She makes the case that this one is even more insidious because it is couched in race-neutral legal terms — making it far more difficult to convince bystanders of its inherent racist nature.

(I have published a longer review on my website.)