There are millions of African-Americans now cycling in and out of prisons and jails or under correctional control. 'Today there are more African-Americans under correctional control - in prison or jail, on probation or parole - than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. On the number of blacks in the criminal justice system Supreme Court and is a graduate of Stanford Law School. She clerked for Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Michelle Alexander is an associate law professor at The Ohio State University. Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again, once you've been branded a felon.' ' shuttled into prisons, branded as criminals and felons, and then when they're released, they're relegated to a permanent second-class status, stripped of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement - like the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, the right to be free of legal discrimination and employment, and access to education and public benefits. typically for fairly minor, nonviolent crimes,' she tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. 'People are swept into the criminal justice system - particularly in poor communities of color - at very early ages. She says that although Jim Crow laws are now off the books, millions of blacks arrested for minor crimes remain marginalized and disfranchised, trapped by a criminal justice system that has forever branded them as felons and denied them basic rights and opportunities that would allow them to become productive, law-abiding citizens. In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes that many of the gains of the civil rights movement have been undermined by the mass incarceration of black Americans in the war on drugs. Things like literacy tests for voters and laws designed to prevent blacks from serving on juries were commonplace in nearly a dozen Southern states.

Under Jim Crow laws, black Americans were relegated to a subordinate status for decades. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The New Jim Crow Subtitle Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Author Michelle Alexander and Cornel West

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander