“A specter is haunting post-racial America. As pundits trip over themselves to declare that racism is dead in the era of a black president, ever-increasing numbers of African Americans are imprisoned and condemned to second-class citizenship. In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New Press), legal scholar and former ACLU attorney Michelle Alexander examines the American criminal-justice system and its propensity for decimating black lives and communities. She argues that prisons — and the consequent stigmatizing of a permanent ‘criminal’ population — have created a ‘new racial caste system’ whose effects are stunningly similar to those of the Jim Crow era.” (03/16/10)