The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander · 24 Nov 2011 · 467pp · 116,902 words
metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system. Mass incarceration—not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement—is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement. The popular
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racialized social control purports to be colorblind, it creates and maintains racial hierarchy much as earlier systems of control did. Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely
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in the political, social, and legal context over time. Ultimately, I believe that the similarities between these systems of control overwhelm the differences and that mass incarceration, like its predecessors, has been largely immunized from legal challenge. If this claim is substantially correct, the implications for racial justice advocacy are profound. With
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bottom of the American totem pole. This pattern, dating back to slavery, has birthed yet another racial caste system in the United States: mass incarceration. The structure of mass incarceration is described in some detail in chapter 2, with a focus on the War on Drugs. Few legal rules meaningfully constrain the police in
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legal, social, and economic boundary between “us” and “them.” Chapter 5 also explores some of the differences among slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration, most significantly the fact that mass incarceration is designed to warehouse a population deemed disposable—unnecessary to the functioning of the new global economy—while earlier systems of control were
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system without violating the law or the new limits of acceptable political discourse, by demanding “law and order” rather than “segregation forever.” The Birth of Mass Incarceration The rhetoric of “law and order” was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize
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shift in racial attitudes. The margin of support for colorblind norms has only increased since then. This dramatically changed racial climate has led defenders of mass incarceration to insist that our criminal justice system, whatever its past sins, is now largely fair and nondiscriminatory. They point to violent crime rates in
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studies indicate that the biggest problem the black community may face today is not “shamelessness” but rather the severe isolation, distrust, and alienation created by mass incarceration. During Jim Crow, blacks were severely stigmatized and segregated on the basis of race, but in their own communities they could find support, solidarity, acceptance
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to tell friends and relatives and kept the family’s suffering private. Constance is not alone. Eerie Silence David Braman’s ethnographic research shows that mass incarceration, far from reducing the stigma associated with criminality, actually creates a deep silence in communities of color, one rooted in shame. Imprisonment is considered
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along with it.”76 Nowhere is that observation more relevant in American society today than in an analysis of the culture of mass incarceration. Descriptions of the silence that hovers over mass incarceration are rare because people—whether they are social scientists, judges, politicians, or reporters—are usually more interested in speech, acts,
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It is important to keep in mind, though, that many hip-hop artists today do not embrace and perpetuate the worst racial stereotypes associated with mass incarceration. Artists like Common, for example, articulate a sharp critique of American politics and culture and reject the misogyny and violence preached by gangsta rappers.
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trying to fight crime.” That response is predictable because most people assume that racism, and racial systems generally, are fundamentally a function of attitudes. Because mass incarceration is officially colorblind, it seems inconceivable that the system could function much like a racial caste system. The widespread and mistaken belief that racial animus
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for it to operate (together with other laws, institutions, and practices) to trap them at the bottom of a racial hierarchy. In the system of mass incarceration, a wide variety of laws, institutions, and practices—ranging from racial profiling to biased sentencing policies, political disenfranchisement, and legalized employment discrimination—trap African Americans
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reform in exchange for an apparent effort to put blacks back “in their place.”29 Legalized discrimination. The most obvious parallel between Jim Crow and mass incarceration is legalized discrimination. During Black History Month, Americans congratulate themselves for having put an end to discrimination against African Americans in employment, housing, public
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black men in cities across the United States are once again subject to legalized discrimination effectively barring them from full integration into mainstream, white society. Mass incarceration has nullified many of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, putting millions of black men back in a position reminiscent of Jim Crow.
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in the population base for calculating Congressional seats and electoral votes, even though they could not vote. Exclusion from juries. Another clear parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is the systematic exclusion of blacks from juries. One hallmark of the Jim Crow era was all-white juries trying black defendants
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making it easier for whites to maintain racial stereotypes about black values and culture. It also made it easier to deny or ignore their suffering. Mass incarceration functions similarly. It achieves racial segregation by segregating prisoners—the majority of whom are black and brown—from mainstream society. Prisoners are kept behind bars
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law enforcement officials charged with enforcing them. The absence of overt racial hostility is a significant difference from Jim Crow, but it can be exaggerated. Mass incarceration, like Jim Crow, was born of racial opportunism—an effort by white elites to exploit the racial hostilities, resentments, and insecurities of poor and
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compassion and caring about race and racial groups) than racial hostility—a feature it actually shares with its predecessors. All racial caste systems, not just mass incarceration, have been supported by racial indifference. As noted earlier, many whites during the Jim Crow era sincerely believed that African Americans were intellectually and morally
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United States from a racial caste system based entirely on exploitation (slavery), to one based largely on subordination (Jim Crow), to one defined by marginalization (mass incarceration). While marginalization may sound far preferable to exploitation, it may prove to be even more dangerous. Extreme marginalization, as we have seen throughout world history
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. What follows is not a plan, but several questions and claims offered for serious consideration by those committed to racial justice and interested in dismantling mass incarceration. They are offered as conversation starters—food for thought, debate, and—I hope—collective action. Each is a challenge to conventional wisdom or traditional
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a few key principles stand out that can be briefly explored here. These principles are rooted in an understanding that any movement to end mass incarceration must deal with mass incarceration as a racial caste system, not as a system of crime control. This is not to say crime is unimportant; it is very
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claims based on the history of race discrimination in this country.” Adding to the temptation to avoid race is the fact that opportunities for challenging mass incarceration on purely race-neutral grounds have never been greater. With budgets busting, more than two dozen states have reduced or eliminated harsh mandatory minimum
