The New Jim Crow

The book that recast the national argument over criminal justice by naming what it does. Alexander argues that mass incarceration functions as a system of racial control comparable to the segregation it followed, stripping millions of the vote and of full citizenship through a process that calls itself colorblind. The claim was contested and then absorbed into the center of the debate. The franchise question of the present, posed through the prison.

The legal scholar and civil rights litigator whose book recast the debate over American criminal justice. The New Jim Crow argues that mass incarceration functions as a system of racial control comparable to the segregation it followed, removing millions from the franchise and from full citizenship. The book moved from the academy to the center of national argument and stayed there.