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    The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 10th Anniversary Edition
    The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 10th Anniversary Edition
    The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 10th Anniversary Edition
    Audiobook16 hours

    The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 10th Anniversary Edition

    Written by Michelle Alexander

    Narrated by Karen Chilton

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
    Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been
    adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of
    the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the
    winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has
    spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

    Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice
    reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander’s unforgettable
    argument that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned
    it.” As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is “undoubtedly the most important book
    published in this century about the U.S.”

    Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a
    tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the
    impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.

    Editor's Note

    Leading a revolution…

    Alexander makes her case that the War on Drugs created a new racial caste system in a highly readable and compelling way. This provocative work has shifted how we think about civil rights and prison reform.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateApr 13, 2012
    ISBN9781464048258
    Author

    Michelle Alexander

    Michelle Alexander is the author of the bestselling The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press). She lives in Ohio.

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    Reviews for The New Jim Crow

    4.5/5

    1,044 ratings82 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I’m a bit late to the party in reading this, but I am so glad I did. It’s unbelievably eye opening. By and large it is well argued, and good evidence is given. One downside to listening to a book like this instead of reading it, is I can’t see whether or not there are footnotes citing her sources, since I would like to look further into some of them.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Guys please stop spoiling the book! It is a great book but people want to read the book not have someone spoil it!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This was a very enlightening book. The reason I didn't give this book 5 starts was because the writing itself was often rather dense, and sometimes it was a bit repetitive. I think the repetitiveness was perhaps necessary to really drive home the points the author was trying to make as they can be difficult concepts to assimilate. I think every American should read this book.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I read this book for my PHIL 122 class (Social Justice).This was an incredibly insightful book, however, I did have some issues with it. She presented many problems but fell short on how to exactly fix them, start a movement, etc. The last chapter didn't do a great job at expanding on how to move forward. But she does a great job at explaining how complicated the problem is. So all in all, a worthwhile read.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      59. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Audio) by Michelle Alexander, read by Karen Chilton (2010, 13 hrs 16 mins, 336 pages in Paperback, Listened October 6-16)I thought this would be a disturbing look a racism, but nothing new. But there were some very positive reviews in CR, so I was happy to give it a try when it showed up in my library's audio collection. It's a much more important book than I suspected. It's a major work, and has led me to shift the context of how I view the drug war and modern hidden racism. I had no idea the stuff, clearly presented here, was going on. And I'm kind of stunned that this is such a poorly covered topic. The book is wow. It's a book which you simply can't understand how important it is until you have actually read it and Michelle Alexander has a chance to fully lay this all out. Among the topics here are how the drug war focuses almost entirely on poor black neighborhoods, where up to 80% of young black males in some major cities have, at least, a police record, if not an arrest and conviction. Of how the drug war essentially ignores drug issues in white middle class suburbs, where young kids can stumble through their own experiences, while the same types of things in poor black neighborhoods lead to convictions and long jail sentences. Of the cost of a conviction, which leads to a life of limited employment opportunities, legal discrimination (because who likes a felon?) and therefore to more crime and more drug enforcement. And finally how that legal discrimination against criminals, who are disproportionately black or Latino, has become the current and painfully effective form of racism.I had no idea that when a politician said he or she wanted to be tough on crime, this was understood by many to be a coded racism. Started under Reagan, the the two president most responsible for ramping up the drug war were Clinton and Obama...Some of the worst parts are of the failures in police policy. How arrests are actually causing crime. And how law enforcement decisions set from higher up at the federal level set in motions policies such that police on the ground don't need to be consciously racist to, in effect, be racist. There is no racist terminology anywhere. And then there is the US Supreme court which has undermined every legal option to fight against this kind of racism. One case was lost where prosecution records were requested to investigate possible racist policy. If I understood this correctly, the records (why are they not public anyway) were withheld because the requester had no data to support their suspicions of racism. Go figure the logic. Any change in policy will have to come outside the legal system...It's strange how obvious this all seems after reading it. I have to wonder why I didn't fully appreciate this before.I listened on audio, read very nicely by Karen Chilton.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      She brought receipts. I now understand how the war on drugs became a way to control black people and other people of color. The way this happened in the US was exploitation (slavery), to subjugation (Jim Crow), to marginalization (using the drug war to imprison more black peoples than any other race), to stigmatization (if you have a felony record, you won’t be able to find legal employment to take care of yourself and a family), to ethnic cleansing and genocide.

      There’s a problem with the drug laws in the inconsistency in its enforcement, but also, many people have a felony record for just a few marijuana joints; black people do not commit more crime or use more drugs than white people - they’re just more likely to get caught because of increased policing in those neighborhoods.
    • 5/5
      Must read for anyone and everyone interested in helping dismantle the US’s oppressive prison industrial complex. Each chapter is filled with more and more horrendous examples of how incredibly flawed our justice system is. This book will make you or keep you fired up in the pursuit of justice.
    • 5/5
      Arguably one of the most important books of the 21st century. A must read for anyone interested in social policy, public health, or the betterment and restructuring of society to better serve us all and right the wrongs of our current system.
    • 5/5
      Very in-depth and mind blowing! We have so much work to do to dismantle mass incarceration!
    • 5/5
      An important piece of insight into the lives of African Americans
    • 5/5
      Great book and still fighting for todays times. Discussed the history on racial tensions in American from a social economic standpoint and not just a racist point of view.
    • 4/5
      Thank you Bill Gates for refering me to this read!
    • 4/5
      This has a lot of good statistics and the author argues her case convincingly. It was particularly interesting for me to see how (intentionally) vague rules can be used as a political tool in America, in this case to allow unconscious racial biases to be brought to the forefront.
    • 5/5
      If you're thinking, "Oh, I don't need to read this, I already know about this." YOU ARE SUPER WRONG. I thought, when I saw this book, "What's the point? I already agree with it. What more do I need to know?"