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—that is, reform efforts that make institutions look good on the surface without the needed structural changes—have actually helped to facilitate the emergence of mass incarceration and interfered with the development of a more compassionate race consciousness. In earlier chapters, we have seen that throughout our nation’s history, poor
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crucial resources and energy away from dismantling the structures of racial inequality? The predictable response is that civil rights advocates are as committed to challenging mass incarceration and other forms of structural racism as they are to preserving affirmative action. But where is the evidence of this? Civil rights activists have created
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These stories “prove” that race is no longer relevant. Whereas black success stories undermined the logic of Jim Crow, they actually reinforce the system of mass incarceration. Mass incarceration depends for its legitimacy on the widespread belief that all those who appear trapped at the bottom actually chose their fate. Viewed from this perspective
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America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), 90. 34 Ibid., 91. 35 See Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (University of Chicago Press, 2007), 157; Steven Raphael, “Should Criminal History Records Be Universally Available?” (reaction essay) in Greg Pogarsky, “Criminal Records, Employment and
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University of Michigan Press, 2004), 219. 63 Ibid., 3, citing data from D.C. Department of Corrections (2000). 64 See Todd Clear, Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 121-48. 65 See, e.g., Steve Liss, No Place for Children: Voices from Juvenile
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bias in alcohol prohibition, as well as other drug wars. 16 Mary Pattillo, David F. Weiman, and Bruce Western, Imprisoning America: The Social Effect of Mass Incarceration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004), 2. 17 Paul Street, The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs, and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation
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America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice , ed. Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 77 Loïc Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration,” 53. 78 john a. powell, Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, personal communication, Jan. 2007. Chapter 6: The
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Crime Drop in America, ed. Alfred Blumstein and Joel Wallman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 97-129; and Todd R. Clear, Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 41-48. 28 See, e.g., Todd Clear, Imprisoning Communities, 3. 29 Jeffrey Reiman makes
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Civil Rights Act (1964); Title VI civil rights advocacy, future of; changing the culture of law enforcement; collective denial by civil rights advocates; dismantling the mass incarceration system; and flawed public consensus; grassroots activism by formerly incarcerated men and women; human rights paradigm/ approach; Obama presidency; poor and working-class whites; and
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research Cohen, Cathy Cohen, Stanley Cohen, William Cole, David Coley, Rebekah Levine colorblindness; and affirmative action; and black exceptionalism; and “interracial racial caste system,”; and mass incarceration; problem of flawed pursuit of; Reagan’s racialized campaign rhetoric; resisting temptation to ignore race in advocacy; and U.S. Constitution; and whites’ reluctance to
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; and prosecutors’ extraordinary discretion; and racially discriminatory sentencing; and Reagan’s drug war crime and “get tough” policies; black support for; and Clinton administration; and mass incarceration system; and white voters crime rates; crime reduction and incarceration rates; drug crime; and joblessness; violent crime “criminalblackman,” Criminology (journal) Davis, Angela J. death
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advocacy; and Obama; racial bias in sentencing Declaration of Independence deindustrialization Democratic Party denial, collective; “birdcage” metaphor and structural racism; by civil rights advocates; and mass incarceration of black men Denton, Nancy Diallo, Amadou disenfranchisement. See voting rights dogs, drug-sniffing Doing Time on the Outside (Braman) Douglas, Justice William O. Douglass
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drug use homelessness Housing and Urban Development (HUD) housing discrimination human rights approach Human Rights Watch Hurley, Ora Lee In re Gault (1967) incarceration. See mass incarceration system indentured servitude indifference, racial inner-city economic collapse Irving, Lawrence Jackson, Jesse Jefferson, Thomas “Jena 6,” Jim Crow system: birth of; black cooperation
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with; and Civil Rights Movement; death of; and Supreme Court; voting rights and disenfranchisement; and World War II, 36. See also mass incarceration and Jim Crow (parallels/differences) Johnson, Lyndon B. Johnson, Sheri Lynn Johnson, Willie Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education juries: and felon exclusion; and peremptory
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mandatory sentencing guidelines; use by Clinton/Obama; and voting rights; white middle class users; white/black student users Marshall, Prentiss Marshall, Stanley Marshall, Justice Thurgood mass incarceration and Jim Crow (parallels/ differences); and argument that race has always influenced the criminal justice system; black support for “get tough” policies on crime; collective
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stereotypes about black men/ fathers; Supreme Court’s pattern of responding to racial caste/claims of racial bias; the symbolic production of race; white victims mass incarceration system; and absence of black men/black fathers; arguments that race has always influenced the criminal justice system; collective denial of; and colorblindness; and crime
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Southern “Redemption” campaign; structural racism; systems of control/recurring periods of transition and uncertainty. See also drug-law enforcement and racial discrimination; mass incarceration and Jim Crow (parallels/differences); mass incarceration system; post-prison release; War on Drugs Racial Formation in the United States (Omi and Winant) Racial Justice Project of the ACLU racial
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pleas/ plea bargaining; legal services /legal representation; mandatory minimum sentencing; paramilitary raids and police SWAT teams; pretext stops; and racial discrimination; traffic stops. See also mass incarceration system; police/police departments and drug-law enforcement; post-prison release (ex-offenders) War on Poverty Washington, Booker T. Washington Post Watson, Tom We Won
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States by The New Press, New York, 2010 Distributed by Perseus Distribution LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Alexander, Michelle. The new Jim Crow : mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness / Michelle Alexander. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. eISBN : 978-1-595-58530-1 1. Criminal justice, Administration
If You See Them
by Vicki Sokolik · 23 Nov 2023 · 332pp · 104,544 words
.state.fl.us/Seal-and-Expunge-Process.aspx. 178 they would carry the stigma of being labeled a criminal: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 140–177. 178 the obstacles they already faced regarding employment, housing, and education would become
Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley
by Jacob Silverman · 9 Oct 2025 · 312pp · 103,645 words
what was described as a setback for the progressive prosecutor movement, which sought to undo the social, economic, and political damage wrought by decades of mass incarceration. The day after the Chesa Boud in11 recall, Sacks went on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show to celebrate his victory and denounce the Democrats
San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities
