The New Jim Crow

Summary

Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been
adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of
the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the
winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has
spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice
reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander’s unforgettable
argument that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned
it.” As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is “undoubtedly the most important book
published in this century about the U.S.”

Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a
tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the
impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.