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

I knew when I was on my third hour of the introduction that Michelle Alexander was not messing around in The New Jim Crow. Exhaustively researched, this book drops like a megaton bomb into the quiet assumptions we make about ourselves and our "so-called" criminal justice system.

And the shocking thing for me at least, is that I already knew a lot of the pieces presented here. I went to law school. I clerked for two years for the Cook County States Attorney's office and I saw plea after plea go down in the felony trial division. But seeing all the pieces I had seen and experienced put together like this, it was like I had been seeing pieces of a puzzle for over a decade and now finally saw the picture that the pieces made.

And it's not pretty. The puzzle is a horribly crippling and unjust system that perpetuates poverty and violence in communities of color. It's a system that tags people with the word "felon" and then never lets them go. It is a lifelong stigma and legal leash on people who are arrested and convicted many times for doing the same thing other people are doing in the less-policed suburbs of America, or the dorm rooms of our higher learning institutions.

How do we move on from here? How do we dismantle the War on Drugs when so many private interests are now invested in its perpetuation? Because that is the next step. It has to be. Lives have been destroyed. Communities have been destroyed. And for what? So the haves can keep having and the have-nots can foot the bill. Because in the communities of the affluent, these will continue to be "mistakes" and in poor communities, they are crimes.

4/5 Stars.