The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Book – Non-Fiction. By Michelle Alexander. 2010. 290 pages.
A critical analysis of the role the justice system plays in the oppression of African Americans in the United States.

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Incarceration Rates in the U.S. from the Sentencing Project

State by State Map of Incarceration Rates by the Sentencing Project. Click to see full roll over version.

“Jarvious Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.” — from The New Jim Crow

In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. The New Jim Crow 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. [Publisher's description.]

A longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, Michelle Alexander was a 2005 Soros Justice Fellow. She holds a joint appointment at the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in Columbus, Ohio, where she lives. The New Jim Crowis her first book.

Published by The New Press.

ISBN: 9781595581037

Related Information

Watch interview with Michelle Alexander on C-SPAN’s The Washington Journal.

The New Jim Crow website.