by Michael Shellenberger · 11 Oct 2021 · 572pp · 124,222 words
and black people, the disparity between white and Latino people is driven by Latinos tending to deal outdoors.21 Violence, not stricter drug sentences, drove mass incarceration. New York is proof. For ten years after Governor Nelson Rockefeller and the state legislature increased penalties for drug use beginning in 1973, the number
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of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Ethan started “bringing together people involved in marijuana legalization, psychedelics, the racist aspects of the drug war, mass incarceration, including people on the European and Australian side,” he said.50 Then the movement was infused with new funding. “Around the summer of ’92 I
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.56 If drugs were legal, and if we treated addiction as a health rather than criminal problem, there would be far less violence and no mass incarceration, I thought. There are no open-air drug markets for insulin. There are no turf wars for antidepressants. Nobody gets shot over a bottle of
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. Probation is also shown to prevent crime and decrease recidivism, while imprisonment is not.64 This suggests that an effective way to reduce crime and mass incarceration would be shorter, swifter, and more certain prison sentences, with the money saved redirected to more and improved policing, including policing capable of handling the
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becoming homeless and often incarcerated. The same kinds of people in the 1990s felt that because America had gone overboard with drug prohibition, punishment, and mass incarceration we should not pressure addicts, as they do in Portugal and the Netherlands, to get sober. And it is educated progressives in West Coast cities
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political power has grown, while voters understandably blame their local elected leaders for the crisis. Progressive advocates and policy makers alike blame the drug war, mass incarceration, and drug prohibition for the addiction and overdose crisis, even though the crisis resulted from liberalized attitudes and drug laws, first toward pharmaceutical opioids, and
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they need. California is overdue for a turn toward pragmatism and moderation when it comes to these issues. Californians do not want to return to mass incarceration nor to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. At the same time, Californians want and deserve public order, which has broken down. Assisted outpatient
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mentally ill homeless. Some may hesitate to support centralizing government mental health services, but doing so would enable efficiencies, cut government waste, and reverse the mass incarceration of the severely mentally ill, which are outcomes that should be persuasive to people with either libertarian or progressive leanings. As such, Cal-Psych, and
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plainly failed, but voters are still not being offered a genuine alternative to status quo policies. Cal-Psych offers voters an alternative between lawlessness and mass incarceration, and between chronic homelessness and chronic institutionalization. A new political vision, agenda, and leadership are needed to overcome the divisions and chaos. “The central conservative
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for Crime & Justice Policy Research, accessed December 12, 2020, www.prisonstudies.org/country/united-states-america. 2. John Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration—and How to Achieve Real Reform (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 2. 3. Ibid., 150. 4. Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate (New York: New Press
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, 2006), 33, cited in Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 6. 5. Pfaff, Locked In, 42. 6. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 101. 7. Bureau
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Addiction Crisis.” 61. Paneez Kosarian, interview by the author, February 3, 2021. 62. Anne E. Parsons, From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration After 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Antonia Hylton, “Carceral Continuities: Tracing Black Bodies from the Asylum to the Penal State,” unpublished
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Investigation, ICPSR, accessed July 21, 2021, www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/series/57?q=1960. 2. John Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration—and How to Achieve Real Reform (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 3–4. 3. “Crime in the U.S.,” FBI: Uniform Crime Reporting, accessed May
Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
by Harsha Walia · 9 Feb 2021
ensuring a compliant labor force through the containment of surplus labor that exists alongside the outsourcing of maquiladora labor and the insourcing of migrant labor. Mass incarceration and mass deportation within neoliberalism thus serve as key techniques of conterminous social and labor control. Clinton’s punitive 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law
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of the fastest-growing incarcerated populations. Black women in the US are incarcerated at twice the rate as white women.38 Michelle Alexander argues that mass incarceration “functions more like a caste system than a system of crime control,” as she details the trajectory between slavery, Jim Crow, and
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mass incarceration, three primary anti-Black systems of control.39 Lisa Monchalin similarly argues that the incarceration of Indigenous women in Canada is not merely an issue
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capital, and the wreckages of climate change. We must wage resistance to displacement and immobility in all its forms: drone warfare, military occupations, policing agencies, mass incarceration, reservations, ghettos, gentrification, capitalist trade agreements, special economic zones, sweatshops, land grabs, resource extraction, and temporary labor programs. Dismantling borders requires that we abandon capitalism
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, Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (London and New York: Verso, 2016). 13.Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 101. 14.National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, “Criminal Justice Fact Sheet,” www
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of Men,” November 5, 2018, https://eji.org/news/female-incarceration-growing-twice-as-fast-as-male-incarceration/. 39.Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012), 13. 40.Lisa Monchalin, The Colonial Problem: An Indigenous Perspective on Crime and Injustice in
The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy
by Peter Temin · 17 Mar 2017 · 273pp · 87,159 words
and Gender 6 The Investment Theory of Politics 7 Preferences of the Very Rich 8 Concepts of Government III Government in a Dual Economy 9 Mass Incarceration 10 Public Education 11 American Cities 12 Personal and National Debts IV Comparisons and Conclusions 13 Comparisons 14 Conclusions Appendix: Models of Inequality References Index
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I and II to specific policy areas, organized around two popular oxymorons: “majority minority” and “private public.” The largest unseen policy is the growth of mass incarceration in the period demarcated in figure 1. Starting from President Nixon’s declaration of a War on Drugs, the American rate of incarceration has grown
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suburban schools are well funded from local taxes, while the urban tax base has shrunk under the economic burden placed on individuals and families by mass incarceration. The combination of these policies has created a vicious cycle where black men are in jail, black women are under strain, and black children are
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more in urban schools if the students often drop out and go to jail—failing to recognize this is the outcome of a system of mass incarceration and complex public funding arrangements. This cycle is what Michelle Alexander called The New Jim Crow.9 Public investment in our cities also has been
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legislation that granted blacks legal rights to equal citizenship, but these laws were followed by the War on Drugs that generated a new system of mass incarceration that continued the Jim Crow tradition. By 2000, one out of three black men was spending time in jail. The rise of mass imprisonment
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; voter IDs appeared to be a large barrier to voting by poor people.9 The old Southern practice has been transferred to the North by mass incarceration. As noted already, the number of imprisoned grew rapidly after 1970, making the United States an outlier in the proportion of its population in
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. Parts of domestic policy might have been more or less similar, as Clinton had approved the 1994 crime bill that confirmed and may have encouraged mass incarceration. But Bush reduced taxes while invading Iraq, creating federal budget deficits similar to those run by Reagan. The invasion of Iraq and the ideological handling
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2016a. 19. Corasaniti and Parker 2016; Gold and Narayanswamy 2016. 20. Mayer 2016, 90; Beard 2015, chapter 9. III Government in a Dual Economy 9 Mass Incarceration Part I focused on economics. Part II focused on politics. Part III applies these disciplines to explain how the preceding political economy of a dual
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with the aims of destroying the welfare state. The War on Drugs is the center of the push to destroy black and brown communities through mass incarceration. The unique American combination of race and class affects both the structure and operation of the government, and the effort to keep African Americans and
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their more recent Latino neighbors in their place imposes large costs on the great majority of Americans today. Mass incarceration began in 1973, shortly after Nixon’s introduction of the War on Drugs. The economic disturbances of the 1970s were described in chapter 2; they
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complex of measures designed to keep African Americans poor and politically marginalized in America. Bruce Western concluded from a careful analysis of the causes of mass incarceration that “law-and-order politics grew out of reaction to the gains of the civil rights movement and anxieties about rising crime rates among white
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were hardly identical, their actions were not so different that changing the results of some elections would have changed the outcome of mass incarceration very much.7 The costs of mass incarceration are not confined to the black community. It takes resources to process and house so many prisoners. States pay about $50 billion
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and out of the judicial system for many years and ended up incarcerated for the rest of his life. The financial and social costs of mass incarceration are apparent; this example reveals a painful and expensive human cost. The rape and murder were committed by Isaiah Kalebu, the son of an
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private prison firms have rapidly increased the penal population in their prisons, although they still account for only a small part of the county’s mass incarceration. Their interest is getting more—not fewer—people into prison. The growth of private prisons illustrates many themes. It is a clear example of
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in 1973 and described in chapter 2. ALEC promoted model bills on mandatory minimum sentencing and three-strikes legislation that helped promote the growth of mass incarceration in the 1990s. The influence of the private prison firms and ALEC impedes efforts to reduce American incarceration. Lobbyists from the private prison industry actively
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in 2016, but we do not know how long this new pattern will endure.24 There are a few bright spots in this picture of mass incarceration as enterprising local officials try to alleviate some of the pressures in this system, although the big picture remains bleak. The police chief in Gloucester
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will catch on, although there are strong forces against it.25 Most reforms being proposed today seek to help former inmates rather than to reduce mass incarceration. The governor of Virginia recently restored voting rights to felons, arousing strong opposition in the legislature. The United States barred federal agencies from asking job
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more difficult. It is not impossible, but fewer people can make this trip than in the decade after the Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s. Mass incarceration increased as school quality deteriorated. The two policies may not have been designed to complement each other, but they increasingly form parts of an integrated
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21. Bernstein 2009, 2016. The Netflix series Orange Is the New Black featured a private takeover of a prison that has publicized the issues of mass incarceration and private prisons. And the federal Justice Department sent out a memo in August 2016 saying it would phase out the use of private prisons
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in private schools. Children in the low-wage sector go to poor urban public schools. Since one third of black men are gone due to mass incarceration, most black children live in poor urban neighborhoods where the low-wage schools are starved for resources. One of the difficulties of school reform today
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at social capital. As argued here, acquiring social capital is a big hurdle for education in the low-wage sector, particularly in communities ravaged by mass incarceration. Evidence shows that graduates of Head Start are more likely to graduate from high school and attend college; they are less likely to be charged
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capital, is a tall order for the low-wage sector, and it goes against the grain of politics in a dual economy. The threat of mass incarceration hangs over black and Latino communities, and the presence of hostile militarized police makes investments in social capital even harder. Far more resources need to
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education to make progress, but none will be forthcoming soon. Instead, poor education will keep black and brown communities down, providing more opportunities for mass incarceration. And mass incarceration will contain the people operating without social capital in prison. The money that should go to schools will go to prisons instead. The abandonment of
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-wage sector to provide abundant cheap labor for their businesses. The choices made in the United States include keeping the low-wage sector quiet by mass incarceration, housing segregation, and disenfranchisement. These oppressive policies were justified by racecraft, that is, the belief that races exist and that racial discrimination is warranted, as
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sector makes plans for itself, typically ignoring the needs of the low-wage sector. This can be seen in policies for health care, public education, mass incarceration, infrastructure investment, and debt reduction since the 2008 financial crisis. Public support has eroded since the 1970s for both health care and public education, typically
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and in the same schools. As public education increasingly failed to provide a transition into the FTE sector for members of the low-wage sector, mass incarceration acted as a New Jim Crow policy to keep blacks and Latinos more recently from full participation in American society. The failure to maintain and
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public education by focusing on preschool and early education, family involvement, and building reconstruction. Shift our resources from repression of the low-wage sector by mass incarceration and bad schools to investing in the human and social capital of all Americans. Repair our abandoned and aging infrastructure; forgive the mortgage and educational
