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A review by crybabybea
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
challenging
informative
sad
medium-paced
5.0
Life-changing. Michelle Alexander presents her ideas clearly and thoroughly backs them up with research and personal analyses. She was incredibly persuasive and completely changed the way I view things, and gave me so much new information along the way.
You should read this even if you already consider yourself anti-racist, or have read other anti-racist works. This targets a very specific issue, which is mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex, which Michelle Alexander argues is intrinsically tied to the anti-racism movement. Although I went into this book already thinking I was sympathetic toward criminals and the plight of people are targeted by mass incarceration, I learned so much and the author challenged views that I didn't even realize I held. She takes the old argument that "mass incarceration is racist because it targets poor/disadvantaged people, and because of our political system poor/disadvantaged people tend to be majorly people of color" and instead argues that mass incarceration is much more nefarious, and argues its connections to past racist eras such as slavery and Jim Crow. In the modern era, Alexander argues, criminals have become the new undercaste of society.
And, instead of simply saying that innocent people deserve to be released, she makes an incredibly empathetic plea for incarcerated people, even those that have done the "worst" crimes, and challenges the reader to examine the way they view criminals and what restorative justice really means.
I gotta admit I had a bit of an existential crisis in the last chapter, where the author really breaks down the different cogs that are part of the prison industrial complex, and laid out explicitly just how much work needs to be done to reverse the damage. In post-2020, with cop cities being built and police budgets being raised yet again, I realized that America is going the opposite way that it needs to be going to set things right.
You should read this even if you already consider yourself anti-racist, or have read other anti-racist works. This targets a very specific issue, which is mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex, which Michelle Alexander argues is intrinsically tied to the anti-racism movement. Although I went into this book already thinking I was sympathetic toward criminals and the plight of people are targeted by mass incarceration, I learned so much and the author challenged views that I didn't even realize I held. She takes the old argument that "mass incarceration is racist because it targets poor/disadvantaged people, and because of our political system poor/disadvantaged people tend to be majorly people of color" and instead argues that mass incarceration is much more nefarious, and argues its connections to past racist eras such as slavery and Jim Crow. In the modern era, Alexander argues, criminals have become the new undercaste of society.
And, instead of simply saying that innocent people deserve to be released, she makes an incredibly empathetic plea for incarcerated people, even those that have done the "worst" crimes, and challenges the reader to examine the way they view criminals and what restorative justice really means.
I gotta admit I had a bit of an existential crisis in the last chapter, where the author really breaks down the different cogs that are part of the prison industrial complex, and laid out explicitly just how much work needs to be done to reverse the damage. In post-2020, with cop cities being built and police budgets being raised yet again, I realized that America is going the opposite way that it needs to be going to set things right.
Content Warnings
Minor: Drug use, Racial slurs, Racism, Slavery, and Police brutality