Is Mass Incarceration the New Jim Crow?
Michelle Alexander spent years as a civil rights lawyer, believing that the criminal justice system, like other American institutions, was “infected with a conscious and unconscious bias” against people of color. It wasn’t until her years working on racial profiling, drug enforcement and police brutality that she realized it was “a different beast entirely.” “I came to see that the mass incarceration of poor people of color has emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racial control, analogous to Jim Crow,” Alexander said to the crowd at …
