The Racial Justice Study Group will meet to discuss The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and legal scholar. Alexander’s central premise is that “mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow”.

Though written eight years ago, those who attended the first book discussion confessed to not having read this seminal book discusses race-related issues specific to African-American males and mass incarceration in the United States, but Alexander notes that the discrimination faced by African-American males is prevalent among other minorities and socio-economically disadvantaged populations. Ms. Alexander states in the preface that this book is not for everyone. It is for “people who care deeply about racial injustice but who,…do not yet appreciate the magnitude of the crisis faced by communities of color as a result of mass incarceration. In other words, I’m writing this book for people like me – the person I was ten years ago.”