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The Civil Rights Battle of the 21st Century The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander (The New Press, 290 pages, $27.95)
reviewed by Milton Moskowitz
IAM NOT ONE who normally subscribes to conspiracy theories but Michelle Alexander's new book offers such a compelling analysis of why so many African Americans are caged in prisons that I might change my mind. She argues, convincingly and wim lawyerly precision, that this mass incarceration represents a deliberate effort by white society to exercise social control over blacks - hence the "new Jim Crow."
The statistics alone are mind-numbing:
* Since 1982 the U.S. penal population has exploded from 300,000 to more than 2 million.
* The U.S. now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children; in the U.S., the rate is 750 per 100,000.
* The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.
* In Washington, D.C, three out of every four young black men can expect to serve time in prison. "Similar rates of incarceration can be found in black communities across America."
* One in three young African-American men is currently "under control of the criminal justice system - in prison, in jail, on probation or on parole."
* More than 700,000 people are employed today as prison guards, administrators and other jobs in the criminal justice system.
Alexander traces this explosion of incarceration to the War on Drugs unleashed by the...