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

This book is such an important read and it should piss you off while reading it.

Alexander lays out well sourced proof showing that mass incarceration and the "WAR" on drugs is a modern day Jim Crow system.

She gives words to answer those who will deny this by pointing out the lack of explicitly race based language in the laws.

While she doesn't offer "the" solution she ends her book by truing to lay out idea for how to move forward and undo the New Jim Crow.

It should boggle the mind when you read the number of black men caught in the never ending cycle of the criminal justice system. It should make you angry when you read the statistics for the number of white men who commit the same crimes or worse and don't get brought into the system at any level. And it should break your heart and make you angry and spark you to action when you read how even the most minor of offenses impact the rest of the life of those labeled criminal.

Just some of the long term consequences: no longer able to get a job (check the box), a home (public housing doesn't allow anyone with a felony no matter the level of said felony), any kind of assistance (food, housing, medical), barred from jury duty, and no longer able to vote.

What we have in this country is a system of segregation that traps people of color in depressed financial areas where jobs and hope are in short supply, they are treated more harshly by the "war" on drugs and pay with their lives. And it is cyclical.

I had to step away and catch my breath while reading this one, I was so heartsick and angry. But it is a must read for anyone who cares about the injustice being heaped on one segment of our fellow humans, but especially if you are a white person. White people need to wake up and throw off the privilege that isn't earned but is given by an accident of birth with a specific skin color. These statistics should help slap us out of our place of lazy comfort and complacency.

As my dear friend Ann said "Silence is compliance."

(Finished January 12, 2018)