'The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness' by Michelle Alexander

The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander (4.0)

I believe this book has a handful of really important and surprising facts. That being said, it was painful to read and redundant. I found myself skimming sections that covered material already presented. The book could have been at least 30% shorter. The main body of the book concerns a credible argument for the reasoning behind and the implications of mass incarceration in the last 40 years. The author points to the ‘war on drugs’ and shows how it was funded and focused – regardless of the data – within inner cities and minority communities. One of the most important points made – is that this has been done even though drug use is shown to be equally distributed amongst all races. I don’t disagree with the state of affairs and the result, what I didn’t find as compelling was her argument that it is all due to an organized conspiracy. Like many horrible outcomes, I believe the abhorrent situation was due to expediency, power and unintended consequences of momentum. When a police station gets money for bringing in more drug offenders, it’s not hard to see why they’d go to a basketball court in Compton versus door to door in Glendale. The number of youths who might have drugs on them is the same, but they can reach more in one ‘bust’ and get less hassle from the parents (i.e. expediency and power). This book was published in 2012. While reading it, I kept wondering what the author felt about the more recent events such as the Black Lives Matter movement and the focus on the opioid epidemic in poor white communities. I give it 4 stars, as I believe everyone should read parts of this book.