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but men are more frequently arrested.) To eliminate this pattern, we need to work on several fronts at the same time. We need to end mass incarceration and differential rates of arrests and convictions of black men by local and state police and judges. We need also to improve education for the
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that has so far eluded us. The first two recommendations are two sides of the same coin. American education cannot be universal until mass incarceration is abandoned. And mass incarceration will not be an inevitable result of growing up in a poor neighborhood until urban public education equals the quality of suburban schools. These
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Welfare State?” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Fall): 187–278. Also available as NBER Working Paper No. 8524. Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press. Alichi, Ali, Kory Kantenga, and Juan Solé. 2016. “Income Polarization in the United States.” IMF Working
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. “G.O.P. Donors Shift Focus from Top of Ticket to Senate Races.” New York Times, May 20. Crutchfield and Weeks. 2015. “The Effects of Mass Incarceration on Communities of Color.” Issues in Science and Technology 32 (1) (Fall): 46–51. Currie, Janet, and Matthew Neidell. 2007. “Getting Inside the ‘Black
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, Steven. 2016. Expand Social Security Now! Boston: Beacon Press. Hinton, Elizabeth. 2016. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Holzer, Harry J., 2015. “Job Market Polarization and U.S. Worker Skills: A Tale of Two Middles.” Economic
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: Princeton University Press Temin, Peter, and David Vines. 2014. Keynes: Useful Economics for the World Economy . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thompson, Heather Ann. 2010. “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History.” Journal of American History 97 (3) (December): 703–734. Tirman, John. 2015. Dream Chasers: Immigration
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immigrants and, 31–32, 103 Investment Theory of Politics and, 68 Japan and, 32 labor and, 32, 103, 127 low-wage sector and, 31–34 mass incarceration and, 110–112 mutual funds and, 31 public education and, 127 tariffs and, 21, 32–33 very rich and, 85 Concepts of government Affordable Care
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–81 equal protection clause and, 67 federal power and, 21–22 FTE (finance, technology, and electronics) sector and, 16–22 John Birch Society and, 83 mass incarceration and, 110 military and, 16, 22, 71 production and, 80–81 public education and, 124 race and, 56, 58–59 supremacist organizations and, 169n9 very
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, and electronics) sector and, 20 Latinos and, 55 length of, 20, 27–28 Lewis model and, 20 low-wage sector and, 27–29, 34–35 mass incarceration and, 104 Michigan and, 35 mortgages and, 34 public education and, 116–117, 125 urbanization and, 20 Growth miracles, 6 Halliburton, 143 Hamilton, Derrick, 173n17
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technology, and electronics) sector and, 20 Irish, 54 Jewish, 54, 120 Latinos, 154 (see also Latinos) low-wage sector and, 27–28, 32, 35, 153 mass incarceration and, 103, 110, 112 military and, 103–104, 127 public education and, 123, 125, 159 race and, 50–55 success of some, 53–54 Income
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and, 8 FTE (finance, technology, and electronics) sector and, 22 Great Depression and, 21, 52–53, 80, 93 Investment Theory of Politics and, 72, 74 mass incarceration and, 109 median income and, ix–x, 9, 53, 144 public education and, 115 very rich and, 77, 79–80, 84 Independent contractors, 31, 52
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6 Manufacturing, 20, 32–35, 91, 170n10 Marginal product, 6 Market booms, 128, 138, 164 Martin, Trayvon, 56–57 Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 67 Mass incarceration African Americans and, xv–xvi, 101–109, 112, 153 ALEC and, 110–111 bail and, 40, 105–106 Ban the Box campaigns and, 38 Clinton
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58, 67 Nixon, Richard M. depletion allowance and, 81 floating exchange rate and, 15 Ford and, 168n2 Johnson and, 15, 27, 168n2 Kennedy and, 81 mass incarceration and, 104, 109 military draft and, 16 New Federalism and, 21–22, 35, 44, 83, 103, 110 Powell and, 17, 27, 117 Project Independence and
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27–28 (see also Great Migration) Investment Theory of Politics and, 62–66 low-wage sector and, 27–29, 32, 34 manufacturing jobs in, 20 mass incarceration and, 104 public education and, 119, 125 race and, 51–53, 55, 59 unions and, 20 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 55 Northeast Corridor
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Rawls, John, 92 Reagan, Ronald, xii, 44, 83, 95 debt and, 142–143 federal grants and, 35, 129 full citizenship of African Americans and, 22 mass incarceration and, 104 neoliberalism of, 22 one-percenters and, 22–23 taxes and, 22 unions and, 22 War on Drugs and, 53 Welfare Queens and, 38
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Reform and Consumer Protection Act and, 93 infrastructure issues and, 129–137, 156–158, 163 labor law and, 19 low-wage sector and, 156–159 mass incarceration and, 156 mentally ill and, 107 police and, 102 prison and, 110–113 public education and, 118–119, 122, 125–127, 130, 135, 156–
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Social capital bridging vs. bonding, 171n31 cities and, 131–133 dual economy and, 12 inequality models and, 165–166 low-wage sector and, 39, 153 mass incarceration and, 103, 107, 156 public education and, 117, 124, 126–128, 156 Putnam on, 11–12, 39, 165 transition and, 42 Social Security, 33,
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, 132 debt and, 141 FTE (finance, technology, and electronics) sector and, 16, 21 Investment Theory of Politics and low-wage sector and, 34, 37, 157 mass incarceration and, 104, 113 participation rates and, 141, 179n2 race and, 52–53 very rich and, 78–79 Union City, 123–127 Unions African Americans and
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and, 51, 58 ignoring of, 97 individual rights and, 81 Investment Theory of Politics and, 62–65 Jim Crow laws and, 65 labor and, 20 mass incarceration and, 108 Nineteenth Amendment and, 56, 58, 67 public education and, 124 Seventeenth Amendment and, 63 slavery and, 94 Voting Rights Act and, 65,
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Fifteenth Amendment and, 15, 56 health care and, 56 inequality and, 12 Investment Theory of Politics and, 61, 64–65, 67 jury duty and, 59 mass incarceration and, 103, 106, 157 occupations available to, 59–60, 116 pregnancy and, 58 production and, 59 property rights of, 56–57 public education and, 115
A People's History of Poverty in America
by Stephen Pimpare · 11 Nov 2008 · 468pp · 123,823 words
be bus drivers or hairdressers. As I’ve suggested, to comprehend the political economy of the ghetto we must consider the manner in which the mass incarceration of black men has removed potential fathers, partners, and wage earners from their community. Urban poverty cannot be understood without incorporating the prison. This was
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Domestic Violence,” Journal of Social Issues 56, no. 4 (2000): 655–82. 21 Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 22 For an examination of these issues in the wake of 1996’s welfare reform, see Sharon Hays, Flat
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, and Propaganda in Two Gilded Ages (New York: The New Press, 2004), chap. 6. 56 Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 199; David Cole, No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System (New York
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until the late nineteenth century, treatment of tramps was less harsh than it was in the last quarter of the century, during the second great mass incarceration of the century (1805–1835 marked the first), when even sick and disabled inmates were forced to undertake hard, manual labor, and violence and threats
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
by Ta-Nehisi Coates · 2 Oct 2017 · 349pp · 114,914 words
Black President,” copyright © 2012 by Ta-Nehisi Coates; “The Case for Reparations,” copyright © 2014 by Ta-Nehisi Coates; “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” copyright © 2015 by Ta-Nehisi Coates; “My President Was Black,” copyright © 2016 by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Reprinted by permission of The Atlantic. Hardback ISBN 9780399590566
