How can a nation that purports to be a democracy
tolerate having the largest incarcerated population
in the world?
Why do we have a system in which so many persons are in prison?
Why did this mass incarceration overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly
affect African Americans?
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The New Jim Crow makes a very provocative argument.
Mass incarceration is a political choice.
As a political choice, we should study
how and why that particular choice was made.
What I find most significant about this book
is it's the beginning of a conversation
about incarceration here in the United States.
It's a huge problem that we are only vaguely aware of,
and I think Michelle Alexander does
a really excellent job of showing us
not only the magnitude of the problem,
and exposing the problem, but also
giving us a history to understand
how the problem came to be.
For me, the most significant part of the book
is its moral relevance to the present.
And it's especially significant as a teaching tool
or instrument for a place like Brown,
where students and faculty are interrogating
the great moral, ethical, and intellectual questions
of the day.
There is likely no more pressing domestic issue
than the question of mass incarceration and the prison
industrial complex.
It's very, very important if you want
to understand it and conceptualize
some of the most prevalent social issues in America today.
One thing this book does bring up
is the way in which race and racism is really entrenched
in our society.
And I think that sometimes American society doesn't really
like to address race or the way in which racism
is very much like a fabric of who we are as a nation.
But it's definitely a topic that's worth exploring.
It sort of exclaims to the entire United States,
that things are not OK.
Just because Barack Obama was elected president in 2008
does not mean that we're in a post-racial society.
There are still many structural barriers specifically targeted
towards black and brown people.
If you think about structural racism as something
that is not just not liking somebody of a different color
but actually affecting their life opportunity--
to education, to help, to livelihood, to housing.
We think about those things.
Then I think we can make the argument that in 2015, we
are actually living in a more racist America than in 1955.
Mass incarceration has become so normalized,
so expected, so unquestioned, in a way, in American life,
that we have to turn a critical gaze on that and ask ourselves,
why is it taken for granted?
Why is it simply taken as a fact of our contemporary life
that we have such massive prison populations?
Any book that makes you pause, whether you agree with it
or not, is a book you must pay attention
to, either in disagreement, or in agreement,
or in partial agreement and partial disagreement.
This one book is not going to be the be-all, end-all
to understand the racial hierarchy,
racial stratification, or even persons
here in the United States.
I think a part of our goal as members
of an intellectual community isn't to take a book
like this is a given, but to think
about the range of positions around it
and to try to come to understand whether we've developed
the right analytical approach to critique
this object, this big, giant prison industrial system.