Recommendations from our site
“Michelle Alexander shows how you can change a system politically and legally, but without ever destroying its social roots. Racial domination in the United States has always found a way of coming back to life, despite legal changes… It is probably the most important book on prisons since Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in 1975. It proves that you can win the judicial battle, change the legal order and still lose the political one.” Read more...
“The new Jim Crow that Michelle Alexander is talking about is mass incarceration.” Read more...
Peter Temin on An Economic Historian’s Favourite Books
Peter Temin, Economist
“Today, according to Alexander, although we have a purportedly colourblind society, the same thing is happening. But today it is done by imposing differentiated citizenship rights on convicted felons.” Read more...
The best books on Race and the Law
Kenneth W. Mack, Historian
The New Jim Crow, by civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander, was an incredibly important book, first published in 2010. There’s now a 10th anniversary edition, with (according to the publisher, The New Press) “a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.”
Our most recommended books
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The Interesting Narrative
by Olaudah Equiano -
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander -
Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery
by Adam Hochschild -
Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
by Mae M. Ngai -
Cane
by Jean Toomer -
American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
by Edmund S Morgan