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Black President 6. Notes from the Sixth Year The Case for Reparations 7. Notes from the Seventh Year The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration 8. Notes from the Eighth Year My President Was Black Epilogue Dedication Acknowledgments By Ta-Nehisi Coates About the Author “We don’t just shine
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width of enslavement tempts insanity. First conjure the crime—the generational destruction of human bodies—and all of its related offenses—domestic terrorism, poll taxes, mass incarceration. But then try to imagine being an individual born among the remnants of that crime, among the wronged, among the plundered, and feeling the gravity
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black enslavement in America as twofold. First there is the actual enslavement and all that has followed from it, from Reconstruction to Jim Crow to mass incarceration. But then there was the manufactured story that was told to ennoble and sanctify that enslavement. This was where these heroes took their stand. Celia
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result is that it prevents Obama from directly addressing America’s racial history, or saying anything meaningful about present issues tinged by race, such as mass incarceration or the drug war. There have been calls for Obama to take a softer line on state-level legalization of marijuana or even to stand
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that, if not born from chasing Baldwin, was still important to me. The Atlantic prided itself on tackling the “big” issues of the day, and mass incarceration was, and is, perhaps the preeminent moral domestic issue of our time. By then I had earned enough trust from my editors that I could
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of the time I was finishing Between the World and Me, I was reporting another story that sought to understand the specific ways in which mass incarceration had hurt black families. I was excited about this story because I believed that “family” had been ceded to moral scolds who cared more about
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shaming people than actually helping families. The man the scolders loved to cite was Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Before coming to mass incarceration, I’d read his Johnson-era report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” and a lot about the subsequent reaction. In reading more
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about Moynihan, both as a liberal wonk and his turn under Nixon, I thought I sensed many of the biases and preconceptions that made mass incarceration seem a plausible answer to the social problems that beset black communities. It was not, to my mind, so simple as racist conservatives; it was
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solutions for black people that I was convinced they would not embrace for white ones. The resulting piece, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” had the misfortune of arriving a few months after Between the World and Me. It was, in many ways, an end point for my inquiries
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finished for me. And if the voyage had not given me hope, it had, at least, granted clarity. THE BLACK FAMILY IN THE AGE OF MASS INCARCERATION Never marry again in slavery. —MARGARET GARNER, 1858 Wherever the law is, crime can be found. —ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN, 1973 I. “LOWER-CLASS BEHAVIOR IN OUR
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under the effects of 350 years of bondage and plunder. He believed that these effects could be addressed through state action. They were—through the mass incarceration of millions of black people. II. “WE ARE INCARCERATING TOO FEW CRIMINALS” The Gray Wastes—our carceral state, a sprawling netherworld of prisons and jails
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, and quintupled for nonaggravated assault. That explosion in rates and duration of imprisonment might be justified on grounds of cold pragmatism if a policy of mass incarceration actually caused crime to decline. Which is precisely what some politicians and policy makers of the tough-on-crime ’90s were claiming. “Ask many politicians
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, or universities—but the credentialing that prison or jail offers is negative. In her book Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration, Devah Pager, the Harvard sociologist, notes that most employers say that they would not hire a job applicant with a criminal record. “These employers appear
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presented an employment problem for America’s poor and working class of all races. Prison presented a solution: jobs for whites, and warehousing for blacks. Mass incarceration “widened the income gap between white and black Americans,” writes Heather Ann Thompson, a historian at the University of Michigan, “because the infrastructure of the
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Americans, unfreedom is the historical norm. Enslavement lasted for nearly 250 years. The 150 years that followed have encompassed debt peonage, convict lease-labor, and mass incarceration—a period that overlapped with Jim Crow. This provides a telling geographic comparison. Under Jim Crow, blacks in the South lived in a police state
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the South than in the North reveals how the carceral state functions as a system of control. Jim Crow applied the control in the South. Mass incarceration did it in the North. After the civil rights movement triumphed in the 1960s and toppled Jim Crow laws, the South adopted the tactics of
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the North, and its rates of imprisonment surged far past the North’s. Mass incarceration became the national model of social control. Indeed, while the Gray Wastes have expanded their population, their most significant characteristic remains unchanged: In 1900, the
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mind, it makes eminently more sense to invest in jobs and education, rather than jails and incarceration”) to mainstream progressives like Hillary Clinton (“Without the mass incarceration that we currently practice, millions fewer people would be living in poverty”) to right-wing Tea Party candidates like Ted Cruz (“Harsh mandatory minimum sentences
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who will likely die in prison” makes the typical European sentence seem lenient to American politicians and their constituents. Thus the initial impediment to undoing mass incarceration in America is not that we don’t have the answers for how to treat violent crime—it’s that our politics seem allergic to
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most discriminated against is also its most incarcerated—and the incarceration of so many African Americans, the mark of criminality, justifies everything they endure after. Mass incarceration is, ultimately, a problem of troublesome entanglements. To war seriously against the disparity in unfreedom requires a war against a disparity in resources. And to
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war against a disparity in resources is to confront a history in which both the plunder and the mass incarceration of blacks are accepted commonplaces. Our current debate over criminal-justice reform pretends that it is possible to disentangle ourselves without significantly disturbing the other
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aspects of our lives, that one can extract the thread of mass incarceration from the larger tapestry of racist American policy. Daniel Patrick Moynihan knew better. His 1965 report on “The Negro Family” was explosive for what it
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anything like equal status in the long run,” Moynihan wrote. As we look ahead to what politicians are now saying will be the end of mass incarceration, we are confronted with the reality of what Moynihan observed in 1965, intensified and compounded by the past fifty years of the carceral state. What
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of the “damages” wrought by mass incarceration? What of the black men whose wages remained stagnant for decades largely due to our correctional policy? What of the twentieth-century wars on drugs
