THE NEW JIM CROW: MASS INCARCERATION IN THE AGE OF COLORBLINDNESS by Michelle Alexander

A nearly 600 percent rise in incarceration rates has characterized the past four decades 1 such that, today, more than two million Americans are incarcerated in local, state, or federal penitentiaries. 2 In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Stanford law professor Michelle Alexander posits that this dramatic rise in incarceration rates represents a backlash to the civil gains of black men. Indeed, mass incarceration, she argues, is “a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control” that has created a functionally identical “segregated, second-class citizenship” for black men (pp. 5, 21). While Alexander focuses on the racial dimension of mass incarceration, it is also fundamentally gendered. It is black men, almost exclusively, who are disproportionately imprisoned and, consequently, who are widely perceived by the public as more violent and criminal than other demographics. 3 In major American cities, up to eighty percent of black male youth have criminal records that will subject them to legal civil disenfranchisement for the rest of their adult lives: denial of access to employment, housing, public benefits, and the revocation of voting rights (p. 7). 4 Moreover, it is estimated that fully sixty-eight percent of the black males who were born in the late 1970s will be imprisoned at least once during their lives if they did not complete high school. 5 Indeed, more black men are under the control of the correctional system today than were enslaved in 1850 (p. 175). Even for a reader familiar with the disturbing trends of the American criminal justice system, this analysis is jarring. Yet, as Alexander point out, there is no broad-based movement to end or reform mass incarceration that approaches