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

The New Jim Crow is a groundbreaking account of how the mass incarceration of African Americans has created a racial caste system in the United States that operates as a legalized system of discrimination, serving to deny basic civil and human rights to millions of people. Michelle Alexander argues that the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control that relegates millions to a permanent second-class status, much like the Jim Crow laws that segregationists imposed a century ago.