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is no reason to believe that black people, black communities, black families will not be fed into the great maw again. Indeed, the experience of mass incarceration, the warehousing and deprivation of whole swaths of our country, the transformation of that deprivation into wealth transmitted through government jobs and private investment, the
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here. *5 For more, see Michael Tonry and David P. Farrington’s “Punishment and Crime Across Space and Time.” For calculations on the effects of mass incarceration on crime, see Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America, chapter 7—“Did the Prison Boom Cause the Crime Drop?” Beyond the numbers on this
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, Western’s text was indispensable in helping me understand the mechanics of mass incarceration and how it affected the lives of young black men. *6 For more, the National Research Council’s The Growth of Incarceration in the United
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Wastes. Written by a committee of some of the most distinguished scholars on the subject, the report addresses any question you could possibly have about mass incarceration. You can read it straight through. But it works just as well as an encyclopedia. *7 Devah Pager’s book Marked gives some sense of
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how the effects of mass incarceration have spread beyond the prisons, and even beyond the previously imprisoned, and now affect those who are thought to have been imprisoned. One of the
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Perkinson’s Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire, a deeply disturbing history of the modern era of mass incarceration. There is a good deal of sociological and economic study on mass incarceration, but considerably less in the way of history. What I would love to see is a book that took
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pro-slavery intellectuals. Michelle Alexander has taken some criticism for asserting, in her book The New Jim Crow, the connections between slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. Honestly, I was one of the skeptics. But having finished this research, I really have to applaud Alexander’s attempt to connect
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mass incarceration with American history. I don’t totally agree with the book (I think linking crime and black struggle is even older than she does, for
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instance), but I think The New Jim Crow pursues the right line of questioning. I don’t think mass incarceration happens without the rise in crime. But there are all kinds of ways one can respond to a crime surge
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. Mass incarceration is appropriate only if you already believe that certain people weren’t really fit for freedom in the first place. *11 Without the work of
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the laws and respect the lives and property of others.” Muhammad’s works lets us see how the psychological and rhetorical groundwork was laid for mass incarceration. Another essential text. *12 Some of the most painful moments in this research came in looking at the black response to lynching. Mary Church Terrell
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—Radley Balko, whose writing and reporting on the problems of modern policing have greatly improved my own understanding of the issue. *15 This account of mass incarceration in Louisiana is drawn from Jeffrey S. Adler’s article “Less Crime, More Punishment: Violence, Race, and Criminal Justice in Early Twentieth-Century America.” Again
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the ones where Democrats know the bill is bad and vote anyway—are little more than cowardice and put the lie to the notion that mass incarceration is a well-intentioned mistake. *17 Citations from John Dean’s memoir Blind Ambition, John Ehrlichman’s memoir, Witness to Power, and H. R. Haldeman
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quotes this deeply unfortunate memo in his book The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America. *25 The historical numbers on mass incarceration come from Christopher Muller’s 2012 article, “Northward Migration and the Rise of Racial Disparity in American Incarceration, 1880–1950.” *26 Frase published his findings
The End of Policing
by Alex S. Vitale · 9 Oct 2017 · 318pp · 82,452 words
disproportionately criminalizes the young, poor, male, and nonwhite. We need to push back on this dramatic expansion of police power and its role in the mass incarceration at the heart of the “New Jim Crow.” What we are witnessing is a political crisis. At all levels and in both parties, our political
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than reducing the burden of racialized policing, this new professionalization movement merely enhanced police power and led directly to the development of SWAT teams and mass incarceration. Policing Today The past few decades have seen a dramatic expansion in the scope and intensity of police activity. More police than ever before are
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engaged in more enforcement of more laws, resulting in astronomical levels of incarceration, economic exploitation, and abuse. This expansion mirrors the rise of mass incarceration. It began with the War on Crime rhetoric of the 1960s and continued to develop and intensify until today, with support from both political parties
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underclass largely excluded from the formal economy.39 In response, government mobilized at all levels to manage this new “surplus population” through intensive policing and mass incarceration. The policing of poor and nonwhite communities became much more intense. As unemployment, poverty, and homelessness increased, government, police, and prosecutors worked together to criminalize
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that is not what the current system is. This system is better designed to create crime, and a perpetual class of people labeled criminals … Saying mass incarceration is an abysmal failure makes sense, though only if one assumes that the criminal justice system is designed to prevent and control crime. But if
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mass incarceration is understood as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.43 The most damning example of this
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the age of adult criminal responsibility, making it easier to incarcerate young people in adult jails, in keeping with the broader politics of incapacitation and mass incarceration. It was also at the center of efforts to tighten school discipline policies and increase police presence in schools. The second major factor was the
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other than educational failure. The School-to-Prison Pipeline Finally, these forces have meshed with the overall trend toward harsher punishments driving the rise of mass incarceration more generally. Politicians in the 1990s had already embraced the idea that criminality was a deeply embedded moral failing that was largely impervious to reform
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have dedicated gang units that concentrate on intelligence gathering and intensive enforcement. Many states have also added enhanced legal penalties that play a role in mass incarceration. Despite these efforts, gangs remain alive and well, continually renewing their membership. While the bulk of crimes committed by active gang members involve low-level
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sentencing enhancements, and gang injunctions. The center of these innovations is California, which has extensive gang activity and has also been at the heart of mass incarceration politics and policy over the past thirty years. San Diego’s Jurisdictions United for Drug Gang Enforcement (JUDGE) targeted gang members believed to be involved
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crime has declined overall without major reductions in poverty or segregation, but the crime that remains is concentrated in these areas. Unlike aggressive policing and mass incarceration, doing something about racialized poverty and exclusion would have general benefits for society in terms of reducing poverty, inequality, and racial injustice. In a bit
