The UUSMC Book Group will meet again on March 3, 2016. Marti Williams will lead a discussion of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” by Michelle Alexander.

This non-fiction book focuses on our flawed criminal justice system which “functions as a contemporary system of racial control — relegating millions to a permanent second-class status — even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness.”

From an author interview on npr.org:

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. 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.