      That was some dumbass hubris on my part. I had very little idea of the full depth of the problem.

      This book should be required reading in high schools across the country. First, because Alexander does a fantastic job walking you through the history and legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and now Mass Incarceration (a much better job than any text I was given to read in high school). I learned so much, and that new knowledge has encouraged me to keep reading, because clearly I know so little!

      Second, the prose and structure of the argument are phenomenal. Alexander expresses herself in a clear, logical way, building on her argument chapter by chapter. It's moving, but also logically persuasive, like all good rhetoric should be. So not only is this book full of valuable historical information, it's a great example of a well written argument.

      Alexander also does a good thing in limiting her discussion, and explaining why she limits it. The book mostly concerns Black men who have been imprisoned due to alleged drug charges. She explains why she limits her scope, and makes it clear that she hopes other people expand on the discussion (which people have since this book was published). Even with her one focused thesis, the problem still spans all of American history and our whole political system, so I think it was a good idea for her to limit the book's discussion to mostly Black men who have been labeled drug criminals.

      Third, even though terms like "mass incarceration" are fairly well known now, I did not understand the breadth and depth of the problem. It's not simply a matter of racial profiling. It's not just police brutality. There is so much more messed up with our justice system. When I started reading this book, I was saying, "Defund the police." Now I'm saying, "Abolish the police."

      Now, the biggest lesson I've learned here is that I know so little, and I'm eager to keep reading, especially the books Alexander mentions in her updated prologue.

      But if you have been putting off reading this book because you think you already know the information it contains, stop! Read it! Right away!

      You'll learn a lot, be forced to think critically, and come away a better informed citizen, not to mention you'll understand yourself, by understanding your social context, better.
    • 5/5
      Thoroughly researched and persuasively argued. Very well narrated. Essential reading/listening.
    • 5/5
      This book is incredible and indispensable, but the more I listen the more it seems this version of the audiobook is out of order :(
    • 5/5
      It was provokingly good read! Powerful and enlightening. Highly recommended
    • 5/5
      Excellent book, completely changed how I think about the criminal justice system and caste in America. A must read for racial justice advocates.
    • 3/5
      Was good to hear this perspective...thought provoking, but too repetitive.
    • 5/5
      Reading this books during the climate we are currently in was much needed. It put so many things into perspective in regards to the war on drugs and our current imprisonment system and how these systems were used to target people of color for so many years. Michelle Alexander does a great job of supporting her book with an insurmountable amount of data and research! This was such a great book!
    • 4/5
      ... but if your strategy for racial justice involves waiting for whites to be fair, history suggests it will be a long wait.”

      How do I review this book? How do I even begin to talk about how much this book affected me or how much I learnt from it? I wish I had a physical copy so that I could write in its pages, in the margins, and fill all its blank spaces.

      Michelle Alexander expertly and deftly unpacks a new kind of racism in this book. It's subversive, subconscious and involuntary, reinforced with images of young black men in the media, all of their portrayals fitting a certain stereotype. She talks about how a certain demographic (of young black men) are systematically, consistently and meticulously searched, arrested, tried and convicted of minor drug offences, and put in jail for such lengthy terms that they would shock any other first world country.

      She discusses all the subtle ways in which the American judicial system and its processes are geared against anyone who isn't a young white man, and how all these attitudes and often outlandish laws can be traced back to political or social movements.

      The author can be quite radical and sometimes says I don't necessarily agree with, but she has found facts and data when there reportedly was none, and she knows her shit.

      Alexander admits to the fact that she only had time in her study to talk about young black men, that she had no space to talk about young latino men or young black women or any other person of colour in the book. (Though she urges the reader to write these books and make the information known.) She insists that she painted the study with a broad brush, a time to merely reflect, with few ideas or solutions.

      ... the audiobook is 13 hours long. The book is 300 pages. So despite the fact that she only spoke about young black men, who were often first-time offenders, and had no time to talk about women in the justice system, or latinos or other people of colour but did not run out of things to talk about is astonishing.

      I will say that this book is really dense, and while it is sometimes a lot to take in, I learnt a lot.

      Whether you agree with Alexander's ideas or not, I think this is an important book for anyone to read
    • 3/5
      So many good facts...but little great conclusions. Fairly subjective work mostly in line with the author’s ideology.
    • 5/5
      Yeah, I thought I knew what this was going to be but it was more. If you’ve never thought about mass incarceration, the war on drugs, and the racist roots and impact of each, you should read this.
      If you have already done significant work educating yourself on these topics, I still recommend the book, because the author goes into such detail and makes illuminating connections between different aspects.
    • 5/5
      A - thorough, incisive and revealing book that all black people should read. It should be a must read for all inner city school kids. This book is not just mind-blowing, it is terrifically written and supported with facts and figures to buttress every points made. An instant classic that will be cited for generations to come. I had goosebumps reading it and I will definitely purchase it as gifts for my friends, little cousins and younger stars in high school. Thanks Michelle.
    • 5/5
      Amazing, inspiring, full of good information. I fully recommend this book
    • 3/5
      A great introduction to the violences of mass incarceration, especially for liberals, but some of the conclusions Alexander comes to are distressingly centrist at best.
    • 5/5
      Written a decade ago and so timely. Even as the world is on fire today. We need to hear where we have been to know where we should go. This book is a great start if you need one.
    • 5/5
      Great book! I’ve learn so much about mass incarceration and who it really affects!
    • 5/5
      Read this book. Read this book. Read this book. Read this book.
    • 5/5
      This book is so informative, if you consider yourself a human rights advocate, this is a must read!