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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. By Michelle Alexander. (New York: New Press, 2010. xiv, 290 pp. $27.95, isbn 978-1-59558-103-7.)
In the latter third of the twentieth century, large-scale incarceration became a defining pillar of American exceptionalism, a domestic counterpart to the country's unrivaled military establishment. With 2.3 million persons in prison, about 1 percent of the adult population, the United States manages the biggest penal system in the world, both in aggregate and per capita - the most extensive punishment apparatus ever assembled by a democratic government.
The legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues in her cogent and provocative book that there is one preeminent social formation behind the emergence of this carcerai colossus: racism. Although the civil rights movement has culminated in the putatively colorblind "Age of Obama," she contends that criminal justice institutions have coalesced into...