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and put non-punitive government resources to work instead? Michael Fortner argues that African Americans played an important role in ushering in the era of mass incarceration and overpolicing by demanding that local government do something about crime and disorder.27 What this analysis misses is that many of these same leaders
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blocks.”29 Most communities could find ways to spend that money that would achieve much better results than those produced by heavy-handed policing and mass incarceration. Jobs programs, drug treatment, mental health services, and youth services would all help reduce crime and break the cycle of criminalization, incarceration, and recidivism. At
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of identity and the diversity of people engaged in leading it. We can’t fight racism while embracing homophobia, any more than we can fight mass incarceration by embracing a politics of punishment. Both of our major political parties have accepted the politics of austerity that globalized capital has imposed on us
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the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007). 41Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2013). 42Jeffrey Reiman, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class, and
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York’s Adult Drug Courts (New York: Center for Court Innovation, 2012). 49Marsha Weissman, “Aspiring to the Impracticable: Alternatives to Incarceration in the Era of Mass Incarceration,” New York University Review of Law and Social Change 33: 235–269. 50Rebecca Tiger, Judging Addicts: Drug Courts and Coercion in the Justice System (New
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University Press, 2015). 28Todd Clear and David Karp, The Community Justice Ideal: Preventing Crime and Achieving Justice (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). 29Emily Badger, “How Mass Incarceration Creates ‘Million Dollar Blocks’ in Poor Neighborhoods,” Washington Post, July 30, 2015. 30David Kennedy, Don’t Shoot: One Man, A Street Fellowship, and the End
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in our borderlands,” Los Angeles Times, August 20, 2013. 12Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond. 13Judith Greene, Bethany Carson, and Andrea Black, Indefensible: A Decade of Mass Incarceration of Migrants Prosecuted for Crossing the Border (Charlotte, NC: Grassroots Leadership, and Brooklyn, NY: Justice Strategies, 2016). 14Ibid. 15Sasha Von Oldershausen, “The Cost of Justice
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1Northern California Patch, “Public Q&A Meeting Set This Evening to Discuss New Santa Clara Co. Jail,” September 22, 2016. 2Judith Greene et al., Ending Mass Incarceration: Charting a New Justice Re-Investment, Justice Strategies, 2013. 3“Agenda to Build Black Futures,” Black Youth Project 100, agendatobuildblackfutures.org. 4“Platform,” The Movement
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, policy.m461.org. This eBook is licensed to Edward Betts, edward@4angle.com on 06/08/2020 Further Reading Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2013. Apuzzo, Matt and Adam Goldman. Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit
Economic Dignity
by Gene Sperling · 14 Sep 2020 · 667pp · 149,811 words
, October 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/. 9. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 34. 10. Dan Carter, “What Donald Trump Owes George Wallace,” New York Times, January 8
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Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco · 7 Apr 2014 · 326pp · 88,905 words
SEDATED: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis
by James. Davies · 15 Nov 2021 · 307pp · 88,085 words
Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces
by Radley Balko · 14 Jun 2013 · 465pp · 134,575 words
Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo
by Rebecca Walker · 15 Mar 2022 · 322pp · 106,663 words
AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together
by Nick Polson and James Scott · 14 May 2018 · 301pp · 85,126 words
When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World
by Jordan Thomas · 27 May 2025 · 347pp · 105,327 words
The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
by Robert B. Reich · 24 Mar 2020 · 154pp · 47,880 words
Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
by Alec MacGillis · 16 Mar 2021 · 426pp · 136,925 words
The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent
by Ben Shapiro · 26 Jul 2021 · 309pp · 81,243 words
We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves
by John Cheney-Lippold · 1 May 2017 · 420pp · 100,811 words
The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
by Daniel Yergin · 14 Sep 2020
Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth
by Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato · 31 Jul 2016 · 370pp · 102,823 words
Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
by Johann Hari · 20 Jan 2015 · 513pp · 141,963 words
Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World
by Gaia Vince · 22 Aug 2022 · 302pp · 92,206 words
Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything
by Becky Bond and Zack Exley · 9 Nov 2016 · 227pp · 71,675 words
$2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America
by Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer · 31 Aug 2015 · 261pp · 78,884 words
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
by Jonathan Crary · 3 Jun 2013 · 102pp · 33,345 words
Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip · 9 Mar 2021 · 661pp · 156,009 words
Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War: 1938-1941
by Alan Allport · 2 Sep 2020 · 1,520pp · 221,543 words
The Liberal Moment
by Nick Clegg and Demos (organization : London, England) · 12 Nov 2009 · 92pp
The New Prophets of Capital
by Nicole Aschoff · 10 Mar 2015 · 128pp · 38,187 words
Who Is Rich?
by Matthew Klam · 3 Jul 2017 · 291pp · 92,688 words
The Sellout: A Novel
by Paul Beatty · 2 Mar 2016 · 271pp · 83,944 words
The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World
by Peter Frankopan · 14 Jun 2018 · 352pp · 80,030 words
Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right
by Michael Brooks · 23 Apr 2020 · 88pp · 26,706 words
Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia
by Adrian Shirk · 15 Mar 2022 · 358pp · 118,810 words
A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income
by Guy Standing · 3 May 2017 · 307pp · 82,680 words
Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
by Meredith Broussard · 19 Apr 2018 · 245pp · 83,272 words
City on the Verge
by Mark Pendergrast · 5 May 2017 · 425pp · 117,334 words
Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write
by Dennis Yi Tenen · 6 Feb 2024 · 169pp · 41,887 words
McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality
by Ronald Purser · 8 Jul 2019 · 242pp · 67,233 words
Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics
by Don Hanlon Johnson · 10 Sep 2018 · 358pp · 106,951 words
Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
by Sarah Jaffe · 26 Jan 2021 · 490pp · 153,455 words
Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance
by Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge · 29 Mar 2020 · 159pp · 42,401 words
Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy
by Adam Tooze · 15 Nov 2021 · 561pp · 138,158 words
Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit
by Steven Higashide · 9 Oct 2019 · 195pp · 52,701 words
What Kind of Creatures Are We? (Columbia Themes in Philosophy)
by Noam Chomsky · 7 Dec 2015
The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work
by Richard Baldwin · 10 Jan 2019 · 301pp · 89,076 words
The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson · 23 Sep 2019 · 809pp · 237,921 words
If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
by Jill Lepore · 14 Sep 2020 · 467pp · 149,632 words
Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman · 17 Mar 2015 · 527pp · 147,690 words
Give People Money
by Annie Lowrey · 10 Jul 2018 · 242pp · 73,728 words
Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution
by Pieter Hintjens · 11 Mar 2013 · 349pp · 114,038 words
Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968
by Thomas E. Ricks · 3 Oct 2022 · 482pp · 150,822 words
Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World
by James Miller · 17 Sep 2018 · 370pp · 99,312 words
The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990
by Jonathan Mahler · 11 Aug 2025 · 559pp · 164,804 words
Year 501
by Noam Chomsky · 19 Jan 2016